- William Byrne
William Matthew Byrne, Jr. (born 1930 –
January 12 ,2006 ,Los Angeles, California ) was judge of theUnited States District Court for the Central District of California . He was best known for presiding over the trial ofPentagon Papers defendantDaniel Ellsberg .After receiving his law degree from the
University of Southern California , Byrne clerked for a federal judge before enlisting in theU.S. Air Force , where he spent two years as a judge advocate. He went to work as a federal prosecutor in Los Angeles and also in private practice.President
Lyndon B. Johnson named him aUnited States Attorney in 1967, and in 1970, was chosen byRichard Nixon as executive director of the President'sCommission on Campus Unrest .In 1973, he was appointed to the federal bench, and served as chief judge of the Central District of California from 1994 to 1998, the year he took senior status.
Pentagon Papers trial
Byrne was assigned the Pentagon Papers case the same year he arrived on the bench.
In the midst of the trial, several twists served to destroy the government's case. The first revelation came on April 26, 1973, when the government prosecutor disclosed that White House operatives had burglarized the Beverly Hills office of Ellsberg's psychiatrist. The burglars, led by
G. Gordon Liddy andE. Howard Hunt , were not apprehended until after they burglarized the Democratic National Committee headquarters at theWatergate complex in Washington nine months later.Days after the disclosure,
Richard Nixon 's two top lieutenants,John Ehrlichman andH.R. Haldeman , resigned, and White House counselJohn Dean was fired. A few days later, the judge disclosed in court that Ehrlichman had offered him the position ofFBI director. On May 9. Judge Byrne learned of yet another illegality: the FBI had secretly taped phone conversations between Ellsberg andMorton Halperin , who had supervised thePentagon Papers study. Finally, when the government claimed it had lost all records of the wiretapping, Byrne declared a mistrial on May 11, 1973.External links
* [http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/01/14/AR2006011401165.html Judge William Byrne; Ended Trial Over Pentagon Papers]
* [http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2006/01/13/state/n194156S64.DTL Associated Press obit]
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