WASHINGTON – Deborah Rhodes has been confirmed by the Senate as the new United States Attorney for the Southern District of Alabama in Mobile, Sen. Jeff Sessions announced today.
Sessions, himself a former U.S. Attorney in Mobile for 12 years during the Reagan and Bush I presidential administrations, said:
“Deborah Rhodes is an experienced prosecutor who has spent a career fighting crime and drugs with the Department of Justice. Ms. Rhodes’s numerous awards and citations from the Department of Justice and FBI are a testament to her hard work and the respect she has earned among her colleagues. In October 2005, Deborah Rhodes came to Mobile on assignment as the Acting United States Attorney for the Southern District of Alabama. She has been an effective and popular leader with her staff and has won the respect of the federal court. Alabama is fortunate to have a prosecutor of Deborah Rhodes’s experience and expertise as the new United States Attorney in Mobile. I am very proud of the U.S. Attorney’s office, and I know that Deborah Rhodes will continue the excellent work she has begun in the past year.”
After a clerkship with a federal trial judge in Philadelphia, Rhodes began her prosecutorial service in 1987 with the Department of Justice Organized Crime and Racketeering Section’s Philadelphia Strike Force. From 1990 to 2003, she was with the United States Attorney’s office in San Diego, where she served as Deputy Chief of the Narcotics Enforcement Section and Acting Chief of the Appellate Section. In these positions, Rhodes was responsible for sensitive grand jury, wiretap and undercover investigations, as well as prosecuting organized crime, racketeering, extortion, complex cases against major illegal drug smuggling organizations, financial fraud, money laundering, immigration, bank robbery and other criminal offenses.
From 2004 to 2005, Rhodes served as counselor to the Assistant Attorney General of the Criminal Division of the Department of Justice in Washington, D.C. In that position, Rhodes supervised the Office of Policy and Legislation, working closely with the senior leadership of the Department on criminal legislation, rules and policy. She served as the Department’s representative to the United States Sentencing Commission, the Judicial Conference Advisory Committee on Criminal Procedure, the American Bar Association’s Criminal Justice Section, and on numerous panels at conferences around the country.
Rhodes was confirmed early Saturday.
