Judge Beeny

Judge Beeny
Beeny as a cadet (illustration by Colin MacNeil).
Publication information
Publisher	Rebellion Developments
First appearance	Judge Dredd Megazine vol. 3 no. 20 (1996)
Created by	John Wagner and Colin MacNeil
In-story information
Full name	America Beeny

Judge America Beeny is a fictional character in the Judge Dredd comic strip in 2000 AD and the Judge Dredd Megazine. She appeared as a cadet in most of her stories, graduating to full street judge in a story published in early 2008.

Her mother, America Jara, was the daughter of immigrants from the Puerto Rican Wastes but before 2011, Beeny was depicted as Caucasian. During "Day of Chaos", colourist Chris Blythe started to colour her with darker skin. The change was flagged in prog 1764's letters page, with the editor referring to Jara and indicating this was a permanent editorial change.

Beeny is the child of the two main characters who appeared in the first America story, America Jara and Bennett Beeny. She herself first appeared briefly in the sequel to that story, but her first main story was the third in the America trilogy, in which she took a lead role.

In 2119 Beeny was enrolled as a cadet in the Academy of Law by her father just before his untimely death, and served well enough to qualify for the accelerated graduation program. In her tenth year, as with all tenth year cadets, she was required to plan and execute a criminal investigation on her own. Allowed to choose her supervisor, she chose to work with Judge Dredd, and decided to take another look at the terrorist attack depicted in the previous America story, since she had decided that the first investigation had failed badly (leading indirectly to the Total War terrorist bombings).

In spite of her parentage (she was descended from anti-judicial activists), America Beeny appears to have the makings of a very good judge. She does however want to reform the system from the inside. With both parents dead, the closest thing she had to family was her father's old robo-servant, Robert. When Robert was destroyed in an attempt on her life Dredd observed "we're your family now." Despite this, Beeny has sometimes visited the remains of the Statue of Liberty, where her mother was killed, as "it's as close as I'm ever going to get to her".

During her assessment Dredd noted Beeny's skill, comparing her to a ten-year graduate, though he did suspect that her insistence on going through the paper trail first was a means of needling him, as Dredd's hatred of paperwork is legendary. In a later story she was specifically chosen by Dredd as part of his team investigating the city's mutant facilities.