Lance Ito - Early Life and Career

Early Life and Career

Ito was born to Jim and Toshi Ito. As children, both had been kept in Japanese American internment camps with their families during World War II. Ito attended John Marshall High School, where he was student body president and received the Scholar Athlete award in 1968. He earned his Bachelors Degree with honors from the University of California, Los Angeles in 1972, and his J.D. degree from the University of California, Berkeley's Boalt Hall in 1975. He then joined the Los Angeles district attorney's office in 1977, working in the hardcore gang unit and the organized crime and terror unit, among others.

In 1981, he married Margaret Ann York, the first woman to attain the rank of Deputy Chief in the Los Angeles Police Department and that department's highest ranking woman officer at the time of her retirement in 2002. The two met while at an Eagle Rock murder scene. York was also the Chief of the Los Angeles County Police.

Republican Governor George Deukmejian appointed Ito, a Democrat, to the Municipal Court in 1987, and then elevated him to Superior Court in 1989.

Read more about this topic:  Lance Ito

Famous quotes containing the words early, life and/or career:

    “And early in the morning he came walking toward them on the sea.”
    —Bible: New Testament, Matthew 14:25.

    “We have created an industrial order geared to automatism, where feeble-mindedness, native or acquired, is necessary for docile productivity in the factory; and where a pervasive neurosis is the final gift of the meaningless life that issues forth at the other end.”
    —Lewis Mumford (1895–1990)

    “I seemed intent on making it as difficult for myself as possible to pursue my “male” career goal. I not only procrastinated endlessly, submitting my medical school application at the very last minute, but continued to crave a conventional female role even as I moved ahead with my “male” pursuits.”
    —Margaret S. Mahler (1897–1985)