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Hochul tells of work on victims’ behalf
U.S. Attorney William Hochul spoke to students last week as UB's Law Day speaker. Photo: DON DANNECKER FOR UB LAW FORUM
The timing was auspicious in a couple of ways when William Hochul ’84, U.S. Attorney for the Western District of New York, faced a roomful of UB Law students on May 3.
It was nearing the end of the semester, and crunch time for the law students as they pondered final exams and the uncertain beginnings of their legal careers. And it was just two days after President Barack Obama, in a dramatic late-night address, announced that terrorist leader Osama bin Laden had been killed by U.S. special forces in Pakistan.
Hochul, UB’s Law Day speaker for the Student Bar Association, addressed both the geopolitical and the eminently practical during his appearance in a packed Cellino & Barnes Conference Center. Introduced by James A. Gardner, vice dean for academic affairs, as “a senior partner in the world’s largest law firm, the United States Department of Justice,” Hochul gave the students a taste of the working life of a federal prosecutor.
The U.S. government’s anti-terrorism focus has forced prosecutors to negotiate the shifting sands of the applicable law and the terrorists’ tactics, he said.
“We didn’t have a whole lot of experience with it,” Hochul said. “That is one of the great challenges and opportunities if you are in prosecution. In the early 21st century, a lot of us in the anti-terrorism unit really had to do our homework and fashion some theories that would work.
“In the United States, there is no such crime as ‘being a terrorist.’ You actually have to have done something to be prosecuted,” he explained. “The tactics that terrorists use—beheading, detonating a bomb, maybe trying to poison a water supply—and their goals and objectives are so extreme the law has recognized that we don’t want to let the terrorists commit the crime before they are prosecuted. That is unlike the criminal realm, where we generally do expect somebody to commit the crime before they are prosecuted. Congress has tried to define what it is you can’t do at a pretty early stage so we prosecutors can interdict at an early juncture.”
More than 50 terrorist groups operate worldwide, Hochul said. “It can’t be a crime just to be a member of al-Qaida, just as we would never prosecute someone for being a member of the Ku Klux Klan,” he said. “However, since 1996, the law says that if you provide material support to a terrorist group, then we can charge you for that. You can’t give al-Qaida money, you can’t give them expert advice or assistance, you can’t give them personnel.”
That was the standard used, he said, when seven men from Western New York went to Afghanistan in 2001 to train at an al-Qaida training camp.
“We argued that by providing themselves, they provided personnel to al-Qaida,” Hochul said. “That theory held—it was the first time it was used—and we got six convictions.” The “Lackawanna Six” case was one of the federal prosecutors’ most high-profile convictions; a seventh conspirator has never been apprehended.
Hochul said he has learned a lot about terrorists and their tactics. “Terrorism was not invented by al-Qaida,” he said. “It’s been a tactic used by groups since biblical times to create a little bit of chaos, a little bit of fear, and change the mindset of the government and the civilian population. Terrorism as a tactic was very well developed by the Russians in the 19th century. If there’s one thing terrorists do, they study each other. Michael Collins, who led the Irish Republican Army, read Russian theorists like Nikolai Morozov. And bin Laden himself was no dummy. He had people whose writings and principles he followed.”
Hochul noted that critics sometimes argue that the “war on terror” should be prosecuted using military or intelligence-community techniques, not the protocols of civilian law enforcement. But, he said, “We are working with other countries all the time, and those countries will take a dim view if we don’t use our legal system to prosecute defendants in an open and transparent venue.”
In addition, he said, “If we use a military system and not the transparent criminal justice system, some communities here in the United States just won’t have the confidence and trust that we’re going to look out for their rights. There is this perception that the military guys are blunt-force instruments; their mission is to find and neutralize the enemy. I’ve always loved the ability to right a wrong. If somebody has hurt somebody else, the legal system should take care of it.”
And for those students pondering their own entry into the legal profession, Hochul put in a good word for government prosecution work at any level.
“You make a difference every day,” he said. “You get to say to a person who has abused his natural physical strength, ‘you’re not going to abuse the legal system.’ You’re dealing with people at their best and their worst, in the real life-and-death terms of the streets. It is a wonderful way to spend 25 years, as I have now.”
Not to mention, he said, that governments are always hiring. He counseled students to have a passion for their work and a commitment to helping crime victims, to demonstrate their community spirit by getting involved in charitable activities and to show they can work with minimal supervision.
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