Joyce Vance Msnbc Legal Analyst

Joyce White Vance is a Distinguished Professor of the Practice of Law at the University of Alabama School of Law, where her fellowship focuses on criminal justice reform and civil liberties. She is a legal analyst at NBC and MSNBC. She served as U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Alabama from August 2009 to January 2017, appointed by President Obama and unanimously confirmed by the Senate. Professor Vance was recently awarded the Lou Wooster Public Health Hero Award from the University of Alabama at the Birmingham School of Public Health for her leadership in creating a community-based initiative that brought together law enforcement, medical and business partners, and educators to combat the heroin and opioid epidemic in northern Alabama. She is a frequent legal commentator on MSNBC and other news outlets. In 2018, Vance signed a contract to become an MSNBC employee, frequently providing on-air commentary on developments in the Mueller investigation and other legal issues affecting the Trump administration. [52] Since 2021, she has also hosted the podcast #SistersInLaw with Jill Wine-Banks, Barbara McQuade and Kimberly Atkins Stohr. [53] Vance took a “smart crime” approach to violent and repeat crime and intended to pursue the most significant cases facing the county in order to make communities safer.

In addition to prosecuting violent crime, she has worked with other community partners on prevention through a violence reduction initiative and reintegration initiatives such as Ban the Box and Legal Clinics to help formerly incarcerated people reintegrate into the community and find work. Vance focused on civil rights by filing a national inquiry into conditions in Alabama`s men`s prisons, as well as a successful challenge to Alabama`s HB56 anti-immigration bill and a voting agreement with the state of Alabama that brought it into compliance with the Motor Voter Act. She founded a community initiative to combat the epidemic of heroin and prescription opioid addiction and received the Lou Wooster Public Health Hero Award from the University of Alabama at Birmingham for her work. Vance has worked to improve relations between the police and the community. Under his leadership, Birmingham was named as one of six pilot cities for the National Community Trust Building Initiative and successfully developed a violence reduction initiative. It has also created reintegration programs to reduce recidivism of people returning from prison to the community. Vance`s most significant prosecutions included the first material support for a terrorism case in Alabama, the major fraud prosecution of a health care CEO in Birmingham, the director of the Alabama Small Business Consortium, and the executive director of Jefferson County, Alabama, Committee for Economic Opportunity; and the prosecution of a man who attempted to hire someone he believed to be a KKK hitman to murder his African-American neighbor. In April 2017, the University of Alabama School of Law announced that Joyce Vance would join the School of Law as a Distinguished Guest Lecturer in Law (beginning August 2017), teaching criminal justice reform, criminal procedure, and civil liberties. [51] Vance prioritized fraud cases and sued Jonathan Dunning for the $14 million scam, which diverted funds intended for health care for low-income individuals. [46] She prosecuted a number of cases of auto loan fraud.

[47] After the tornadoes that swept through Alabama on April 27, 2011, causing severe damage throughout the region, Vance`s office took a zero-tolerance stance toward disaster fraud. [48] [49] In April 2014, he successfully sued a network of five individuals who had conspired to make $2.4 million fraudulent claims against the BP Oil Deepwater Horizon Settlement Fund. [50] Vance is the daughter-in-law of federal judge Robert S. Vance, who was murdered in a mail bomb in 1989. [3] She is an avid knitter and once had a blog[57] (now dormant) about knitting and yarn. [56] Prior to joining the U.S. Attorney`s Office, Vance worked as a private litigator, first with aren`t, Fox, Kintner, Plotkin, and Kahn in Washington, DC, and then with Bradley, Arant (now Bradley, Arant, Boult, Cummings) in Birmingham. Vance graduated from the University of Virginia School of Law in 1985 and Bates College in Lewiston, Maine in 1982.