SANTA ANA – U.S. District Judge Cormac J. Carney once credited his 2003 appointment to the federal bench to his days as a UCLA football player.
Carney played receiver at UCLA 1980 to 1982, leading the team with 108 catches in three years. He won two academic All-America awards, and was nominated for a Rhodes scholarship.
“It’s the foundation for everything,” Carney said in a September 2003 interview with The Orange County Register. ”There are so many things I learned playing football at UCLA that helped get me here. It reinforced the principle that you can achieve great things if you work hard and are in the right place at the right time.”
The judge, now bespectacled, sent shock waves through the legal community today by tossing the government’s options-backdating prosecutions of two Broadcom executives. The judge says misconduct by prosecutor Andrew Stolper had intimidated witnesses who could have refuted the government’s case.
Legal experts have taken note of Carney’s unusual decisions in the Broadcom case – including his decision last week to toss out the guilty plea of co-founder Henry Samueli.
John Hueston, a former federal prosecutor who now does white-collar defense work, prosecuted a trademark infringement trial in Carney’s courtroom in 2003.
“He was actively engaged in the trial and intervened as he felt necessary,” Hueston said.
Hueston, who used to head the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Orange County, called Carney a “passionate man with a very strong internal compass.”
“Beware the attorney who attempts to fiddle with Judge Carney’s finely-tuned sense of justice,” Hueston said.
Carney studied psychology at UCLA and graduated cum laude in 1983. He played professional football for a year in the now-defunct United States Football League – then headed to Harvard Law School.
After graduation, he practiced business litigation with the firm O’Melveny & Myers. He was appointed to Orange County Superior Court in October 2001 by then-Governor Gray Davis, presiding over both criminal and civil jury trials.
Former President George W. Bush nominated Carney in February 2003 to the federal bench, and he was confirmed by the Senate that April.
Carney has handled a variety of cases as a federal jurist, including the military spying cases of an engineer and his family who were accused of exporting defense technology to China.
Chi Mak an engineer for the Anaheim-based naval contractor Power Paragon who was the alleged mastermind of the conspiracy, was sentenced by Carney to 24 ½ years in prison.
Carney also convicted Dongfan “Greg” Chung in July 2009 of economic espionage for giving aerospace trade secrets to the People’s Republic of China. Chung will be sentenced in January.
During today’s hearing, Carney said he knew his decision to throw out the accounting-fraud cases of Broadcom co-founder Henry T. Nicholas III and former chief financial officer William Ruehle would face criticism.
Prosecutors had urged Carney not rule on dismissing the cases until after the jury in Ruehle’s trial had reached a verdict. Earlier this month, Carney agreed, but then changed his mind.
The judge today asked critics to imagine they were the accused.
“You are charged with serious crimes and, if convicted on them, you will spend the rest of your life in prison,” the judge said today. “You only have three witnesses to prove your innocence and the government has intimidated and improperly influenced each of them. Is that fair? Is that justice? I say absolutely not.”
Carney’s decision led to an outpouring of praise from defense attorneys, including Nicholas’s lawyer, Brendan Sullivan.
“The message delivered by this court today has been heard throughout the country by all those who enforce the law, and we are all better off, and the system of justice will be better off for the courage demonstrated in this court,” Sullivan said.
Carney thanked the lawyers for the compliments, but said he didn’t need them. “I’m just doing my job,” he said.
