Meet the 3 judges nominated by Gov. Charlie Baker for state’s highest court

Governor Charlie Baker chose three experienced judges from the Superior Court as his nominees to join the Supreme Judicial Court. Here’s a quick introduction:

KIMBERLY S. BUDD — Budd grew up on the North Shore and is a graduate of Georgetown University and the 1991 class at Harvard Law School, which also included Barack Obama, the current president of the United States.

The daughter of former US attorney Wayne Budd, she was appointed to the Superior Court in 2009 by former governor Deval Patrick, a Democrat. Budd’s career has included stops at the US attorney’s office in Boston, Harvard University’s legal office, and an administrative post at Harvard Business School.

In 2011, she addressed the Boston Bar Association's summer jobs program, where she discussed the values her parents taught that her guided her into adulthood.

“My parents passed along certain values to my sisters and me that I have found helpful — they are probably the same ones that you have been exposed to: honesty, reliability, a strong work ethic, and always doing your best,’’ according to transcript posted on the Boston Bar Association website.

Budd is registered as an unenrolled voter in Newton.

FRANK M. GAZIANO — Gaziano, 52, is a former prosecutor both in the Plymouth County district attorney’s office and the US attorney’s office, where he was part of the team of lawyers who secured a death sentence for spree killer Gary Lee Sampson in 2003. (His death sentence was later vacated by a judge who found juror misconduct, but a new sentencing trial is slated for this fall.)

Gaziano was also one of the Superior Court judges recently assigned to handle the legal mess arising from the Annie Dookhan drug lab scandal. Dookhan, a state chemist, manipulated drug samples, causing thousands of convictions to be called into question.

Gaziano also presided over the trial and the conviction of Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter, the con man who called himself “Clark Rockefeller” and whose kidnapping of his own daughter on July 27, 2008, sparked a nationwide manhunt that ended about a week later when he was arrested by the FBI in Baltimore.

Gaziano was appointed to the Superior Court in 2004 by former governor Mitt Romney, a Republican. He is a graduate of Lafayette College and Suffolk University Law School in Boston.

Gaziano’s oldest daughter, Andrea Marie Gaziano, died in 2006 from cancer when she was 14 years old.

Gaziano is registered as a Democrat in Scituate.

DAVID A. LOWY — Lowy worked with Baker during the administration of Governor William F. Weld in the early 1990s and helped craft Weld’s anticrime legislative package in 1993, which included a major legal reform that allowed judges to consider dangerousness when setting bail, a boost for advocates of domestic violence victims.

He was named to the Superior Court in 2001 by the late governor Paul Cellucci, a Republican. Lowy sat in Lynn District Court before joining the Superior Court.

A 1983 University of Massachusetts graduate, Lowy got his law degree in 1987 from Boston University.

Recently, Lowy presided over the first-degree murder trial of teenager Philip Chism in the killing of math teacher Colleen E. Ritzer inside Danvers High School in 2013. He invoked both American historian Henry Adams and the Bible’s Proverbs when sentencing the teen, noting that “the crashing waves of this tragedy will never wane.’’

Lowy is registered as a Republican in Marblehead.