John S. Davis, former Assistant U.S. Attorney and Criminal Chief of the Eastern District of Virginia, and now a partner with Williams Mullen (North Carolina and Virginia, USA), has received a Director’s Award from the U.S. Department of Justice’s Executive Office for United States Attorneys.
After serving more than 20 years with the Department of Justice, Davis is well-known for his work in high-profile criminal cases, including the indictment (in the Southern District of New York) of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and the 9/11 conspirators; “American Taliban” John Walker Lindh; and the Khobar Towers bombing in Saudi Arabia. Davis has also tried Medicaid fraud, securities fraud, and environmental crimes cases, among many others; established the U.S. office in support of the Iraq War Crimes Tribunal that tried Saddam Hussein; and most recently was assigned to the WikiLeaks investigation and the procurement fraud and money laundering trial of an international gold smuggler featured on America’s Most Wanted.
Davis received the Director’s Award for his historic prosecution of five Somali pirates who attacked the USS Nicholas off the Horn of Africa in 2010. The case was tried in Norfolk in November 2010 before United States District Judge Mark Davis. The case marked the first federal piracy trial in Virginia since the 1820's and the first in the United States since the Civil War.
The case was among those chosen for recognition this year out of the thousands of cases prosecuted by the Department of Justice. The awards were presented by U.S. Attorney General Eric H. Holder, Jr. at the Robert F. Kennedy Main Justice Building on December 9, 2011.
At Williams Mullen, Davis is a member of the Litigation Section, serves as co-chair of the White Collar and Investigations Team and practices with the firm’s Appellate Team.
During his federal career, Davis also served as Criminal Chief in the Northern District of Georgia (Atlanta), and as Associate Deputy Attorney General under James B. Comey at Main Justice. Davis has been the Senior Privacy Official in the Department of Justice; a member of the Advisory Committee on the Federal Rules of Evidence; Chairman of DOJ’s Criminal Chiefs’ Working Group; and an Adjunct Assistant Professor at the University of Richmond’s T.C. Williams School of Law.
A native of Charlottesville, Virginia and a graduate of Davidson College, Davis is a magna cum laude graduate of Harvard Law School and is a member of the Virginia State Bar, as well as the bars of Georgia and New Hampshire.
