Page 9 - 2024 OAD First Monday in October Journal
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2024 MILTON S. GOULD AWARD
FOR OUTSTANDING ORAL ADVOCACY
DAVID PATTON
David Patton is a partner at Hecker Fink in New York City. From 2011
to 2023, he was the Executive Director of the Federal Defenders of
New York, the federal public defender office for the Southern and
Eastern Districts of New York. From 2002 to 2008, he worked at
the Federal Defenders as a trial attorney in the Manhattan office.
David has served as lead or co-counsel in dozens of trials. He
has achieved outright acquittals in more than half of the federal cases he has personally tried to a jury.
Most recently, David successfully represented a client in the first federal death penalty trial under the
Biden Administration, which resulted in a life sentence. In July 2023, he concluded a deferred prosecution
agreement on behalf of the lead defendant in a long-standing federal insider trading and fraud case. He
had earlier tried the case, resulting in acquittals on the insider trading charges and a successful appeal on
the fraud counts.
David is a member of the American College of Trial Lawyers and the American Law Institute. He has
published law review articles in the Yale Law Journal, Cornell Law Review, Emory Law Journal, Fordham
Law Review, and Cardozo Law Review, among other legal journals. His articles include The Structure of
Federal Public Defense: A Call for Independence, 102 Cornell l. rev. 101 (2017) and Federal Public Defense
in an Age of Inquisition, 122 Yale l.J. 100 (2013).
David currently teaches a legal ethics seminar as an Adjunct Professor of Law at NYU. From 2008-2011, he
was a full-time law professor at the University of Alabama and Stanford Law School. David is a graduate
of the University of Virginia School of Law, where he served as an editor of the Virginia Law Review. He
clerked for the Honorable Claude Hilton of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia. Prior
to joining the Federal Defenders in 2002, he was an associate at Sullivan & Cromwell.
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