From Bay Farm Road to NY Supreme Court Judge: Neither Lisp, Cancer, nor COVID-19 Stopped Carol Sharpe (’84)
How does a shy, little, ‘lisp-tongue’ girl from Kingston end up as a Supreme Court judge in New York, beating back cancer and COVID-19 along the way? Carol Sharpe still doesn’t quite know how she did it, but she was elected to the Supreme Court on November 3.
“I never thought that somebody like me could become a judge, just like I never thought I could be a trial attorney,” she told the Jamaica Observer via Zoom one Saturday afternoon, the only time her busy schedule allowed for an interview. She’s now focused on mastering an entirely new area of the law, and failure has never been an option for Sharpe.
The sixth of seven children (one of whom is well-known journalist Michael Sharpe), she mimicked her siblings’ knack for hard work during her early years. And, always at the back of her mind, there was the thought that she had to make her parents proud.