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Trump nominates Jamaica-born law professor for federal judge post

Published:Thursday | August 15, 2019 | 4:47 PM
Richard E. Myers - Contributed photo.

RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) — President Donald Trump has nominated a law professor who previously worked as a prosecutor, defence attorney and journalist to fill the nation’s longest federal judiciary vacancy.

Trump nominated Richard E. Myers on Wednesday to be a trial judge in the Eastern District of North Carolina.

The state’s two Republican senators recommended Myers for the job.

There’s been an eastern North Carolina judicial vacancy since January 2006, the longest in the country, according to a list from the U.S. Administrative Office of the Courts. 

Myers was born in Kingston, Jamaica and grew up in the coastal North Carolina city of Wilmington, where he worked as a newspaper reporter in the early 1990s.

Myers got his law degree from the University of North Carolina’s School of Law in Chapel Hill and is now a professor there.

He previously clerked at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit and was a federal prosecutor in both California and later North Carolina, when he worked on white collar and violent crime cases.

While in private practice in California, Myers also was on the legal team defending Wen Ho Lee, a Taiwan-born scientist once charged with mishandling nuclear weapons secrets.

Lee was released after the government dropped all but one charge.

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