Daniel J. Sears

Daniel J. Sears started his career in June, 1968, as an attorney for the Navajo Tribe of Indians in Window Rock, Arizona. After leaving New Mexico/Arizona, he became a deputy district attorney in Pueblo, Colorado, prosecuting everything from driving offenses to first degree murder. The Chief Judge of the Pueblo District Court appointed him special prosecutor to run state grand jury investigations and to prosecute public corruption. He successfully prosecuted and sent to prison the head of Colorado organized crime and sixteen fellow mob members. In 1972, he was appointed Special Attorney for the Office of Drug Abuse Law Enforcement for the U. S. Department of Justice and ran the drug strike force in Denver. He was thereafter appointed Assistant U. S. Attorney for the Distict of Colorado and prosecuted all federal offenses ranging from postal and secret service violations to complex white collar crimes. In 1975, the Colorado federal judges appointed him to be the first Federal Public Defender for the District of Colorado. He established the Colorado office and was one of the first seven federal public defenders in the United States. During his tenure as federal public defender, he appealed an inconsistent declarations perjury conviction to the U. S. Supreme Court in 1979 and, in Dunn v. United States, 442 U.S. 100 (1979), won an 8-0 reversal of the conviction and subsequent dismissal of the charges. He has been named in Best Lawyers of America (white collar criminal defense and nonwhite collar ciminal defense) every year since 1987. In 2006, he was named one of the top fifty lawyers in Colorado in Super Lawyers, and has been listed as one of the top lawyers in white collar criminal defense since the inception of the publication. He has been a Fellow of the American College of Trial Lawyers since 1990, and served as State Chair of the Colorado Chapter from 1992-1994.