When health issues caused John Doar to withdraw as the keynote speaker for the Atlanta conference, long time NAFUSA member W.J. Michael (“Mike”) Cody agreed to stand in. Cody proceeded to give one of the most memorable speeches ever heard at the annual meetings. Cody was one of six lawyers representing Dr. Martin Luther King in Memphis when Dr. King was assassinated while in the city to support the striking sanitation workers. Cody’s intense description of the last two days of Dr. King’s life effected everyone in the room.
At the close of the Atlanta conference, the NAFUSA membership elected Jay Stephens, to serve as its president for 2012-2013. Stephens is senior vice president, general counsel and secretary of Raytheon Company. Raytheon, with 2011 sales of $25 billion and 71,000 employees worldwide, is a leader in defense, homeland security and other government markets worldwide. Stephens leads the company’s legal and regulatory affairs, ethics and compliance programs, and corporate governance activities.
Prior to joining Raytheon, he served as associate attorney general of the United States. Before becoming associate attorney general, Stephens was corporate vice president and deputy general counsel for Honeywell International (formerly AlliedSignal). From 1993 to 1997, Stephens was a partner in the Washington, D.C., office of the law firm of Pillsbury, Madison and Sutro, where his practice focused on complex litigation, regulatory matters and corporate governance issues. He also served as co-managing partner of the firm’s Washington office.
Stephens served as the United States Attorney for the District of Columbia, 1988-1993. From 1986 to 1988, Stephens served in the White House as deputy counsel to President Reagan, where he was responsible for a wide range of legal policy and regulatory issues and for providing counsel and advice to the President and senior White House staff.
From 1973 to 1985, Stephens served in a variety of positions with the U.S. Department of Justice and in the private sector, including principal associate deputy attorney general, assistant U.S. attorney and assistant special Watergate prosecutor. He also worked as an assistant general counsel with the Overseas Private Investment Corporation and as an associate with the Washington law firm of Wilmer Cutler & Pickering.
Stephens graduated from Harvard College magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa with a bachelor’s degree in government, attended Oxford University on a Knox Fellowship, and earned his Juris Doctor degree cum laude from the Harvard Law School. He currently serves on the board of directors of the New England Legal Foundation and the Atlantic Legal Foundation. Stephens also serves on the advisory boards of the American Enterprise Institute’s Legal Center for the Public Interest and the Georgetown Law School Corporate Counsel Institute, as well as on the General Counsel Committee of the National Center for State Courts, and as a trustee of the American Friends of New College, Oxford.
The following were also elected to serve for 2012-2013: President Elect Donald K. Stern, District of Massachusett; Vice President Matthew D. Orwig, ED of Texas; Secretary Gregory A. Vega, SD of California and Treasurer E. Bart Daniel, District of South Carolina.
Alice Howzwe Martin, ND of Alabama was elected to fill the vacancy on the board in the class of 2013 due to Bart Daniels moving to the chairs. The following were elected to the the board as the class of 2015: Kent B. Alexander, ND Georgia; William J. Leone, District of Colorado; Kenneth L. Wainstein, District of Columbia; Donald W. Washington, WD of Louisiana and Sharon J. Zealey, SD of Ohio. Click here for photos of officers and directors.
Finally, it was announced that the 2013 conference will be held in Washington, DC on September 26-28 and the 2014 conference in Boston on October 9-11.
NAFUSA member Andrea Sheridan Ordin retired from her position as Los Angeles County County Counsel after two years as the head of the 250 in-house counsel office providing civil representation for the Board of Supervisors and the departments of Los Angeles County.
On July 1st she was re-appointed to the Los Angeles Board of Police Commissioners, and elected as its president. Under the Charter the Board is the head of the LAPD, and the five civilians donate 20-30 hours per week on commission business, set policy and are assisted in improving service to the public by a paid professional staff, including an Inspector General’s office, headed by a former assistant U.S. attorney, who serves as the eyes and ears of the Commission.
In addition in January, 2013, Ordin will be joining the adjunct faculty of Loyola Law School, teaching an advanced legal ethics course, called the Government Lawyer. Ordin, a former NAFUSA board member, served as the United States Attorney for the Central District of California (1977-1981).
Seagal V. Wheatley passed away Tuesday, September 25, 2012 of pancreatic cancer, he was 77. Wheatley served as the United States Attorney for the Western District of Texas (1969-1971) and was a long time member of NAFUSA.
His 53 year legal career was spent specializing in complex business litigation and he was well recognized as one of the most effective trial attorneys in Texas.
Wheatley graduated from the University Of Texas School Of Law and began his first law practice with a law firm specializing in trial work. He was mentored by John H. Wood who later became a Federal District Judge, but whom Wheatley always gave credit to as his teacher.
In 1969, when at the age of 34, he was nominated by President Nixon and confirmed by the U.S. Senate to serve as the United States Attorney, he was one of the youngest U.S. Attorneys in the country. In 1970 Wheatley was selected the “Outstanding Young Man of San Antonio” by the Rotary Club.
In 1971, Wheatley became a partner in a newly formed firm with Jesse Oppenheimer, Stanley Rosenberg and Herb Kelleher where he led the litigation section for 25 years and represented many local and national corporations as well as the personal attorney for many prominent businessmen such as the former owner of the New Orleans Saints, the owner of the Houston Astros, owners of the Detroit Tigers, a former King Ranch heir and two former Mayors of San Antonio. Wheatley continued to practice until he was invited to join the law firm of Jackson Walker, LLP where he practiced complex business litigation until his death.
Wheatley is survived by his two daughters, Jill Wheatley of San Antonio and Julie Gosh of Austin. NAFUSA has arranged for an American flag to be flown over the U.S. Deaprtment of Justice in Wheatley’s honor and to be presented to his family as a lasting memorial from his former collegues.
Health issues have forced John Doar to withdraw from the NAFUSA Atlanta conference. Doar, 91, was hospitalized in New York in August with a blood clot in his lung. He is recovering and his health is improving, but he will be unable to travel to Atlanta in October.
Long time NAFUSA member W.J. Michael (“Mike”) Cody, shown right, has agreed to stand in for Doar as this year’s keynote speaker. John Doar served in the Justice Department during the critical years of the civil rights movement. Cody, as a young lawyer in Memphis during that era, was also a witness to some of the most significant events of the times. His keynote topic will be entitled King at the Mountain Top: The Representation of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Memphis, April 3-4, 1968. Cody was one of six lawyers providing legal representation to Dr. King on that momentous day in Memphis when King was assassinated while in town to support the striking sanitation workers. Young Mike Cody is shown below on the right at the injunction hearing where the City of Memphis attempted to prevent the march in support of the sanitation workers.
Cody served as the United States Attorney for the Western District of Tennessee (1977-1981) and as the Attorney General of the State of Tennessee (1984-1988). He served on the Attorney General’s Advisory Committee (1979-1980).
Except for his years in public service and one year at another firm in Nashville, he has been a partner at Burch Porter & Johnson PLLC in Memphis since 1961. He has been a professor at Rhodes College and Lemoyne Owen College, Memphis State University School of Law and Vanderbilt University School of Law. Cody is a fellow in the American College of Trial Lawyers. He is co-chair, Society of Attorneys General Emeritus. He was a first lieutenant in the U.S. Army Reserve and earned his J.D. at the University of Virginia. Cody is a member of the Tennessee Sports Hall of Fame.
On September 12, 2012, Judge Katherine B. Forrest of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York issued a permanent injunction barring the government from enforcing a statute authorizing the indefinite detention without trial of terrorism suspects. On September 17, 2012, Judge Raymond J. Lohier of the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit granted an interim stay until a panel of judges hold a hearing scheduled for September 28.
NAFUSA held a two hour panel in New York in 2010 on the prosecution of terrorism suspects and Charlie Savage of The New York Times moderated the panel. Two years later this issue has not gone away and Savage writes in The Times,
The United States has been detaining terrorism suspects indefinitely since 2001, relying on an authorization by Congress to use military force against perpetrators of the Sept. 11 attacks and those who helped them. Last year, Congress decided to create a federal statute that codified authority for such detentions.
The new statute went beyond covering the perpetrators of the Sept. 11 attacks to also cover people who were part of or substantially supported Al Qaeda, the Taliban or associated forces engaged in hostilities against the United States or its allies. Its enactment was controversial in part because lawmakers did not specify what conduct could lead to someone’s being detained, and because it was silent about whether the statute extended to American citizens and others arrested on United States soil.
It was challenged by Chris Hedges, a journalist who interacts with terrorists as part of his reporting, and by several prominent supporters of WikiLeaks. They argued that its existence chilled their constitutional rights by creating a basis to fear that the government might seek to detain them under it by declaring that their activities made them supporters of an enemy group.
In May, Judge Forrest agreed, issuing a preliminary injunction barring the government from relying on the law to detain anyone without trial, and Wednesday she made that injunction permanent in a 112-page opinion.
This afternoon the Justice Department released the 471-page report from Michael Horowitz, the DOJ Inspector General, finding federal agents and prosecutors in Phoenix primarily responsible for the failed effort to infiltrate weapons into smuggling rings in the operation named “Fast and Furious”.
The long-awaited report also directed sharp criticism at senior officials from the Justice Department and its Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives in Washington for lax oversight of the attempt to block the flow of weapons to Mexico’s violent drug cartels. Many of the weapons later turned up at crime scenes in Mexico and the United States, including one in which a Border Patrol agent was killed.
The inspector general’s report recommended that the Justice Department consider taking disciplinary action against 14 current officials from the department and ATF. Among them were former acting Deputy Attorney General Gary Grindler, Assistant Attorney General Lanny Breuer, former acting ATF Director Kenneth Melson, former ATF Special Agent in Charge William Newell and Deputy Assistant Attorney General Jason Weinstein.
Weinstein resigned today but called the IG’s conclusion that he knew about and failed to stop the practice of allowing guns to cross the border “completely false.” Weinstein is represented by NAFUSA member and former DOJ Inspector General Michael Bromwich.
The IG’s report failed to criticize Attorney General Eric holder Jr., finding that he had no advance knowledge of the tactics and risks involved in the operation.
In a scathing report, the inspector general, Michael Horowitz, laid primary blame on what he portrayed as a dysfunctional and poorly supervised group of Arizona-based federal prosecutors and agents of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. As part of the operation, those officials did not act to seize illegal weapons in hopes of bringing a bigger case against a gun-smuggling network linked to a Mexican drug gang.
While it found no evidence that officials at the Justice Department in Washington had authorized or approved the tactics, it faulted several officials for related failures, including not recognizing red flags and failing to follow up on information about both Operation Fast and Furious and a similar, earlier investigation called Operation Wide Receiver, in which guns also reached drug gangs.
The ABA Journalreported that Chief Judge David Sentelle of the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia told a Judicial Conference meeting at the U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday, September 11, 2012, that unless a federal budget impasse is resolved by Congress, all federal civil jury trials may have to be eliminated in 2013.
Judge Sentelle is the chairman of the executive committee for the Judicial Conference. The committee is making contingency plans to deal with a possible need for $500 million in cost-cutting next year, as the judicial system’s share of $1.2 trillion in spending cuts due to take effect next year, absent a new budget agreement.
NAFUSA member Herbert J. Stern has authored a new book Diary of a DA: The True Story of the Prosecutor Who Took on the Mob, Fought Corruption, and Won (Skyhorse Publishing, September 2012).
Herb Stern knows better than anybody. As U.S. attorney, he led a series of prosecutions in the late 1960s and early 1970s that ended in criminal convictions for the mayors of Jersey City, Newark and Atlantic City, along with a congressman and what seemed at the time to be half the politicians in the state, exposing some as being wholly owned subsidiaries of the mob. All of this was done despite the fierce opposition of powerful state officials, as well as the Nixon Justice Department’s preference for silly political prosecutions such as that of the “Camden 28.”
Jeffrey Toobin writes:
Herbert J. Stern- prosecutor, judge and advocate- is a legend in American law, and this extraordinary memoir tells the story of how he became one.
Judge Stern served as the U.S. Attorney for the District of New Jersey 1971-1974. In 1962-1965, he served as an assistant district attorney in Manhattan, participating in the investigation of the assassination of Malcolm X. He also served in the Organized Crime and Racketeering Section of the U.S. Department of Justice. He was appointed by President Nixon to serve on the U.S. District Court in the district of New Jersey, serving from 1974-1987. He has authored several books on trial advocacy and Judgment in Berlin, later made into a film.
Judge Stern is a partner and founding member of Stern & Kilcullen. He earned his J.D. from the Universtiy of Chicago Law School.
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