Who Is Tony Balkissoon? Harvard Lawyer and Laura Jarrett’s Husband

Barack Obama wore a tan suit. Father’s Day weekend, June 2012, and the president walked one block from his Chicago home in Kenwood to watch Tony Balkissoon get married at the Jarrett family house. Eric Holder was there. So was Marian Robinson. Most of the coverage led with the president.

In the years since, Balkissoon has won a $22 million wrongful conviction verdict against the City of Chicago, represented a man who spent thirty years in prison for a crime the victim herself challenged at trial, and joined Neufeld Scheck Brustin Hoffmann & Freudenberger in New York, the firm Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld built alongside the Innocence Project. He is still, in most accounts, described as Laura Jarrett’s husband.

From Scarborough to Harvard Law

Balkissoon was born in Scarborough, Ontario, to parents who had immigrated from Trinidad and Tobago in the early 1970s. The family is of Indian descent, part of the Indo-Trinidadian community that settled across the Toronto suburbs during that period.

His father, Bas Balkissoon, served as a Liberal Member of Provincial Parliament in Ontario from 2005 to 2016 and as Deputy Speaker of the Ontario Legislature from 2011 until he stepped down. Earlier, as a Toronto City Councillor, Bas was among those who exposed the MFP Financial leasing scandal, an illegal computer contract between the city and a private company that triggered a formal judicial inquiry.

Tony completed a Bachelor of Applied Science in Engineering Science at the University of Toronto, graduating with honors, before enrolling at Harvard Law School. He graduated cum laude in 2010 and received the Dean’s Scholar award in Trademark Law and Gender Equality. At Harvard, he also served as a student representative for the university’s Office of Sexual Assault Prevention and Response. He and Laura Jarrett met in 2008, during their second year of law school. Both graduated in 2010 and went on to practice law in Chicago.

A Career in Civil Rights Law

Before entering civil rights practice, Balkissoon clerked for two federal judges:

• Hon. Manish S. Shah — U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois
• Hon. Ann Claire Williams (retired) — U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit

Williams was the first African American woman appointed to the Seventh Circuit. Both clerkships preceded his joining Loevy & Loevy in October 2016.

He also worked with the Roderick & Solange MacArthur Justice Center, a nonprofit that takes civil rights cases to the Supreme Court. An NSBHF profile of Balkissoon describes him as “part of a small, non-profit appellate team that convinced the U.S. Supreme Court to reverse a federal appellate court whose recent decisions had made malicious-prosecution suits harder to bring.” That matches the MacArthur Justice Center’s central role in Thompson v. Clark, the 2022 case in which the Supreme Court voted 6-3 to make it easier for victims of false criminal charges to sue police. The NSBHF profile does not date when that work took place.

In October 2016, he joined Loevy & Loevy in Chicago as a Justice Fellow. The firm is one of the country’s most active practices in wrongful conviction litigation.

Nathson Fields and the $22 Million Verdict

Two months after joining Loevy, Balkissoon was listed among the six attorneys who won a $22 million federal verdict against the City of Chicago in the case of Nathson Fields. Fields had spent 18 years in an Illinois prison for two murders he did not commit, most of that time on death row, surviving five near-executions. The jury found that Chicago police had kept internal files containing evidence favorable to the defense that was never disclosed. The verdict came back on December 15, 2016.

The Perrot Case

In 2018, Balkissoon was attorney of record in a federal civil rights case on behalf of a Massachusetts man who had served thirty years in prison for a rape he did not commit. The evidence was not complicated. The victim had told investigators throughout the case that her attacker had no facial hair. The man who was arrested had a beard and a mustache on the night of the attack. At trial, when shown the lineup photograph, she said to the court: “How can I say it when this man has a mustache and a beard?” He was convicted, sentenced to life, and served thirty years before his release in 2016.

When Balkissoon filed the lawsuit against the police department, he said:

“He was incarcerated for 30 years, during a period of his life when most of us are building careers, building families and learning how to navigate the world as an adult. Hopefully the civil lawsuit, where everything comes to light, will bring him some sense of justice.”

Before joining NSBHF in January 2024, he had also been part of trial teams that secured a $15 million verdict for a wrongfully convicted client, separate from the Fields case, and helped defend both verdicts on appeal.

He also served as Vice President and Executive Counsel at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, advising the institution on legal matters under the Office of Legal Counsel.

In January 2024, Balkissoon joined NSBHF as Counsel. Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld, who co-founded the firm, also co-founded the Innocence Project, which has used DNA evidence to exonerate more than 375 wrongfully convicted people across the United States. At NSBHF, his work centers on complex legal writing in wrongful conviction and police misconduct cases from the initial complaint through the final appeal. Other attorneys at the firm call on him regularly to help prepare for oral arguments. His bar admissions cover Washington D.C., Illinois, and New York, alongside ten of the thirteen federal circuits, meaning he can argue in federal appellate courts across nearly the entire country.

The Obama Wedding

The ceremony took place on June 16, 2012, at the Jarrett family home in Kenwood. Balkissoon and Jarrett were both practicing law in Chicago at the time. Among those present was John Rogers, a Chicago business leader who told reporters: “I grew up down the block and it’s wonderful to come back home and celebrate Laura’s extraordinary wedding.”

Laura Jarrett and Family

Laura Jarrett is currently co-anchor of Weekend Today on NBC News and the network’s Senior Legal Correspondent, a position she moved into in 2023 after several years co-anchoring Early Start on CNN. She graduated from Harvard Law School, practiced law in Chicago, and later shifted into broadcast journalism. Her mother, Valerie Jarrett, served as Senior Advisor to President Obama and directed the White House Office of Public Engagement and the Council on Women and Girls.

Balkissoon and Jarrett have two children: James Anthony Balkissoon, born in 2019, and June Tahay Balkissoon, born in 2022. Jarrett told People magazine: “Tony and I waited a while before we had children, which I think was super valuable because we just got to have fun. Kids are wonderful, but they can be extremely taxing on marriages. We had a ball just the two of us for a long time and I think that really set us up for success.”

Balkissoon has no public social media accounts and does not give interviews. The family lives in New York, where he works from NSBHF’s office on Varick Street. Their daughter’s middle name, Tahay, honors Tony’s mother, Tahay Balkissoon.

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