David Patton is a partner at Hecker Fink LLP.
David is a highly accomplished trial attorney who has represented hundreds of clients in federal and state courts during his 25-year career. David joined the firm after serving as Executive Director and Attorney-in-Chief of the Federal Defenders of New York for twelve years, in which time he oversaw the work of federal public defenders in the Southern and Eastern Districts of New York, with offices located in Manhattan, Brooklyn, White Plains, and Islip.
David has served as lead or co-counsel in dozens of federal trials, achieving outright acquittals in more than half of the cases he has personally tried to a jury. His trial experience spans fraud, insider trading, sanctions violations, money laundering, drug trafficking, firearms offenses, and counterfeiting.
David’s recent successes include negotiating the dismissal of a Southern District of New York (SDNY) indictment against an attorney charged with bribery and honest services fraud and trying a cryptocurrency case to a jury in the SDNY in which the client was convicted of only a single, lesser count despite allegations of money laundering, sanctions violations, and operating an unlicensed money transmitting business. In the District of Connecticut, he also secured a highly favorable sentencing outcome for a former oil and gas trader facing Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) charges. David currently represents a client on appeal before the Eleventh Circuit in an expansive Medicare fraud case tried by other counsel in the Southern District of Florida. He also represented Kilmar Abrego Garcia in a criminal prosecution in the Middle District of Tennessee, where he cross-examined the prosecutor in connection with a successful vindictive prosecution motion that resulted in the dismissal of all charges. David continues to represent clients facing fraud charges involving the financial services and cryptocurrency industries.
David is a Fellow in the American College of Trial Lawyers and a member of the American Law Institute. Chambers and Legal 500 recognize David for his white-collar defense work, and Benchmark Litigation named him a “Litigation Star.” David has also been selected for inclusion in Lawdragon’s “500 Leading Litigators in America” and “500 Leading Lawyers in America” lists. He is the recipient of numerous professional awards and honors, including the 2023 Norman S. Ostrow Award from the New York Council of Defense Lawyers, the 2020 Emory Buckner Medal from the Federal Bar Council, the 2018 Judge Robert Louis Cohen Award for Professional Excellence from the New York Criminal Bar Association, the 2017 Champion of the Community Award from Gideon’s Promise, and the 2013 Thurgood Marshall Award for Outstanding Criminal Practitioner from the New York State Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers.
In addition to his work as a trial lawyer and running the Federal Defenders of New York, David has been a prominent national figure in efforts to reform the criminal justice system. He has testified before Congress on multiple occasions, served as the chair of the federal defender legislative committee, and was a member of the national committee that guides policy on behalf of federal defenders. He has published scholarly articles on a variety of criminal justice topics in the Yale Law Journal, Cornell Law Review, Emory Law Journal, and Cardozo Law Review, among others.
From 2002 to 2008, David worked at the Federal Defenders of New York as a trial attorney in the Manhattan office. He left the office to pursue a career in academia, first as an Assistant Professor of Law at the University of Alabama, where he taught Criminal Law, and then at Stanford Law School, where he created its first trial-level criminal defense clinic and was offered a tenure-track position. He left Stanford in order to return to the Federal Defenders of New York as Executive Director. Between October 2022 and March 2023, David successfully represented a client in the first federal death penalty trial under the Biden Administration, which resulted in a life sentence.
David is currently an adjunct professor at New York University School of Law where he teaches a seminar on legal ethics. He began his career as an associate at Sullivan & Cromwell and served as a law clerk to the Honorable Claude Hilton, U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia. He received his J.D. from the University of Virginia School of Law, where he served as editor of the Virginia Law Review. David received his B.A. from the University of Virginia.
Select Publications
- Co-author, “When Politics Drives Prosecutions: The Vindictive Prosecution of Kilmar Abrego Garcia,” ABA Criminal Justice Magazine (Fall 2026)
- Criminal Justice Reform and Guns: The Irresistible Movement Meets the Immovable Object, 69 Emory L. J. 1011 (2020)
- The Structure of Federal Public Defense: A Call for Independence, 102 Cornell L. Rev. 335 (2017)
- Policing the Poor and the Two Faces of the Justice Department, 44 Fordham Urb. L.J., 1431 (2017)
- Federal Public Defense in an Age of Inquisition, 122 Yale L.J. 100 (2013)