PUBLIC DEFENDER ADVOCATED REFORM
Before joining the bench, Nachmanoff spent more than a decade as a federal public defender, representing indigent defendants and campaigning against mandatory minimum sentences.
In a 2009 article he co-wrote, he argued that such policies “inevitably result in disproportionately harsh punishments and unwarranted disparity”.
In 2007, he argued before the US Supreme Court in a case that secured judges’ discretion to depart from sentencing guidelines in crack-cocaine cases, helping address disparities that had disproportionately affected Black Americans.
At a 2015 American Bar Association event, Nachmanoff called those disparities “one of the most pernicious and corrosive examples of unfairness in our criminal justice system”.
PREVIOUS CASES ON THE BENCH
As a magistrate judge, Nachmanoff presided over the 2019 arraignment of Rudy Giuliani’s associates Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman on campaign finance charges, releasing them on US$1 million bonds.
As a district judge, he has handled politically sensitive matters. Last November, he sentenced a former health worker to two years in prison for illegally accessing the medical records of late Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
In May, Nachmanoff sided with the Trump administration in a dispute that cleared the CIA to fire its top doctor, a figure criticised by some Trump allies for her past COVID-19 vaccination policies for the military.
