Chuck Rosenberg

NAFUSA life member Chuck Rosenberg (ED Virginia 2006-2008, Texas 2005-2006) and the former Acting Director of DEA), will return to present the 2020 ethics lecture at the annual NAFUSA conference in New York City, September 30-October 2. Chuck was scheduled to give this lecture last year at the San Francisco conference but had to cancel due to an appendectomy attack. Chuck will speak on “The Korematsu Story–The Duty of Candor to The Court”. Registration for fall conference is expected to begin in June.

Here is his preview:

In early 1942, following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, FDR issued Executive Order 9066, enabling west coast military commanders to set up curfews and exclusion zones, ostensibly to protect the US against sabotage by Japanese Americans.  More than 110,000 Japanese Americans on the west coast were relocated to internment camps, primarily in the mountain west.  However, two reports – one commissioned by the State Department and one conducted by the Naval Office of Intelligence – showed that there actually was not a significant threat from Japanese Americans living on the west coast.  Indeed, for the most part, those reports showed quite the opposite and, to the extent there was a threat from Japanese Americans, it was confined to a small group of individuals largely known to the FBI and national security officials, many of whom were already under surveillance or in custody.  Further, at least two DOJ attorneys knew about the Munson and Ringle reports and believed – and put it in writing – that withholding the findings from those reports from the Supreme Court in connection with the litigation of the Hirabayashi (curfew) and Korematsu (exclusion) cases amounted to a suppression of evidence.  Those DOJ attorneys lost an internal debate to the Solicitor General, who concealed the information from the Court and misled it in oral argument in response to a direct question about the views of the USG on the threat posed by Japanese Americans.  About seven decades later, the SG’s office (led, at the time, by Neal Katyal) confessed error, acknowledging that the reports had been suppressed and that providing truthful information to the Court was not only required but might have affected the outcome.

Click here to view hundreds of photos from the 2019 NAFUSA conference at the Westin St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco California.

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San Francisco Conference Photos

Fred Wyshak

Each year, NAFUSA recognizes an Assistant U.S. Attorney for outstanding performance through the J. Michael Bradford Memorial Award. The award is named after J. Michael Bradford, who served as a U.S. Attorney in the Eastern District of Texas from 1994 to 2001. Bradford, who died in 2003, had a distinguished career in public service, including successfully defending the government against lawsuits stemming from the 1993 siege of the Branch Davidian’s compound in Waco, Texas. NAFUSA annually solicits nominations from current U.S. Attorneys for the Bradford Award. Typically, the recipient has handled a significant investigation and prosecution or a series of prosecutions which has had a significant impact and merits special recognition.

Once again, a number of exceptional nominations were made by U.S. Attorneys around the country. The J. Michael Bradford Award Committee was chaired by NAFUSA Vice President Karen Hewitt. Its members included Bob Balfe, Shari Potter, Paul Coggins, Ron Machen, and John Brownlee.

This year, the NAFUSA Board of Directors voted to give the award to AUSA Fred M. Wyshak, Jr.  of the District of Massachusetts, nominated by U.S. Attorney Andrew E. Lelling. His nomination and selection was based upon Fred having  “quite literally- taken down the Boston mob.” Over the past 25 years, Wyshak has prosecuted Stephen “The Rifleman” Flemmi, a former mobster who killed dozens of people; James “Whitey” Bulger; and former mob boss Frank Salemme and his co-defendant Paul Weadick. In addition, in 2018 Fred was lead counsel in one of the most signficant criminal health care fraud trials in the country, the Insys Therapeutics case involving Subys, a dangerous opioid. Finally, Fred, as chief of the district’s Public Corruption Unit, supervised the prosecutions and convictions of eight Massachusetts State Trooper for fraudulently obtaining thousands of dollars for overtimes shifts they did not work.

Other nominees for the Bradford Award were:

Each of the nominees will receive recognition from NAFUSA for their exemplary service.

The San Francisco conference will include a dialogue with the leadership of the Executive Office for United States Attorneys (EOUSA) and the Attorney General’s Advisory Committee (AGAC). It will be held on Thursday morning, September 26, 2019, at The Westin St. Francis. It will be moderated by NAFUSA Board Member Donna Bucella, who served as the Executive Director of EOUSA (1997-1999). She also served as the United States Attorney for the Middle District of Florida (1999-2001). She is currently Vice President and Chief Compliance Office at 7-Eleven Inc.

Joining Donna will be Jessie Liu, the Chairwoman of the AGAC. Jessie was confirmed on September 14, 2017 as the United States Attorney for the District of Columbia. She last appeared at the NAFUSA conference in Washington in 2017, welcoming us as the local United States Attorney.

On behalf of EOUSA, Norman Wong, the Principal Deputy Director will join the dialogue. Norm began his career at the Department of Justice in 2000.

On Thursday, September 26, 2019, the Annual NAFUSA conference will feature a panel discussion on “Artificial Intelligence, Privacy and the Law.” It will be moderated by NAFUSA Board Member Anne Tompkins, a partner at Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft in the White Collar Defense and Investigations Group. Anne served as the United States Attorney for the Western District of North Carolina (2010-2015).

The three panelists will be:

Courtney Bowman, Director of Privacy & Civil Liberties Engineering, Palantir Technologies. His work addresses issues at the intersection of policy, law, technology, ethics and social norms.

Scott Schools, Chief Compliance and Ethics Officer at UBER, and a NAFUSA member (U.S. Attorney for Northern District of California and the District of South Carolina).

Eric Vandevelde, a litigation partner in Gibson Dunn’s Los Angeles office and a member of its White Collar Defense & Investigations, Privacy & Cybersecurity, Intellectual Property, and Crisis Management groups. He has also served 7 years as an AUSA in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Central District of California.

Register Now

This year’s NAFUSA annual conference will be held in San Francisco September 25-27 at The Westin St. Francis. The deadline to obtain the group rate is September 3. There is no guaranty rooms will be available after that date. If you any difficulties reserving a room, contact Lisa Rafferty.

The conference will open on Wednesday, September 25, with a welcome reception at the hotel sponsored by Guidepost Solutions. In honor of NAFUSA’s 40th anniversary, the opening reception will recognize and honor the founding members, past presidents and executive directors. Golf will be available on Wednesday morning at Presidio Golf Course.

On Thursday and Friday mornings, the CLE programs will feature:

• a panel on artificial intelligence/technology with Courtney Bowman of Palantir Technologies, Scott Schools of UBER and Eric Vandevelde of Gibson Dunn, moderated by NAFUSA Board Member Anne Tompkins
• a dialogue with EOUSA and the AGAC with Jessie Liu and Norman Wong, moderated by NAFUSA Board Member Donna Bucella
• a presentation on the United States Supreme Court by Dean Erwin Chemerinsky of Berkeley Law
• a presentation by Professor Jennifer Eberhardt of Stanford University on “Unconscious Bias in Law Enforcement” with NAFUSA member Carol Lam
• and an ethics presentation by Stanford Law Professor Deborah Rhode.

On Thursday afternoon, there will be a luncheon and harbor cruise on SanFrancisco Bay. Thursday evening is reserved for class reunions at various off-site locations. On Friday afternoon following the CLE, there will be a luncheon at the hotel, followed by a tour of the Historic Browning Courthouse courtesy of Hon. Michael Hawkins, U.S. Circuit Judge (9th Circuit). The conference will close on Friday evening with dinner and a general membership meeting. Our keynote speaker on Friday night will be Hon. Christopher Wray, Director of the FBI.

Click here to view the San Francisco program.

Click here to read the biographies of our 2019 conference speakers.

Erwin Chemerinsky will give the Supreme Court Update at the NAFUSA 2019 Annual Conference in San Francisco. This will be his second time doing so, as he gave the Supreme Court Update in 2016 at our San Diego Conference.

Erwin Chemerinsky became the 13th Dean of Berkeley Law on July 1, 2017, when he joined the faculty as the Jesse H. Choper Distinguished Professor of Law.
Prior to assuming this position, from 2008-2017, he was the founding Dean and Distinguished Professor of Law, and Raymond Pryke Professor of First Amendment Law, at University of California, Irvine School of Law. Before that he was a professor at Duke University from 2004-2008, and from 1983-2004 was a professor at the University of Southern California Law School.

He is the author of eleven books, including leading casebooks and treatises about constitutional law, criminal procedure, and federal jurisdiction. His most recent books are, We the People: A Progressive Reading of the Constitution for the Twenty-First Century (Picador Macmillan) published in November 2018, and two books published by Yale University Press in 2017, Closing the Courthouse Doors: How Your Constitutional Rights Became Unenforceable and Free Speech on Campus (with Howard Gillman). He frequently argues appellate cases, including in the United States Supreme Court.

In 2016, he was named a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In January 2017, National Jurist magazine again named Dean Chemerinsky as the most influential person in legal education in the United States.

Professor Jennifer Eberhardt

Jennifer Eberhardt, Professor, Department of Psychology at Stanford University, will join NAFUSA at the September conference in San Francisco to speak on unconscious bias in law enforcement. As described on Professor Eberhardt’s website, A social psychologist at Stanford University, she investigates the consequences of the psychological association between race and crime. Through interdisciplinary collaborations and a wide ranging array of methods—from laboratory studies to novel field experiments—Eberhardt has revealed the startling, and often dispiriting, extent to which racial imagery and judgments suffuse our culture and society, and in particular shape actions and outcomes within the domain of criminal justice.

Eberhardt’s research not only shows that police officers are more likely to identify African American faces than white faces as criminal, she further shows that the race-crime association leads people to attend more closely to crime related imagery. In one experimental study, for example, people who were exposed to black faces were then more quickly able to identify a blurry image as a gun than those who were exposed to white faces or no faces.

The race-crime association extends beyond the laboratory. Using an actual database of criminal defendants convicted of a capital crime, Eberhardt has shown that among defendants convicted of murdering a white victim, defendants whose appearance was more stereotypically black (e.g. darker skinned, with a broader nose and thicker lips) were more likely to be sentenced to death than if their features were less stereotypically black. This finding held even after the researchers controlled for the many non-racial factors (e.g. the severity of the crime, aggregators, mitigators, the defendant’s attractiveness, etc.) that might account for the results.

Extending the sentencing research to juveniles, Eberhardt found that bringing to mind a black juvenile offender leads people to view juveniles in general as more similar to adults and therefore deserving of more severe punishment. Further, in a study with actual registered voters, Eberhardt found that highlighting the high incarceration rate of African Americans makes people more, not less, supportive of the draconian policies that produce such disparities.

Eberhardt’s research suggests that these racialized judgments may have roots deeper than contemporary rates of crime or incarceration. In a series of studies, she has unearthed evidence that African Americans sometimes become objects of dehumanization. Specifically, Eberhardt has found that even people who profess to be racially unbiased may associate apes and African Americans, with images of one bringing to mind the other.

The dehumanization finding may help to explain the dynamics that occur within the criminal justice context, where high profile controversies feature African Americans who are shot by police or citizens who feel threatened, even though the African American is unarmed. According to Eberhardt’s research, the implicit association between African Americans and apes may lead to greater endorsement of police violence toward, or mistreatment of, an African American suspect than a white suspect.

As daunting as are the problems Eberhardt illuminates, she has recently begun to work with law enforcement agencies to design interventions to improve policing and to help agencies build and maintain trust with the communities they serve. The problems associated with race are ones we have created, she believes, and they are also ones we can solve. Spurred by the innovation that is the hallmark of Silicon Valley, she aims to combine social psychological insights with technology to improve outcomes in the criminal justice context and elsewhere.

Jennifer Eberhardt received a B.A. (1987) from the University of Cincinnati, an A.M. (1990) and Ph.D. (1993) from Harvard University. From 1995 to 1998 she taught at Yale University in the Departments of Psychology and African and African American Studies. She joined the Stanford faculty in 1998, and is currently a professor in the Department of Psychology and co-director of SPARQ, a university initiative to use social psychological research to address pressing social problems.

Professor Eberhardt’s first book “BIASED: Uncovering the Hidden Prejudice That Shapes What We See, Think, and Do” will go on sale on March 26.

Chuck Rosenberg

NAFUSA life member Chuck Rosenberg (ED Virginia 2006-2008, Texas 2005-2006) and the former Acting Director of DEA), will return to present the 2019 ethics lecture at the annual NAFUSA conference in San Francisco, September 25-27. Chuck organized last year’s excellent panel on the opioid crisis. This fall, Chuck will speak on “The Korematsu Story–The Duty of Candor to The Court. Registration for the September conference is expected to begin in June.

Here is his preview:

In early 1942, following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, FDR issued Executive Order 9066, enabling west coast military commanders to set up curfews and exclusion zones, ostensibly to protect the US against sabotage by Japanese Americans.  More than 110,000 Japanese Americans on the west coast were relocated to internment camps, primarily in the mountain west.  However, two reports – one commissioned by the State Department and one conducted by the Naval Office of Intelligence – showed that there actually was not a significant threat from Japanese Americans living on the west coast.  Indeed, for the most part, those reports showed quite the opposite and, to the extent there was a threat from Japanese Americans, it was confined to a small group of individuals largely known to the FBI and national security officials, many of whom were already under surveillance or in custody.  Further, at least two DOJ attorneys knew about the Munson and Ringle reports and believed – and put it in writing – that withholding the findings from those reports from the Supreme Court in connection with the litigation of the Hirabayashi (curfew) and Korematsu (exclusion) cases amounted to a suppression of evidence.  Those DOJ attorneys lost an internal debate to the Solicitor General, who concealed the information from the Court and misled it in oral argument in response to a direct question about the views of the USG on the threat posed by Japanese Americans.  About seven decades later, the SG’s office (led, at the time, by Neal Katyal) confessed error, acknowledging that the reports had been suppressed and that providing truthful information to the Court was not only required but might have affected the outcome.