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John Baker is the Federal Defender for the United States District Court for the Western District of North Carolina and is a retired United States Marine Corps JAG officer. He attended University of Pittsburgh School of Law for his Juris Doctor.

He is the co-author of Naval Law: Justice and Procedure in the Sea Services (4th Edition) with Brent Filbert and Mark Jamison.

He is notable for serving as the Chief Defense Counsel for the Military Commission Defense Organization, which provides criminal defense services to Guantanamo detainees in the Guantanamo Military Commissions. And his nickname is “Just on Time John” because “I’m always on time. Not early, not late.”

Early Life and Career
Baker was commissioned as an officer in the Marine Corps in 1990, where he served as a supply and logistics officer. While in the Marine Corps, he attended the University of Pittsburgh Law School, graduating in 1997. He also holds a Master of Laws from the Judge Advocate General’s Legal Center and School at the University of Virginia. As a Judge Advocate, Baker served as a prosecutor, defense counsel, and military judge. In 2010, became the Chief Defense Counsel for the Marine Corps. He was thereafter appointed to be the Deputy Director, Judge Advocate Division, for Military Justice and Community Development.

Chief Defense Counsel
Baker served as the Chief Defense Counsel for the Military Commission Defense Organization from 2015 to 2022. He was appointed by President Obama after Congress required the Chief Defense Counsel to be of equal rank to the Military Commission’s Chief Prosecutor, who at the time was Mark S. Martins. Soon after taking office Baker protested being excluded from closed sessions of the trial of those accused in the September 11th attacks.

Baker v. Spath
In 2017, Baker authorized the mass resignation of the defense team assigned to represent Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri after al-Nashiri lead lawyer, Richard Kammen, discovered secret monitoring equipment had been installed in his attorney-client meeting room. The military judge presiding over the al-Nashiri case, Colonel Vance Spath, ordered Baker to rescind his order returning the lawyers to the case. When Baker refused the order as illegal, Spath found Baker in contempt and ordered him put under house arrest in Guantanamo.

Baker filed a petition for a writ of habeas corpus in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia. While the case was pending, the Convening Authority for Military Commissions reduced Baker’s sentence and ordered him released from confinement. Soon after, United States District Judge Royce Lamberth granted Baker’s habeas corpus petition and vacated Spath’s finding of contempt.

The following year, al-Nashiri’s new lawyers Brian Mizer, Alaric Piette, and Michel Paradis discovered that Spath had been secretly negotiating for employment with the United States Justice Department as an immigration judge. Al-Nashiri’s lawyers challenged Spath for engaging in judicial misconduct and succeeded in obtaining a writ of mandamus from the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. Circuit Judge David Tatel writing for a unanimous Court held: "Although a principle so basic to our system of laws should go without saying, we nonetheless feel compelled to restate it plainly here: criminal justice is a shared responsibility. Yet in this case, save for Al-Nashiri’s defense counsel, all elements of the military commission system—from the prosecution team to the Justice Department to the CMCR to the judge himself— failed to live up to that responsibility."

In testimony before the United States Senate Judiciary Committee in 2021, Baker was critical of the military commissions, telling the Senators:

"Whatever the original intentions, no one today can seriously argue that the military commissions in Guantanamo have been anything but a failed experiment. To date, in their almost 20 years of existence under four different Presidents, the military commissions have produced one final conviction. Let me repeat that – as we sit here today, the failed experiment called the Guantanamo military commissions has produced one final finding of guilt."

Baker retired from the Marine Corps at the end of 2021. Earlier that year, the Chief Prosecutor for Military Commissions, Mark Martins abruptly retired following a scandal involving the use of torture in the al-Nashiri case.

Federal Public Defender
On March 28, 2022, the judges of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit appointed Baker to be the Federal Defender for the Western District of North Carolina.