Educational career

Educational career

degree	date	institution
Bachelor	1974	Vassar College Vassar College Vassar College is a private, coeducational liberal arts college in the town of Poughkeepsie, New York, in the United States. The Vassar campus comprises over and more than 100 buildings, including four National Historic Landmarks, ranging in style from Collegiate Gothic to International,...
M.I.A.	1978	School for International Training School for International Training SIT Graduate Institute is the accredited college program of World Learning in Brattleboro, Vermont. The president and CEO is Adam Weinberg.History=SIT Graduate Institute began as the Experiment for International Living...
J.D. Juris Doctor Juris Doctor is a professional doctorate and first professional graduate degree in law.The degree was first awarded by Harvard University in the United States in the late 19th century and was created as a modern version of the old European doctor of law degree Juris Doctor (see etymology and...	1978	Columbia University Columbia University Columbia University in the City of New York is a private, Ivy League university in Manhattan, New York City. Columbia is the oldest institution of higher learning in the state of New York, the fifth oldest in the United States, and one of the country's nine Colonial Colleges founded before the...

Legal career

Roberts played a number of different roles in the US justice system prior to his appointment as a judge.

Covington & Burling

Roberts was an associate at the large, international law firm Covington & Burling

Covington & Burling

Covington & Burling LLP is an international law firm with offices in Beijing, Brussels, London, New York, San Francisco, Silicon Valley, San Diego, and Washington, DC. The firm advises multinational corporations on significant transactional, litigation, regulatory, and public policy matters...

.

Prosecutor

Roberts has served as an Assistant US Attorney and a Principal Assistant US Attorney.

Department of Justice

Roberts was the
Chief of the Criminal Section in the Civil Rights Division
of the
U.S. Department of Justice

United States Department of Justice

The United States Department of Justice , is the United States federal executive department responsible for the enforcement of the law and administration of justice, equivalent to the justice or interior ministries of other countries.The Department is led by the Attorney General, who is nominated...

 for three years.

Roberts's role in the controversy over the CIA's destruction of interrogation tapes

Roberts issued a court order

Court order

A court order is an official proclamation by a judge that defines the legal relationships between the parties to a hearing, a trial, an appeal or other court proceedings. Such ruling requires or authorizes the carrying out of certain steps by one or more parties to a case...

 prohibiting the CIA destroying evidence of its use of interrogations in July 2005.
CIA Director Michael V. Hayden
acknowledged in December 2007 that the CIA had subsequently destroyed hundreds of hours of tapes of the use of "extended interrogation techniques", including the technique known as "waterboarding

Waterboarding

Waterboarding is a form of torture in which water is poured over the face of an immobilized captive, thus causing the individual to experience the sensation of drowning...

", where subjects's lungs are filled with water, so they experience the first stages of drowning.

Many commentators have described the CIA's destruction of this evidence as a violation of Roberts's court order.
On January 24, 2008 Roberts demanded an explanation from the CIA for the tapes destruction.

On March 25, 2008 Charles H. Carpenter, a lawyer for a Guantanamo captive from Yemen

Yemen

The Republic of Yemen , commonly known as Yemen , is a country located in the Middle East, occupying the southwestern to southern end of the Arabian Peninsula. It is bordered by Saudi Arabia to the north, the Red Sea to the west, and Oman to the east....

 named Hani Abdullah brought suit against the CIA, before Roberts, arguing that the evidence the CIA destroyed would have helped prove his client's innocence.