The United States Senate confirmed Robert Lee Pitman a Texas Democrat to be a federal prosecutor on September 26, 2011.
President Obama’s nominee U.S. Magistrate Robert Pitman of Austin, will lead the San Antonio-based Western District.
Once he is sworn in, Pitman would be the first openly gay United States Attorney in Texas.
Robert Lee Pitman is a United States magistrate judge on the United States District Court for the Western District of Texas
He will be one of four openly LGBT U.S. Attorneys, alongside Jenny Durkan of the Western District of Washington, Laura Duffy of the Southern District of California and Anne Tompkins of the Western District of North Carolina.
Pitman then obtained a J.D. from the University of Texas School of Law. After completing law school, Pitman served as a law clerk for Judge David Belew Jr. of the United States District Court for the Northern District of Texas.
Pitman was raised in Fort Worth, Texas. He graduated from Abilene Christian University, where he was student body president.
He is widely respected by those who have worked with him at Austin’s federal courthouse.
He is an adjunct professor in the law and honors departments at the University of Texas, where he earned his law degree. If confirmed, he’ll have to give up those posts because of Obama administration policy.
He was hired as a federal prosecutor in Austin in 1990 and in 1997 worked in Washington in the prestigious Executive Office of U.S. Attorneys.
Upon returning to Texas, Pitman rose through the ranks of the Western District, which includes El Paso, San Antonio and a wide swath of the U.S. border with Mexico.
He served as interim U.S. attorney for the district in 2001 at the time of the Sept. 11 attacks. Sutton later made Pitman his chief deputy.
In 2003, the federal district judges in Austin chose Pitman to be a magistrate judge, handling a variety of pretrial criminal matters and some civil cases.
U.S. District Judge Sam Sparks said he believes that Pitman, as a presidential appointee, will be more aggressive than Murphy in setting office policy. Sparks said he hopes, for example, that Pitman will tell prosecutors to decline to pursue criminal charges in some less serious immigration cases, which have flooded federal court dockets in recent years.
"I think he will be far more practical about the cases he will take," Sparks said.
But others disagree that Pitman will have the leeway to break with the administration, noting that the traditional role of the U.S. attorney is to carry out the will of the president and the attorney general.
"That immigration stuff, he’s not going to affect that," said Horatio Aldredge, an assistant federal public defender. "The decisions on that come from on high."
President Obama in all nominated four Democrats and they all have been recently confirmed by the whole Senate.
The four new Federal Prosecutors will include Robert Pittman listed above along with Corpus Christi’s native Sarah Saldaña nominated by the President back on June 27th to be the state’s first Latina Chief Prosecutor.
John Malcolm Bales, a career federal prosecutor, will lead the office in the Eastern District, which runs from Plano to Beaumont; he already has been serving as interim U.S. attorney.
Ken Magidson, an assistant U.S. attorney for nearly three decades, will lead the Houston-based Southern District.
Compliments of Allan R. Jamail – – Senatorial District 6
(SDEC) Texas State Democratic Executive Committeeman 2011
50 year proud member of the AFL-CIO.
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