President Obama’s pick to lead the Office of Justice Programs is slated to appear before the Senate Judiciary Committee Oct. 7 for a confirmation hearing, the panel announced today.

Laurie O. Robinson (DOJ)

Laurie O. Robinson was tapped for the post Sept. 14. She was named OJP Acting Assistant Attorney General in January and served in that capacity until her nomination. Robinson became Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General after her nomination because she cannot be a nominee and serve in an acting position at the same time.

She previously served as the OJP Assistant Attorney General from 1993 to 2000. During her tenure as President Clinton’s OJP chief, the annual appropriations for the office grew from $800 million to more than $4 billion, according to her biography.

Robinson would succeed Bush OJP head Jeffrey Sedgwick, who resigned in January.

Read more about Robinson here.

President Obama nominated U.S. Attorneys for Colorado, Missouri and Oklahoma today. They are:

• 

  Stephanie Villafuerte (gov)

  Stephanie Villafuerte (Colorado): Colorado Gov. Bill Ritter (D)’s deputy chief of staff for community outreach would replace David Gaouette, who was appointed as the state’s acting U.S. Attorney Jan. 10, following the resignation of Bush appointee Troy Eid. Villafuerte, who was recommended by Sen. Mark Udall (D-Colo.) and then-Sen. Ken Salazar (D-Colo.), previously served as Denver’s chief deputy district attorney. She also worked on Ritter’s campaign.

• Sanford Coats (Western District of Oklahoma): The Assistant U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Oklahoma has served in his current role since 2004 and simultaneously headed the major crimes section of the office from 2007 to 2008. Before joining the office he was an associate at the Oklahoma City law firm Fellers, Snider, Blankenship, Bailey & Tippens.

• Beth Phillips (Western District of Missouri) The Assistant U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Missouri has served in her current role since last year. Before joining the office she was an attorney in the Leawood law firm Bartimus, Frickleton, Robertson & Gorny. In addition, from 1997 to 2001 Phillips served as an assistant prosecutor in Jackson County.

Obama has now made a total of 30 U.S. Attorney nominations. The full Senate has considered 14 of those nominees and they were all confirmed by unanimous consent. Read biographies of the nominees here.

Reid Weingarten (Steptoe & Johnson)

Roman Polanski may have Hollywood on his side, but he’s not betting on Tinseltown to get him out the clink.

The prominent fugitive-director has hired Steptoe & Johnson’s Reid Weingarten, a well-known criminal defense lawyer and close friend of Attorney General Eric Holder.

Polanski,  76, was arrested last weekend at Zurich’s airport on a 31-year-old fugitive warrant issued after he skipped sentencing for having sex with a 13-year-old girl. The addition of Weingarten, who has known Holder since the two worked together in the department’s Public Integrity Section in the 1970s, means Polanski now has a powerful advocate in Washington.

The New York Times reports:

The recruiting of Mr. Weingarten was a strong signal that Mr. Polanski’s legal team intends to push hard on the Washington end of the case. Mr. Polanski was arrested on his way to the Zurich Film Festival after Swiss authorities received a letter from the Department of Justice requesting that he be held for possible extradition to the United States.

The Justice Department wrote the letter on behalf of Los Angeles prosecutors. Polanski fled the United States in 1978 after pleading guilty to having sex with a minor. As part of a plea agreement, he avoided other charges, including rape and sodomy. But he was never sentenced.

Weingarten, who declined to comment, will be instrumental in Polanski’s efforts to stop the extradition before the issue wends through the Swiss legal system. As the Times notes, Polanski could argue that his crime does not qualify, because he was sentenced to less than a year in prison, or that he effectively served his sentence during a 42-day psychiatric evaluation.

Weingarten advised Holder during the confirmation process, and he represented Holder in congressional hearings that explored the then-Deputy Attorney General’s role in the controversial pardon by President Clinton of fugitive financier Marc Rich. Weingarten also helped Holder in the founding of the See Forever Foundation, which helps disadvantaged children.

Carter Stewart (Vorys, Sater, Seymour and Pease)

Carter M. Stewart this morning took the oath of office as U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Ohio, The Dayton Daily News reported. He was sworn in by U.S. District Court Judge Edmund Sargus Jr.

The Senate confirmed Stewart by unanimous consent on Sept. 15. He replaces Gregory Lockhart, who resigned last month.

Most recently, Stewart was an associate at the Vorys, Sater, Seymour and Pease law firm. Before joining the firm in 2005, Stewart joined the U.S. Attorney’s office in San Jose, where he prosecuted gangs and handled general crimes, including drug and gun possession, social security fraud, obstruction of justice, environmental crimes, and illegal immigration. While working in the office, Stewart helped investigate and prosecute Victor Conte and others at Balco Laboratories for peddling anabolic steroids.

He also has worked as an associate in Bingham McCutchen’s San Francisco office. In the early 1990s, Stewart was an analyst in the New York City Office of Management and Budget.

Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) recently announced that a selection committee has selected six candidates to interview to become Oregon’s next U.S. Attorney. The interviews will take place Oct. 24-25, after which the committee will recommend three finalists for Wyden to forward to President Obama. The last Senate-confirmed person in the position was Bush-appointee Karin J. Immergut, who resigned in July to accept an appointment as a state judge.

The six people who will be interviewed are

• Kent Robinson, the acting U.S. Attorney for the district

Others who previously were said to be under consideration included Rob Bovett (Lincoln County district attorney), Ken Perry (Portland lawyer), Robert Hutchings (Lane County public defender) and John Hummel (Portland lawyer and professor at a university in Liberia).

John Foote (Gov)

John Haroldson (Gov)

Josh Marquis (Gov)

Amanda Marshall (facebook)

Kent Robinson (gov)

The Democratic National Committee released a new You Tube ad that included footage of testimony Chris Christie gave to the House Judiciary commercial and administrative law subcommittee in June. The hearing was about controversial court-monitoring contracts he awarded when he was New Jersey U.S. Attorney. Christie’s camp at the time complained the hearing was held for political theater, and he eventually stalked out of the hearing. And sure enough, here’s Christie’s testy back-and-forth with Rep. Steve Cohen (D-Tenn.), appearing in the DNC ad.

The ad also highlights a heated exchange between the Republican nominee for New Jersey governor and a cancer survivor at the New Jersey Politics forum at Rider University on Sept. 16.

Check out the ad:

The Senate confirmed three U.S. Attorneys last night by unanimous consent.

They are:

Jenny Durkan (Law Offices of Jenny A. Durkan)

-Jenny Durkan (Western District of Washington): The Seattle lawyer was nominated June 4. She will replace Jeffrey C. Sullivan, who has been the interim U.S. Attorney since John McKay was forced out in the 2006 U.S. Attorney purge. Read more about Durkan here.

Deborah Gilg (Gilg, Kruger & Troia)

-Florence Nakakuni (Hawaii): The Hawaii Assistant U.S. Attorney was nominated July 14. She will succeed Bush holdover Edward Kubo Jr., who has been U.S. Attorney since 2001. Read more about Nakakuni here.

-Deborah Gilg (Nebraska): The Omaha lawyer was nominated July 31. She will replace Bush holdover Joe Stecher, who has been U.S. Attorney since 2007. Read more about Gilg here.

The Senate has now confirmed 14 U.S. Attorneys who have been reported out of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Paul Fishman for New Jersey is the only nominee who has been endorsed by the panel, but has not been considered by the full Senate yet. Fishman and Durkan waited more than three months before the Senate Judiciary Committee considered them. Read our previous report about the delays on them here.

The Senate Judiciary Committee has yet to consider eight U.S. Attorney nominees, including Timothy Heaphy for the Western District of Virginia who will go before the panel tomorrow.

In a House Judiciary Committee hearing this afternoon, DOJ officials and expert witnesses told members of the subcommittee on crime, terrorism and Homeland Security to put more money towards state and federal measures to benefit victims of crimes.

The hearing was held to reexamine the Crime Victims’ Rights Act of 2004, designed to ensure victims of crimes are protected from threats, notified of the planned release of a perpetrator, and given the right to testify at parole hearings.

Representatives from the Department of Justice and the Government Accountability Office acknowledged it needed more funding, as did Rep. Ted Poe (R-Texas), the subcommittee ranking member.  ”Victims are people. They are American people whose lives have been shattered,” Poe said. He called the act’s funding “appallingly low, embarrassingly low.”

Subcommittee chairman Rep. Bobby Scott (D-Va.) asked acting Assistant Attorney General for the Office of Justice Programs Mary Lou Leary how much more money she thought the DOJ would need for CVRA’s programs. “We can work with you on that,” Leary replied.

The 2004 bill authorized $46.3 million over five years to crime victim programs.  Grants to state, tribal and local prosecutors’ offices were also created to enforce victims’ rights. However, according to this Government Accountability Office report, it’s unclear how much of that money was actually appropriated. Over the years, Congress made “lump sum” appropriations under the CVRA authority to a variety of different victim assistance programs, the GAO said.

Lewis & Clark Law Professor Doug Beloof said the “experiment” would cease to function without a more solid financial footing.  ”This is perhaps the most critical problem,” Beloof said. Without funding, “victims will have no champions.”

National Center for Victims of Crime Public Policy Director Susan Howley said that in addition to increasing the program’s funding, “the process through which aggrieved crime victims seek redress should also be more user-friendly.”

To that point, Eileen Larence, Director of the GAO’s Homeland Security and Justice branch, which produced a study of the 2004 law, said: “While we tried, we could not determine just how much the department should appropriate to implement the act.”

More funding would mean more staff members in the DOJ’s programming to help more victims, Larence said, which would help victims understand their rights better.

Leary said millions of dollars are already flowing to alternative programs similar to the CVRA. That funding includes $4 million between fiscal year 2006 and 2009 to the National Crime Victim Law Institute for their Crime Victims’ Rights Enforcement Project,and $39 million to 38 states and Puerto Rico for a program to help states better reach out to victims of crime.

“Within OJP,” Leary said, “our Office for Victims of Crime provides resources and leadership to support key services for crime victims.”

The Clarion-Ledger in Mississippi has this story about  federal and local law enforcers investigating convenience store owners, many of Middle Eastern descent, for possible ties to terrorist orgranizations in the years after 9/11.

The unimaginatively named “Convenience Store Initiative” uncovered no terrorist links in Northern Mississippi. But it morphed into a meth task force, apparently.

Federal authorities and agents of the state’s Bureau of Narcotics and Drug Enforcement Administration have arrested more than 65 people for allegedly selling excessive amounts of pseudoephedrine, an ingredient of meth, among other criminal acts. More than 60 people have been charged since 2006, according to the newspaper.

In an investigation worthy of The Simpsons, authorities targeted convenience store owners from "Yemen, India or the like," The Clarion-Ledger reported. But Apu is Hindu! (Getty Images)

U.S. Attorney Jim Greenlee, in Oxford, Miss., told the Clarion-Ledger the government was “looking to see any links to terrorism, but what we found was criminal conduct.”

People involved in the initiative told the Clarion-Ledger that proceeds from the drug sales were diverted overseas and possibly into the coffers of terrorist organizations. But they also acknowledged the money may have gone to relatives.

The newspaper reported that of the more than 100 people listed as under investigation by federal authorities, “nearly every name appears to be Islamic.” The article said most targets were “from the Middle East, Yemen, India or the like.” But it quoted Marshall Fisher, director of the state bureau, denying that authorities targeted any ethnic group.

“We target drug dealers,” Fisher told the paper. “We don’t care if they’re green Martians.”

Greenlee denied people were targeted for their ethnic background.  ”Did we look at it from an improper purpose? No,” he said.

So, how did they collar these drug dealers?

Asked how they determined operators knew they were breaking the law, Fisher replied they relied on undercover officers or informants to talk about purchasing more than a minimum amount — 9 grams over a 30-day period.

“We would target them and go and see if undercover informants could buy,” he said.

The informants and undercover agents tried to make bulk buys of the ingredients for meth in 279 stores. Operators at eight stores agreed to illegal bulk sales, Fisher said.

Maybe it isn’t much of a meth task force, either.

Wisconsin Sens. Herb Kohl and Russ Feingold, both Democrats, made two recommendations Monday for U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Wisconsin, The Associated Press reported Monday.  Assistant U.S. Attorney John W. Vaudreuil and former Assistant Attorney General Eric J. Wilson were selected from a list of four finalists, The AP reported.

AUSA Vaudreuil runs the Madison-based district’s criminal division. Vaudreuil has lectured at the University of Wisconsin Law School Since 1987, teaching evidence and trial advocacy. A senior litigation counsel, he’s also taught evidence and trial skills to prosecutors in the United States, Albania and the Czech Republic since 1992.

Eric J. Wilson (Godfrey & Kahn)

Wilson is a member of the white collar counseling and defense practice group at the Godfrey & Kahn law firm in Madison. Before joining Godfrey & Kahn, Wilson was an Assistant Attorney General at the Wisconsin Department of Justice, with dual responsibilities as a criminal prosecutor and chief antitrust attorney for the state of Wisconsin.

The other two finalists for the position — as determined by a Wisconsin nominating commission — were Michael Leffel, a partner with Foley & Lardner in Madison, and Frank D. Remington, an Assistant Attorney General at the Wisconsin Department of Justice.  Madison attorney Michael Bauer and Monona attorney Pablo Carranza also applied to fill the position but were not selected by the commission.

Erik C. Peterson, who had been the U.S. Attorney since 2006, resigned June 7 to join the Wisconsin Department of Justice as a prosecutor in the criminal litigation unit. Stephen P. Sinnott was appointed acting United States Attorney on June 8.