Joseph E. Beshouri was installed as a Magistrate Judge on March 16, 2009.

Magistrate Judge Beshouri was born and raised nearby Detroit, Michigan. During his last years in high school, and for almost a decade thereafter, he played drums and percussion professionally, first as a performing musician throughout the Midwest and then as a studio musician in Miami, Florida.

Judge Beshouri attended the University of South Florida, where in 1982 he received a Bachelor of Arts degree in International Studies. He received his law degree in 1986 from Catholic University of America’s Columbus School of Law. During his second and third years in law school, he practiced law as a student-attorney in the Criminal Division of the D.C. Law Students in Court Program.

After graduating from law school in 1986, Judge Beshouri founded his own criminal practice, which continued for twenty-three years until his appointment as a Magistrate Judge. Licensed in both the District and Maryland, he represented individuals charged in Superior Court, in Maryland’s District and Circuit courts, and in the U.S. Districts courts for both the District of Columbia and Maryland.

The cases Judge Beshouri defended over the course of twenty-three years in practice were far-ranging, although his last decade in practice was primarily focused on complex federal litigation, to include gang-racketeering cases, transnational crimes, and death-penalty prosecutions. During that decade, he represented several high-profile defendants in the District of Columbia, to include Sam Carson in United States v. Sam Carson, et al., a seven-month federal trial of six defendants charged in a 101-count RICO indictment, and Kenneth Simmons in United States v. Kenneth Simmons, et al., a six-month federal trial of six defendants charged in a 158-count RICO indictment.

For several years during his last decade in private practice, Judge Beshouri served as an instructor with the National Institute of Trial Advocacy at the Georgetown Law Center.

Since his appointment as Magistrate Judge, Judge Beshouri has served in the Civil Division, presiding concurrently over the non-jury civil trials calendar and the tax-lien calendar.

Magistrate Judge Beshouri is married to Dee C. Kerr. They have one child.