Tom Delahanty

NAFUSA member Thomas E. Delahanty II, a legal titan in Maine whose career as a prosecutor and judge spanned more than four decades, died Monday after battling pancreatic cancer. He was 75.

As reported by The Portland Press Herald:

Delahanty, a prominent member of a well-known Maine legal family, served as the U.S. attorney for the District of Maine from 2010 to 2017. A lifelong Democrat, he was appointed by President Barack Obama. It was Delahanty’s second stint. He also had been appointed to the post 30 years earlier by President Jimmy Carter.

 

Gov. Janet Mills mourned Delahanty’s passing and cited his work on behalf of Mainers to stem the opioid epidemic.

 

“I respected and admired his intellect, his judgment, and his commitment to protecting and delivering justice under the law for the people of Maine,” Mills said in a statement. “I will miss him but know that Maine is better off as a result of his service. My thoughts and deepest sympathies go out to his wife, Ruth, and his two sons.”

 

Delahanty grew up in Lewiston, earned his undergraduate degree in Vermont and earned his law degree at the University of Maine School of Law in 1970. Following a short stint as a defense attorney, he was elected district attorney in 1974 for the newly created Prosecutorial District Three, covering Androscoggin, Oxford and Franklin counties.

 

His first stint as U.S. attorney for the District of Maine was between 1980 and 1981, when Carter appointed Delahanty to replace George Mitchell, whom Carter had appointed to the federal bench.

 

When Carter lost re-election to Ronald Reagan, Delahanty resigned and returned briefly to defense work for two years until 1983, when he was appointed a justice of the Maine Superior Court, where he served, including as chief justice from 1990 to 1995, until Obama named him U.S. attorney for the District of Maine in 2010.

 

“Tom Delahanty was a giant in the Maine legal community,” Donald E. Clark, the acting U.S. attorney for the District of Maine, said in a statement Wednesday. “In addition to his professional accomplishments, he was also an honorable, just man and a devoted husband, father and grandfather. We at the U.S. Attorney’s Office mourn his passing and send our condolences to his family.”

As is our custom, NAFUSA will arrange for an American flag to be flown over the United States Department of Justice and presented to Tom’s family as a token of the regard with which he was held by his colleagues.