Kathleen Rice
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Kathleen Maura Rice (born February 15, 1965 in New York City) is the current district attorney of Nassau County, New York, elected on November 8, 2005. A Democrat, she defeated 30-year incumbent Denis Dillon, by a margin of 51%-49% (about 8000 votes).
Rice grew up in Garden City, and was one of 10 siblings in an Irish Catholic family. She graduated from The Catholic University of America in 1987 with a B.A. in English and graduated from Touro Law School in June 1991.
She began her career as a prosecutor in Brooklyn before being appointed Assistant United States Attorney in Philadelphia by then-Attorney General Janet Reno in 1999.
She returned to her native Long Island in 2005 to run against incumbent Denis Dillon as a Democrat, shortly after the Democratic party declined to endorse Dillon. She defeated him as part of a county-wide victory for the Democratic Party on Long Island. Rice took office on January 1, 2006, as Long Island's first female district attorney.
After running on a platform of merit-based hiring, Rice immediately hired sister-in-law Cheryl Rice (at a starting salary of $95,000 a year) to handle the scheduling, reports and correspondence for the office. Cheryl Rice's salary will be $5,000 a year more than the woman who held the job under former District Attorney Dillon, according to 2004 records.[1]
Rice dismissed Fred Klein, a 27-year veteran of the District Attorney's Office. Klein was dismissed because he "did not see eye to eye" with Rice on how to prosecute major cases.[2]
During her tenure as district attorney, she also neglected to renew her license to practice law in New York. [3]
Rice campaigned on a platform of zero tolerance for drunk drivers and refuses to plea bargain such cases. She advocates the use of monitoring devices on persons who have been convicted of DWI and who are forbidden to drink as part of their probation.[4] She has been roundly praised by many public figures, including Denna Cohen, president of the Long Island chapter of Mothers Against Drunk Driving, who said "She's absolutely correct that there's an epidemic of drunk driving on Long Island ... There's not a day that you can open the paper and not read about another DWI crash. I am so proud of the way she is handling the situation."[5] In one case, she charged a drunk driver with murder after his pickup truck slammed into a limo on a Nassau County highway and killed the driver and a seven year old flower girl coming home from a wedding.
Critics allege that Rice's refusal to grant plea bargains is too stringent and leaves to little room for judicial discretion. Since the time that DA Rice implemented this policy, Suffolk County DA Thomas Spota has instituted a similar policy.
She is single and has no children.
She is a Touro Law graduate -- and is now spearheading the campaign to slipstream a strict assault clause in the NHL for any player using too much violence.
