By Daryl Hannah
President Barack Obama on Saturday officially nominated Loretta Lynch, a two-time United States Attorney for the Eastern District of New York, to succeed outgoing Attorney General Eric Holder.
A Greensboro, N.C., native and daughter of a fourth-generation North Carolina Baptist minister, Lynch graduated from Harvard College and Harvard Law School. She spent six years at Manhattan’s Cahill Gordon & Reindel as a litigation associate and later joined the Eastern District as a prosecutor. She worked inside the U.S. Attorney’s office to prosecute and convict a New York City police officer who sexually assaulted Haitian immigrant Abner Louima with a broom handle. At the time, the case was one of the most explosive police-brutality cases, and it earned Lynch a reputation for “even-handed tenacity”.
