CHARLESTON -- President Joe Biden has nominated two men to be the U.S. Attorneys for West Virginia's two districts.
State Senator and former U.S. Attorney William Ihlenfeld was nominated to lead the Northern District again, and Circuit Judge William Thompson was picked to lead the Southern District.
The pair, along with six other nominees announced August 10, still must be confirmed by the U.S. Senate.
Thompson
Ihlenfeld was U.S. Attorney for the Northern District from 2010 to 2016. Before that, he was a prosecutor in Brooke County from 2007 to 2010. He has been a member of the state Senate since 2019.
“I’m humbled to have been nominated by President Biden to serve as United States Attorney,” Ihlenfeld tweeted. “If confirmed, it will be an honor to join a tremendous team of career public servants dedicated to protecting the public.”
Ihlenfeld is a special counsel at Bowles Rice, where he is a member of the firm’s Litigation and Cybersecurity practice groups. Throughout his legal career, Ihlenfeld has advocated for victims of domestic and sexual violence through pro bono legal representation and service to local and statewide nonprofit organizations.
Thompson was appointed as a judge for the 25th Judicial Circuit (Boone and Lincoln counties) in 2007. He was reelected in 2008 and 2016. He presides over several treatment courts, including the first family treatment court in West Virginia.
Before being a judge, Thompson was an associate at the law firm of Cook and Cook in Madison from 1995 to 2007. His primary focus was litigation, which included representing several hundred indigent clients in criminal defense and other matters. He also served as President of Madison Healthcare from 1997 to 2007, and as Vice President of Danville Lumber Company from 1994 to 2007.
Booth Goodwin, who served as U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of West Virginia from 2010 to 2015, praised both nominees.
“President Biden and Senator (Joe) Manchin made fantastic choices for U.S. Attorney in both the Northern and Southern Districts," Goodwin told The West Virginia Record. "Bill and Will will continue to serve our state and this country with distinction in these critical roles. Both respect the rule of law and will deliver justice without fear or favor.
“Both of them will fill the role as contemplated by Justice Sutherland in the 1935 opinion in Berger v. United States."
That opinion stated, "The United States Attorney is the representative not of an ordinary party to a controversy, but of a sovereign whose obligation to govern impartially is as compelling as its obligation to govern at all; and whose interests, therefore, in a criminal prosecution is not that it shall win a case, but that justice be done. As such he is in a peculiar and very definite sense the servant of the law, the two-fold aim of which is that guilt shall not escape or innocence suffer. He may prosecute with earnestness and vigor – indeed he should do so, but, while he may strike hard blows, he is not at liberty to strike foul ones. It is as much his duty to refrain from improper methods calculated to produce a wrongful conviction as it is to use every legitimate means to bring about a just one."