William Byrne
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- For the New York politician, see William T. Byrne
William Matthew Byrne, Jr. (born 1930 – January 12, 2006, Los Angeles, California) was judge of the United States District Court for the Central District of California. He was best known for presiding over the trial of Pentagon Papers defendant Daniel Ellsberg.
After receiving his law degree from the University of Southern California, Byrne clerked for a federal judge before enlisting in the U.S. Air Force, where he spent two years as a judge advocate. He went to work as a federal prosecutor in Los Angeles and also in private practice.
President Lyndon B. Johnson named him a United States Attorney in 1967, and in 1970, was chosen by Richard Nixon as executive director of the President's Commission on Campus Unrest.
In 1973, he was appointed to the federal bench, and served as chief judge of the Central District of California from 1994 to 1998, the year he took senior status.
[edit] Pentagon Papers trial
Byrne was assigned the Pentagon Papers case the same year he arrived on the bench.
In the midst of the trial, several twists served to destroy the government's case. The first revelation came on April 26, 1973, when the government prosecutor disclosed that White House operatives had burglarized the Beverly Hills office of Ellsberg's psychiatrist. The burglars, led by G. Gordon Liddy and E. Howard Hunt, were not apprehended until after they burglarized the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate complex in Washington nine months later.
Days after the disclosure, Richard Nixon's two top lieutenants, John Ehrlichman and H.R. Haldeman, resigned, and White House counsel John Dean was fired. A few days later, the judge disclosed in court that Ehrlichman had offered him the position of FBI director. On May 9. Judge Byrne learned of yet another illegality: the FBI had secretly taped phone conversations between Ellsberg and Morton Halperin, who had supervised the Pentagon Papers study. Finally, when the government claimed it had lost all records of the wiretapping, Byrne declared a mistrial on May 11, 1973.
