Judge J. Michael Ryan was appointed to the Superior Court of the District of Columbia in 2003 by President George W. Bush.  Following his appointment to the Court in November of 2003, Judge Ryan sat in Family Court on calendars which combined Domestic Relations and Abuse & Neglect as well as Juvenile Delinquency.  Thereafter he has sat in the Criminal Division in both Felony 1 and Felony 2 assignments, in Domestic Violence, both the Criminal and Civil Protection Order assignments, and is now back in Felony 2.  Judge Ryan is a member of the Judicial Education Committee and Criminal Division Panels Oversight Committee, and has served on the Mental Health/Mental Retardation Rules Advisory Committee, and Pre-Trial Mental Examination Committee.

Judge Ryan was born and raised in the D.C. Metropolitan area.  He received his Bachelor of Arts degree in philosophy, with honors, from the College of William and Mary in 1979 and received his law degree in 1982 from the National Law Center, George Washington University.

Following graduation from law school, Judge Ryan served as law clerk to the Honorable Richard B. Latham, Sixth Judicial Circuit Court, Montgomery County, Maryland, and interim law clerk to the Honorable Bruce S. Mencher, Superior Court for the District of Columbia.  From 1984 to 1985, Judge Ryan was a partner with J. Patrick Anthony in Ryan & Anthony, practicing criminal and civil mental health defense. 

Prior to his appointment to the bench, Judge Ryan had been an attorney at the D.C. Public Defender Service since 1985, serving in various capacities.  From 1985 to early 2002, Judge Ryan served as a staff attorney at the Mental Health Division of PDS, located at Saint Elizabeths Hospital.  In that capacity, he represented indigent clients subject to both civil commitment proceedings and criminal release hearings.  Thereafter, serving as Special Counsel to the Director of PDS, he coordinated the agency’s use of expert witnesses as well as agency jail diversion efforts and oversaw PDS’s Mental Health and Offender Rehabilitation Divisions.  He participated in the PDS Forensic Practice Group and was involved in the preparation and presentation of challenges to the admissibility of both nuclear and mitochondrial DNA evidence in the District of Columbia Courts.  Judge Ryan has lectured extensively on the use and admission of expert witness testimony, especially as it relates to issues in psychology and psychiatry.

For many years Judge Ryan chaired the DC Jail Diversion Task Force, a working group comprised of representatives from various criminal justice and mental health agencies and community service organizations, which addressed problems relating to people with mental illnesses in the criminal justice system.  Collaborative efforts of this group resulted in the creation and operation of OPTIONS, a successful pretrial diversion program in Superior Court, as well as a force-wide training of the Metropolitan Police Department in the appropriate handling of people with mental illness.

Judge Ryan also served on the Superior Court’s Family Division Mental Health and Mental Retardation Branch Working Group and as an Advisory Board Member of the Criminal Justice/Mental Health Consensus Project of the Police Executive Research Forum.  He has been an Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychiatry, Georgetown University School of Medicine and was a contributing writer to the Mental & Physical Disability Law Reporter of the American Bar Association.