Ken Thompson’s office said that he had passed away due to complications with cancer on Sunday.
In 2014 Ken became Brooklyn’s first African American district attorney. The Huffington Post said:
As chief prosecutor of New York’s Kings County, which encompasses the New York City borough of Brooklyn, Thompson launched a high-profile initiative to review questionable murder convictions, some of them decades old.
It resulted in 21 people having their convictions overturned or dismissed over the past three years, the office said in a statement.
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo gave a statement and said:
“A lifelong New Yorker, Ken was known as an effective, aggressive civil rights leader – and a national voice for criminal justice reform,”
RIP KEN.
Wikipedia describes Ken’s Education and Career as follows:
Education
After graduating from New York City public schools, Thompson attended John Jay College of Criminal Justice, where he graduated magna cum laude.
His mother, Clara Thompson, was one of the first female police officers in the New York City Police Department to patrol the streets in 1973. Kenneth attended New York University School of Law where he earned the Arthur T. Vanderbilt Medal for contributions to the law school community.
Career
Thompson began as an attorney in the United States Treasury Department in Washington, D.C., where he served as Special Assistant to former Treasury Department Undersecretary for Enforcement and now the Secretary General of Interpol, Ronald K. Noble.
In 1995 Thompson accepted a position as an Assistant U.S. Attorney under Zachary W. Carter, in the United States Attorney’s Office in Brooklyn. During his tenure, he worked with Loretta Lynch as a member of the federal prosecution team in the 1997 trial of former New York City police officer Justin Volpe, who was accused of sodomizing Abner Louima inside a bathroom at the 70th Precinct in Brooklyn. The watershed police brutality trial, at which Thompson delivered the opening prosecution arguments, resulted in Volpe changing his plea from ‘not guilty’ to ‘guilty’.
After his time as a federal prosecutor, Thompson went into private practice, first at the international law firm Morgan, Lewis & Bockius[4] and then at his own law firm, Thompson Wigdor LLP, which he co-founded in 2003.
Thompson also worked with Senator Charles E. Schumer, Congresswoman Yvette D. Clarke, other elected officials, and members of the clergy to convince the United States Department of Justice to reopen the investigation into the 1955 murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till in Mississippi.
In 2011, he represented Nafissatou Diallo, the hotel housekeeper who claimed that she was sexually assaulted in a Manhattan hotel room by Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the former head of the International Monetary Fund. Her case was dropped by public prosecutors, who stated they were not convinced of his culpability beyond a reasonable doubt due to serious issues in Diallo’s credibility and inconclusive physical evidence, and therefore could not ask a jury to believe it.
Election as District Attorney
In September 2013 Thompson defeated incumbent Charles J. Hynes in the Democratic primary for Brooklyn District Attorney, where he ran as a critic of the New York City Police Department.[13] After Hynes decided to run on the Republican and Conservative party lines in the general election in November, Thompson defeated him again.
Thompson was the first challenger to defeat a sitting District Attorney in Brooklyn since 1911, and the first African-American district attorney of Kings County. He took office on January 1, 2014.
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