HARTFORD — Retired US District Judge Ellen Bree Burns, the first woman to serve on the federal bench in Connecticut and widely admired as a pioneer and role model, died Monday in New Haven after a brief illness. She was 95.
Judge Burns was one of the first female Connecticut state judges and the first woman to serve on the state Superior Court bench, after having worked as an attorney for the Legislature for 24 years.
President Jimmy Carter nominated her for a federal judgeship in Connecticut in 1978, and she was confirmed by the Senate. She served nearly four decades on the federal bench, including as chief judge of the federal courts in Connecticut, until her retirement in 2015 at age 91.
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Mobsters, Hells Angels, and drug dealers were among the people she sent to prison.
‘‘Most of my cases now were drug cases,’’ Judge Burns told the Connecticut Post shortly before her retirement. ‘‘Things haven’t gotten better since the war on drugs began. It’s awful, all the destruction this causes to families, neighborhoods, and cities. I look at the families of the defendants and just wonder how awful it is for them.’’
In 1986, she sent leaders of the Hells Angels to prison as part of a nationwide crackdown on drug dealing that snared about 30 members of the motorcycle gang’s Bridgeport chapter.
Judge Burns also presided over the case of Greenwich financier Martin Frankel, whom she sent to prison for more than 16 years for cheating insurance companies out of $200 million .
She also was on the bench for cases connected to the late 1990s state pension fund scandal that sent Connecticut Treasurer Paul Silvester to prison.