Joyce Vance Biography
Joyce Vance is an American lawyer who served as the United States Attorney for the Northern District of Alabama from 2009 to 2017. She was one of the first five U.S. Attorneys, and the first female U.S. Attorney, nominated by President Barack Obama.
Joyce Vance Age
Joyce Vance was born on 22 July 1960 in St. George, Utah, United States. Joyce Vance is 58 years old as of 2018.
Joyce Vance Education
Joyce Vance attended Mark Keppel High School in Los Angeles California. He received a Bachelor degree of Arts Magna Cum Laude from Bates College in Lewiston, Maine, in 1982, and a Juris Doctor from the University of Virginia School of Law in 1985. On April 2017, Joyce Vance was announced by the University of Alabama School of Law to join the school of law school as a Distinguished Visiting Lecturer in Law (effective August 2017), teaching in the areas of criminal justice reform, criminal procedure, and civil rights.
Joyce Vance Husband
Joyce Vance got married to Bob Vance in 1988. Her husband is also a lawyer like she is and jurist who is a circuit court judge on Alabama’s 10th Judicial Circuit, located in Birmingham, Alabama. The couples were blessed with one child William Oliver.
Joyce Vance Image
Joyce Vance History
Joyce Vance was a litigator in private practice at Bradley Arant Boult Cummings LLP in Washington, DC, before joining the United States Attorney’s Office in the Northern District of Alabama in 1991. She spent ten years in the Criminal Division, working on investigations including that of Eric Robert Rudolph, who bombed a Birmingham abortion clinic and killed a police officer and set a string of church fires in the district. She successfully prosecuted five Boaz, Alabama, police officers charged with Conspiracy to Violate Civil Rights. She moved to the Appellate Division in 2002 and became the Chief of that Division in 2005.
Joyce Vance U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Alabama
Joyce Vance was nominated to become the U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Alabama by President Barack Obama on May 15, 2009, and was confirmed by the U.S. Senate on August 7, 2009. She was then sworn in on August 27, 2009, with U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder who was in attendance. Attorney General Holder tapped Vance to serve on his first Attorney General’s Advisory Committee of U.S. Attorneys in October 2009.
She co-chairs the AGAC’s Criminal Practice Subcommittee, along with Vermont U.S. Attorney Tristram Coffin. She charged the first Material Support of Terrorism case in the Northern District of Alabama in 2011. The defendant, Ulugbek Kodirov, pled guilty to charges of Threatening to Kill the President and Material Support of Terrorism the following year and received a sentence of more than fifteen years in prison.
She was also instrumental in building awareness about cybercrime and working with businesses in key sectors on threat minimization and critical incident response. and prosecuted the first ever cyber cases in the Northern District. She was credited with pursuing public corruption prosecutions with integrity. Public corruption prosecutions were one of her top priorities.
Maurice William Campbell, Director of the Alabama Small Business Development Consortium, was sentenced in March 2012 to more than 15 years in prison and ordered to pay $5.9 million restitution for using his position to obtain funds meant for small businesses for his own use. In 2013, she successfully prosecuted the Director of Jefferson County Committee for Economic Opportunity for using half a million dollars of the agency’s funds, meant for Headstart and other programs, to purchase real estate for herself.
She also prosecuted cases involving corruption and other misconduct by law enforcement. She hired the first prosecutor, in the Huntsville office, solely dedicated to cyber prosecutions. She developed a federal, state, and local law enforcement working group to deal with rapidly increasing heroin overdose deaths before the issue rose to national awareness. At one point, her office arrested and charged more than 40 heroin dealers and traffickers in one week.
She held a community summit and initiated community-wide planning to develop partnerships between law enforcement, public health officials, and addiction prevention and treatment specialists. She continued to aggressively prosecute heroin traffickers throughout her time in office, insuring ringleaders received sentences of more than 20 years.
The working group developed in a community-engaged initiative, widely credited with working on all fronts to reduce heroin and prescription opiate addiction and overdose deaths, In 2018, she signed a contract to become an MSNBC contributor, frequently providing on-air commentary regarding developments in the Mueller investigation.
She established a civil rights enforcement unit in the office. Then-Assistant Attorney General for the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division and later Secretary of Labor Tom Perez traveled from Washington, D.C. to Birmingham to make the announcement of the new unit along with Vance. In 2011, she successfully challenged Alabama’s immigration Bill, HB 56, on constitutional grounds.
The Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals found key portions of the law unconstitutional, and in 2013, the District Court entered a settlement in which seven challenged provisions of the law were permanently blocked. Her office engaged with the University of Alabama on allegations of racial discrimination in sorority rush in the University of Alabama’s sorority system when students brought to light the role of alumni in refusing admission to minority candidates.
In 2014, she prosecuted a man who tried to hire a KKK member to murder his African American neighbor. She was then involved in key work to protect the rights of Alabama voters, including a settlement of Alabama’s violation of the motor voter act, which brought the state into compliance, and a settlement with Jefferson County, Alabama of countywide violations of access to the polls for citizens with disabilities Vance, along with Civil Rights Division Assistant Attorney General Vanita Gupta, also launched a statewide investigation into inhumane conditions in Alabama’s prisons.
Vance adopted a “smart on crime” approach to violent and recidivist crime, with a goal of prosecuting the most significant cases facing the district so that communities would be safer. In addition to violent crime prosecution, she worked with other community partners on prevention through a violence reduction initiative and on reentry initiatives, like ban the box and legal clinics to help formerly incarcerated individuals reenter the community successfully and find jobs.
Vance also prioritized qui tam and false claims act cases. In April 2014, Amedysis Home Health Care agreed to pay $150 million to settle claims of Medicare fraud against them that were pursued by Vance’s Office, working together with DOJ’s Civil Division and several other U.S. Attorney’s Offices. A month earlier, Vance announced that Hospice Compassus would pay $3.9 million to resolve an investigation into Medicare fraud.
She oversaw a case in which American Family Care agreed to pay $1.2 million to the federal government under the False Claims Act. In June 2012, Rural/Metro Ambulance agreed to pay $5.4 million to resolve allegations of that it was engaged in improper billing and provision of unnecessary service. She prioritized fraud cases, prosecuting Jonathan Dunning for the $14 million fraud that diverted funds meant to provide healthcare to low-income individuals.
She prosecuted a series of cases involving fraud in car loan origination. Following the tornadoes that swept through Alabama on April 27, 2011, doing severe damage across the region, Vance’s office took a zero-tolerance stance on disaster fraud. In April 2014 she successfully prosecuted a ring of five people who conspired to make $2.4 million in fraudulent claims against the BP Oil Deepwater Horizon compensation fund.
Joyce Vance New York|Mueller
Whenever news emerges of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian influence on the 2016 elections, MSNBC and other outlets turn to Joyce White Vance ’82, an on-air contributor who helps guide viewers through thickets of revelations, rumors, and legal maneuverings. The thing is, a lot of news emerges about the investigation, which makes Vance one very busy law professor and the former U.S.
Attorney and often makes for a very confused public. Inflaming emotions around the issue is the fact that the allegations involve the president of the United States. But it helps, Vance told a Bates audience Thursday night, to look at the investigation as a process: allegations were made, an investigation is taking place, and certain people are seeing consequences. “We are watching the rule of law being tested,” she said. “There are some people questioning whether the rule of law is up to the task ahead of it.”
It’s widely believed that Mueller will conclude his investigation at any time and make a report to the U.S. Attorney General William Barr which means Vance was in particularly high demand this week. Still, she managed to squeeze in a visit to her alma mater, visiting a class to talk about her work on penal reform in Alabama and then giving a public talk to a packed Muskie Archives, part of the Harward Center’s Theory into Practice speaker series.
Vance has decades of experience with and expertise in the rule of law. She was a federal prosecutor in Alabama for years before Barack Obama appointed her U.S. Attorney in the state’s northern district. In that office, she took on high-profile public corruption cases, fought the growing heroin epidemic, and prosecuted civil rights cases. In addition to her role as an MSNBC contributor, Vance is also a distinguished professor in law at the University of Alabama.
The foundation of Vance’s legal career was laid at Bates, Vance said in an interview. Drawn to the college by an encounter with legendary debate director and rhetoric professor Robert Branham, she joined the debate team and majored in politics, writing an honors thesis under the direction of Garold Thumm, a professor emeritus of politics who died in 2012.
“I had the wonderful opportunity when I was here to be exposed to a really diverse way of thinking, a willingness to integrate views that were very different from your own,” Vance said. “Rather than just immediately discarding them, you explore them and compare your own views and see if your own views should be expanded.” In her talk, Vance used Harvard law professor Cass Sunstein’s definition of the rule of law as a system of clear laws and fair processes:
Citizens know why they might be punished, get advance notice of charges, and have ways to defend themselves in front of an unbiased tribunal. To Sunstein’s conditions, Vance added one of her own: that no man or woman is above the law and that the same laws apply to the president of the United States as to an ordinary citizen. “The rule of law is a lot like a playground game of basketball,” she said.
“If you get so caught up in winning one round of the game that you don’t respect the game itself and the players on the other team, pretty soon there’s no more game left to play. That respect is incredibly important.” She thinks the institutions that uphold the rule of law are “stretched, but so far they appear to be holding.” That’s because, despite public denunciations of his work and changes in other key personnel, Mueller has stuck to his job, investigating Russian interference, other issues that arise, and perjury and obstruction of justice.
She’s is remarkably moved quickly since her 2017 appointment, Vance pointed out. By comparison, one of Vance’s public corruption cases, which resulted in the imprisonment of enough county commissioners to make a quorum, took more than six years. In just two years, Mueller has presented two unusually detailed indictments against Russian individuals and companies one for waging an influence campaign on the public, one for hacking the Democratic National Committee’s servers.
He’s also indicted six of Trump’s advisers (“You look at these folks, and you have to wonder what kind of vetting was going on” in their hiring, Vance said); five have been convicted of or pleaded guilty to a range of crimes. So Mueller’s investigation is not a witch hunt, Vance said. Nor is Mueller a saint.
“Mueller is not going to drag the president of the United States out of the White House in handcuffs,” she said. “He is not going to fix gridlock in Congress, and he will not create world peace.” “He is a career prosecutor,” she added. “He’s an institutionalist, someone who’s devoted most of his adult life to serving the people of the United States.”
Joyce Vance University of Alabama
Joyce Vance is a Distinguished Professor of the Practice of Law. She served as the U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Alabama from 2009 to 2017. She was nominated for that position by President Barack Obama in May of 2009 and unanimously confirmed by the Senate in August of 2009.
Professor Vance served on the Attorney General’s Advisory Committee and was the Co-Chair of its Criminal Practice Subcommittee. As U.S. Attorney, she was responsible for overseeing all federal criminal investigations and prosecutions in north Alabama, including matters involving civil rights, national security, cybercrime, public corruption, health care, and corporate fraud, violent crime and drug trafficking.
She was also responsible for affirmative and defensive civil litigation on behalf of the government and for all federal criminal and civil appeals. Before becoming U.S. Attorney, Professor Vance served as an Assistant United States Attorney in Birmingham for 18 years. She spent ten years as a criminal prosecutor, before moving to the Appellate Division in 2002.
She became the Chief of that Division in 2005. Prior to her work as a federal prosecutor, she spent six years as a litigator in private practice, first at Arent, Fox, Kintner, Plotkin & Kahn in Washington D.C., and then at Bradley, Arant, Rose & White, now Bradley, Arant, Boult & Cummings, in Birmingham. Professor Vance received a B.A. from Bates College in Lewiston, Maine, magna cum laude, and a J.D. from the University of Virginia School of law.
Professor Vance recently received the University of Alabama at Birmingham School of Public Health’s Lou Wooster Public Health Hero Award for her leadership in creating a community-engaged initiative that included partners from law enforcement, the medical and business communities, and educators to address the heroin and opioid epidemic in northern Alabama. She is a frequent legal commentator on MSNBC and other news outlets.
Joyce Vance Retirement
Joyce Vance retired from the Department of Justice, on Jan. 19, 2017 after 25 years as a federal prosecutor. “It has been an honor to serve the Northern District of Alabama as U.S. Attorney for the past 7-1/2 years,” Vance said. “I thank the dedicated men and women in my office, and our federal, state and local law enforcement partners, for their tireless dedication.
They serve with competence, integrity and a commitment to public service, and they honored me with their trust in my leadership. Together, we’ve taken on a full spectrum of challenges and have left our communities safer, while protecting the civil rights of all who live here.” “Since the first year of the Obama Administration, U.S.
Attorney Joyce White Vance has served the people of the Northern District of Alabama and all of the American people with compassion and integrity,” Lynch stated. “During her tenure, she oversaw the development of a comprehensive initiative to tackle opioid and heroin addiction. She helped lead an ongoing investigation into abuse in Alabama prisons. She fought corruption and brought actions to protect the rights of immigrants.
And she has been a valuable partner in the department’s efforts to improve relationships between police officers and the people they serve, including by welcoming me to Birmingham in 2015 during my Community Policing Tour. In these and in so many other ways, Joyce has been a dedicated servant of the law and a tireless champion of justice. I thank her for her outstanding contributions to the Department of Justice, and I wish her well in her future endeavors.”