Print Issue: September 26, 2002

Georgia's First Female Hispanic Judge Has A Passion For Justice

By Priscilla Greear, Staff Writer

ATLANTA - She's Georgia's first female Hispanic judge; a tireless advocate for abused women and children, and role model for young Latinos. But Carolina Colin-Antonini recalls that her career journey wasn't easy.

She remembers returning exhausted at midnight to her apartment and collapsing onto the sofa in frustration, after spending her days working at the St. Vincent de Paul Society and her nights going to law school. In her early 30s, she wondered if she was wasting critical years of her life.

"The thought of dropping out was a constant battle because I would get home at midnight and sometimes I would get in the sofa and cry myself to sleep. And I shouldn't be ashamed of acknowledging that this happened very often. I was just tired; it seemed like an insurmountable process."

But a passion drove her on, a righteous anger for the people who fall through the cracks, stoked in years as a bilingual caseworker for Catholic Social Services.

"Fortunately for me, I love being an attorney, it's the greatest work in the world," said Colussy, 39, who last year became Georgia's first female Hispanic judge.

Completing Georgia State University Law School in five years, she opened her own practice in Grant Park, where she specializes in immigration law including domestic violence, asylum, family issues and deportation defense. She also serves part-time as a pro hac vice judge for the city of Atlanta, presiding over probable cause cases, ordinance violations and minor offenses.

She has developed a new love for her work as a judge, where she is able to foster respect for the legal system while having caseloads of "intellectual fun."

"Being a judge is a very noble profession and it's really an awesome profession and an extremely wonderful intellectual challenge. It truly is. There are very few things that you can do in your world where you are having to process information and process cases all day long."

Her colleague Sue Colussy, who directs Catholic Social Services' legal clinic where Antonini worked after law school, said, "I think she's fabulous. She is and was (at CSS) an amazing lawyer, very compassionate, very patient, a lot of common sense and a very astute attorney and you can't ask for more than that in a judge. You want somebody who knows and cares about people."

Growing up in Venezuela, Antonini immigrated to the United States with her American mother at 19 after her parents divorced. From a family of architects, dentists and politicians, she first earned a bachelor's degree in history and criminal justice from Georgia State University.

Her first job was as a bilingual caseworker for Catholic Social Services, where she was "the belle of the ball by default," one of a few bilingual Hispanic professionals at the time. She despaired when she saw Latino youth without hope while she advocated for Hispanics and helped with things like disability or Social Security claims, Medicaid appointments and intervention for families at risk.

Her favorite part of her job quickly became advocacy, as she encountered workers not getting paid or being denied access to housing.

"It was truly great work and it was from that work that I decided that I wanted to go to law school because as a caseworker you're limited in what you can do (to get redress for her clients.) You can't sue them and believe me there are many times when I wanted to sue them," she said.

She then started working for SVDP and its mobile thrift store while she went to law school.

"I think the Society does a tremendous job and they're not sung about enough," she said. "I had to balance all the different interests...It was a very interesting period, but it was also a period filled with growth."

She recalled the trials of one semester where she had bad grades, trouble at work and home, no money for books, and the chicken pox.

"I had a very, very bad semester and I was put on probation. I'd always been a really good student and I had always prided myself on being intellectually capable of doing anything I wanted to do. For me to be put on probation was a very big blow to my ego and it made me think 'why are you doing this, why are you struggling so hard?'"

But winning moot trial competitions at school spurred her on. So did experiences while she was a social worker, like riding with police to help a battered wife get her children away from the father.

Seeing children so used to their mother being beaten by their father that "they didn't bat an eyelash," strengthened her resolve to help.

"I was scared. I knew that the police had visited this home a million times and I knew that the children had become accustomed to hearing screams, to hearing mayhem and to seeing cops bust in their door and to hearing their father scream and their mother crying, so much so that they didn't bat an eyelash. And that made me very angry . . . I think that was really the beginning for me of wanting to use the legal system to change people's lives in a more permanent way."

Domestic violence cases remain "very dear" to her and constitute the majority of her pro-bono work. She added, "If I grew up with all the love, support and encouragement that I needed and had to struggle to make it, what possibly could society expect from children who are raised in homes like these children are? And if society does not intervene then society does not need to complain later on when they become social failures," she said.

When she graduated from law school in debt and unsure of what type of law to practice, she decided it would be a good time to return to the archdiocese to work for Colussy, with whom she had worked previously as a caseworker and for whom she has deep admiration. "I figured I need to do this now because I am already so poor I won't know the difference."

She says she "fell in love with immigration law and fell in love with my clients- average people whose lives are fundamentally changed, if you are able to help them navigate through their immigration problems . . . If you are able to win a person's case, you may be making the difference between a family being able to live together or a family being torn apart permanently."

It was - and is - a love laced with frustration. Immigration law can be complicated and confusing for clients, and involves "tremendous bureaucracy," she said. That has been compounded since Sept. 11, 2001. She now has has clients who in the current national climate, have baseless fear, which prevents them from taking the advised action in their cases.

She spoke of her fight over five years to get one mother protection from abuse under battered women laws from her third abusive partner. "We've failed twice and it's very difficult because she needs the intervention of a society that's more sophisticated on issues of abuse and a woman who if she does go back home will not have the support and protection around her."

Yet Colussy confirmed Antonini's tenacious spirit, recalling how at CSS she would take on the "unwinnable" domestic violence cases, "the ones you were more likely to pray about than do research about," and win them.

"She was very creative and she did very good filings, good research. The immigration attorneys just loved her because she was tough and funny and always really cared about the clients. And she also knows when to say this is not the type of client we need to be representing," she said. "The best thing she has going for her is her absolutely wonderful sense of humor. She sees the humor in everything, no matter how ugly the situation."

She's very grateful for family members' who were patient when she sacrificed time with them. "I didn't have to deal with the guilt. And you know we are Latinos and we are Catholics so that's sufficient guilt right there."

Carolina has been married to her husband Alejandro from Mexico for seven years. They met at Our Lady of the Americas Mission "My husband is a great man and is my number one fan. He is the one who wants to click the camera and celebrate and wants to tell everybody I'm a judge and it's embarrassing."

In 2000 she began her own practice with Natalie Sullivan, whom she calls her "moral partner." They both share a desire as lawyers to serve the community. "Our backgrounds are in the business of helping people and we're not going to turn into money-making businesswomen forsaking our identities," she said.

"She treats all her clients with such respect and she fights for them to the end. She's a very strong advocate, and has been from day one, whether for nonprofit volunteer cases or paid cases," Sullivan said. "With volunteer cases, a lot of times it's sort of 'when I have time.' With Carolina it's as if there's no lines really drawn between her own paid cases and volunteer cases. She treats them pretty much the same."

Antonini is grateful now to be able to talk with youth as well as other groups, receiving invitations to speak at schools and other organizations about being a judge. She is also glad to be a public role model to young Latinos.

"I hope that all that it does is says to people that it's possible," she said. "The high school dropout rate, the lack of going to college for Latinos, is something to be frightened about and society needs to be very concerned about that."

And she loves that not just Hispanics but all sorts of community groups have celebrated her achievement. That was not always the case. When she first came to the United States she often felt unwelcome and was the victim of verbal abuse and ethnic stereotyping, including things like bank tellers refusing to cash a check without calling the issuer to verify its validity.

"It's a small mind, the mind that thinks that we should operate with only one culture, one knowledge, one language, because Lord have mercy we should be encouraging people to learn all kinds of languages . . . Languages are such beautiful instruments of communication."