Milwaukee County District Attorney | |
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First holder | Charles James |
Website | county |
The Milwaukee County District Attorney is a state constitutional officer responsible for criminal prosecution in Milwaukee County, Wisconsin. The current district attorney is John T. Chisholm, who has served since 2007.
The first Milwaukee County District Attorney was Charles James, who served a two-year term beginning in 1848. District attorneys from then until 2008 also served two-year terms in office. Since that year, the district attorney serves for four years. The position is not, and has never been, subject to term limits.
In the first decade of the 1900s, district attorney Francis E. McGovern and his office investigated and prosecuted corrupt city officials. The administration of Mayor David Rose was notorious for this, often ignoring illegal activity. [1] Rose, although termed by McGovern "the self-elected, self-appointed attorney general" of local crime, was not indicted but was defeated in the 1910 mayoral election by Socialist Emil Seidel.
The district attorney's office is responsible for prosecuting state-level criminal offenses committed in Milwaukee County. The office also prosecutes county ordinance violators. Separate units within the office prosecute offenses such as violent crimes, sexual assault, domestic violence, white-collar crimes, and drug-related crimes, among others. The office also contains a unit devoted to prosecuting misdemeanor offenses.
The district attorney's office is composed of about 125 [2] assistant district attorneys, who are supervised by four deputy district attorneys and a chief deputy district attorney. The office is assisted by a relatively large support staff, and has ten investigators, who are law-enforcement officers.
The Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act is a United States federal law that provides for extended criminal penalties and a civil cause of action for acts performed as part of an ongoing criminal organization.
In the United States, a district attorney (DA), county attorney, county prosecutor, state's attorney, prosecuting attorney, commonwealth's attorney, state attorney or solicitor is the chief prosecutor or chief law enforcement officer representing a U.S. state in a local government area, typically a county or a group of counties. The exact scope of the office varies by state. Generally, the prosecutor represents the people of the jurisdiction. With the exception of three states, district attorneys are elected, unlike similar roles in other common law jurisdictions.
A prosecutor is a legal representative of the prosecution in states with either the adversarial system, which is adopted in common law, or inquisitorial system, which is adopted in civil law. The prosecution is the legal party responsible for presenting the case in a criminal trial against the defendant, an individual accused of breaking the law. Typically, the prosecutor represents the state or the government in the case brought against the accused person.
Paul Oscar Adolph Husting was an American lawyer and Democratic politician from Mayville, Wisconsin. He was the first popularly-elected United States senator from Wisconsin, serving from 1915 until his death in 1917. He previously served eight years in the Wisconsin Senate, representing Dodge County, and was district attorney for four years. He was a grandson of Solomon Juneau, the founder of Milwaukee.
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The 2022 Wisconsin fall general election was held in the U.S. state of Wisconsin on November 8, 2022. All of Wisconsin's partisan executive and administrative offices were up for election, as well as one of Wisconsin's U.S. Senate seats, Wisconsin's eight seats in the United States House of Representatives, the seventeen odd-numbered seats in the Wisconsin State Senate, and all 99 seats in the Wisconsin State Assembly. The 2022 Wisconsin fall primary was held on August 9, 2022.
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