Metropolitan News-Enterprise

 

Friday, July 20, 2012

 

Page 3

 

U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee Advances Olguin Nomination

 

By a MetNews Staff Writer

 

The U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee yesterday approved the nomination of Magistrate Judge Fernando M. Olguin to be U.S. district judge for the Central District of California.

The nomination was approved on a voice vote, with Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, who votes against all of President Obama’s judicial nominees, asking to be recorded as voting no.

Also approved, by similar votes, were district court nominees Frank Paul Geraci Jr., Western District of New York, and Malachy Edward Mannion and Matthew W. Brann, both of whom would serve in the Middle District of Pennsylvania.

The committee also approved the nomination of U.S. District Judge Charles R. Breyer of the Northern District of California to be a member of the U.S. Sentencing Commission. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, who recommended Olguin, provided a statement in support of his nomination.

Olguin, she said, “has served as a Magistrate Judge for 11 years, managing a docket of hundreds of cases at a time and issuing hundreds of published opinions, as well as nearly 2,000 decisions and orders.”

She added that he had a “very impressive” record of having “been reversed fewer than 10 times out of thousands of rulings.”

 She said Olguin “had the best record of any Magistrate Judge on the Court at working with litigants to settle their own disputes,” and said that was “very important in a busy district like the Central District, which in fact is the sixth-busiest district in the nation in terms of civil cases.”

She cited his endorsements by Los Angeles Police Chief Charlie Beck, Sheriff Lee Baca, and the Los Angeles Police Protective League, along with his extensive record as a private and government attorney and former law clerk to a federal judge.

“In short, Judge Olguin is fair, and he is seasoned,” she said. “He has strong qualifications. I have no doubt he will serve with distinction on the bench, as he has done as a Magistrate Judge for 11 years. I urge my colleagues will support him.”

Feinstein also offered praise of Breyer, whom she described as “a distinguished jurist on the Northern District of California and good friend of mine.” She noted that Breyer, 71, holds degrees from Harvard College and the UC Berkeley School of Law, and has long experience with sentencing issues..

Breyer, she pointed out, clerked for a district judge, served as deputy district attorney and later chief assistant district attorney in San Francisco, prosecuted and defended military courts-martial in the Army Judge Advocate General’s Corps, and has sentenced over 640 defendants since being appointed to the bench in 1997.

Breyer is the brother of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer. Their father was chief counsel of the San Francisco Unified School District.

Of the other district court nominees, Geraci is a state Supreme Court justice—the Supreme Court is a trial court in New York—in Rochester, Mannion is a federal magistrate judge, and Brann is an attorney in Bradford County and former chair of the county’s Republican Party.

 

Copyright 2012, Metropolitan News Company