Christopher Thyer, U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Arkansas, has announced three promotions in his office sparked by the recent departure of his top assistant, Jane Duke, who left Jan. 11 to practice civil litigation at a local law firm.
Patrick Harris, a 30-year veteran who started working in the office while still in law school, will be Thyer’s new first assistant.
Assistant U.S. Attorney John Ray White has been named chief of the office’s criminal division, the position previously held by Harris, and Assistant U.S. Attorney Anne Gardner is the new deputy criminal chief.
Harris, 60, first worked as a law clerk in the officewhile attending what is now known as the William H. Bowen School of Law at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. After earning his law degree, he was hired as a special assistant U.S. attorney and law enforcement coordinator, before being sworn in as an assistant U.S. attorney in November 1987.
As one of several assistant federal prosecutors who serve under the presidential appointee of the moment, Harris was initially assigned to the civil division. He was later assigned to the criminal division, where he served as chief of the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force before becoming chief of the criminal division in May 2006.
For more than 20 years, Harris also has served as aninternal inspector and a team leader for other internal inspectors who are sent by the U.S. Department of Justice to other U.S. attorneys offices across the country to evaluate an office’s performance.
He also has taught new federal prosecutors at the Justice Department’s National Advocacy Center at the University of South Carolina and has acted as a special attorney in highprofile cases in the Western District of Tennessee, based in Memphis, and the Northern District of Oklahoma in Tulsa, when conflicts of interest arose with the federal prosecutors based in the districts.
Harris also has found time to teach as an adjunct professor at the Bowen Law School.
Harris joked Friday that he has somehow climbed to the upper ranks in the office despite a bad start.
“On my first day on the job, I took annual leave,” he said, explaining that he didn’t make it back to Little Rock from Memphis, where he had run in a marathon the previous day, in time to board a plane for an out-ofstate training program.
John Ray White, 48, earned his law degree in 1990 from the University ofArkansas School of Law in Fayetteville, and followed it a year later with a master’s degree in taxation from the University of Florida. Previously, he earned a bachelor’s degree in economics at UA.
He started his legal career practicing tax law at the Friday, Eldredge & Clark firm in Little Rock. He later served as a deputy prosecuting attorney for Pulaski and Perry counties for six years. From there, he became a deputy attorney general supervising criminal appeals, habeas corpus and Medicaid fraud sections.
In 2002, he was appointed an assistant U.S. attorney, and since then, has served as an anti-terrorism coordinator and a deputy security manager for the district, as well as deputy criminal chief.
Gardner, 46, graduated from Catholic University of America, Columbus School of Law, in Washington, D.C., in 1997. While in law school, she clerked for the Office of Justice Programs and Office of General Counsel for the Federal Retirement Thrift Investment Board.
After receiving her law degree, Gardner became an attorney adviser in the Office of Justice Programs. She transferred to the U.S. attorney’s office in 2000 and has served as lead attorney for the Organized Crime and Drug Enforcement Task Force since 2007.
Northwest Arkansas, Pages 7 on 02/04/2013