PERSON: Fani Willis
Employer
Fulton County District Attorney’s Office
Position
District Attorney
Biography
Fani Taifa Willis (/fɑːniː/, FAH-nee, born 1971) is the district attorney of Fulton County, Georgia, which contains most of Atlanta. She is the first woman to hold the office.
Willis was born in Inglewood, California. Her father was a member of the Black Panthers and a criminal defense attorney. When Willis was in the first grade, her family moved to Washington, D.C. Her parents divorced, and her mother eventually moved back to California. Willis mostly stayed with her father. Willis studied political science at Howard University, graduating cum laude in 1993, then moved to Atlanta to attend Emory University School of Law, graduating in 1996 with a Juris Doctor.
She spent 16 years as a prosecutor in the Fulton County district attorney’s office. Her most prominent case was her prosecution of the Atlanta Public Schools cheating scandal. Willis, an assistant district attorney at the time, served as lead prosecutor in the 2014 to 2015 trial of 11 educators accused of correcting answers entered by students to inflate the scores of state administered standardized tests. Eleven of the 11 were convicted of racketeering under Georgia’s RICO statute in April 2015.
In 2018, she went into private practice. That year, she ran for a seat on the Fulton County Superior Court, and lost. In 2019, Willis became chief municipal judge for South Fulton, Georgia.
In 2020, Willis was elected district attorney for Fulton County, defeating Paul Howard Jr., a six-term incumbent and her former boss. In this role she is known for successfully using Georgia’s RICO statute to prosecute non-mobsters, and is currently using the same statute to prosecute former president Donald Trump and 18 alleged co-conspirators.
>> Wikipedia
Willis was born in Inglewood, California. Her father was a member of the Black Panthers and a criminal defense attorney. When Willis was in the first grade, her family moved to Washington, D.C. Her parents divorced, and her mother eventually moved back to California. Willis mostly stayed with her father. Willis studied political science at Howard University, graduating cum laude in 1993, then moved to Atlanta to attend Emory University School of Law, graduating in 1996 with a Juris Doctor.
She spent 16 years as a prosecutor in the Fulton County district attorney’s office. Her most prominent case was her prosecution of the Atlanta Public Schools cheating scandal. Willis, an assistant district attorney at the time, served as lead prosecutor in the 2014 to 2015 trial of 11 educators accused of correcting answers entered by students to inflate the scores of state administered standardized tests. Eleven of the 11 were convicted of racketeering under Georgia’s RICO statute in April 2015.
In 2018, she went into private practice. That year, she ran for a seat on the Fulton County Superior Court, and lost. In 2019, Willis became chief municipal judge for South Fulton, Georgia.
In 2020, Willis was elected district attorney for Fulton County, defeating Paul Howard Jr., a six-term incumbent and her former boss. In this role she is known for successfully using Georgia’s RICO statute to prosecute non-mobsters, and is currently using the same statute to prosecute former president Donald Trump and 18 alleged co-conspirators.
>> Wikipedia
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