Frank W. Dunham Jr. ( – November 3, 2006, in

Alexandria, Virginia Alexandria is an independent city (United States), independent city in Northern Virginia, United States. It lies on the western bank of the Potomac River approximately south of Washington, D.C., D.C. The city's population of 159,467 at the 2020 ...

) was a federal public defender who represented a number of high profile defendants, including

Zacarias Moussaoui Zacarias Moussaoui (, '; born 30 May 1968) is a French member of al-Qaeda who pleaded guilty in a U.S. federal court to conspiring to kill citizens of the United States as part of the 9/11 attacks. He is serving life imprisonment without the ...

, the only person charged and convicted after the

September 11, 2001 attacks The September 11 attacks, also known as 9/11, were four coordinated Islamist terrorist suicide attacks by al-Qaeda against the United States in 2001. Nineteen terrorists hijacked four commercial airliners, crashing the first two into ...

Education and early career

Dunham was a graduate of

Virginia Tech The Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, commonly referred to as Virginia Tech (VT), is a Public university, public Land-grant college, land-grant research university with its main campus in Blacksburg, Virginia, United States ...

and the

Columbus School of Law The Catholic University of America Columbus School of Law is the law school of the Catholic University of America, a private Roman Catholic research university in Washington, D.C., United States. More than 370 Juris Doctor students attend the ...

The Catholic University of America The Catholic University of America (CUA) is a private Catholic research university in Washington, D.C., United States. It is one of two pontifical universities of the Catholic Church in the United States – the only one that is not primarily ...

. He had been a federal

prosecutor 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 (legal system), civil law. The prosecution is the ...

and defense lawyer in

Northern Virginia Northern Virginia, locally referred to as NOVA or NoVA, comprises several County (United States), counties and independent city (United States), independent cities in the Commonwealth (U.S. state), Commonwealth of Virginia in the United States. ...

before becoming the federal

public defender A public defender is a lawyer appointed to represent people who otherwise cannot reasonably afford to hire a lawyer to defend themselves in a trial. Several countries provide people with public defenders, including the UK, Belgium, Hungary and Si ...

for the Eastern District of Virginia in 2001.

Legal

Dunham was instrumental in the federal government's release of

Yaser Esam Hamdi Yaser Esam Hamdi (; born September 26, 1980) is a former American citizen who was captured in Afghanistan in 2001. The United States government claims that he was fighting with the Taliban against U.S. and Afghan Northern Alliance forces. He wa ...

. By the time Moussaoui went to trial in early 2006, Dunham was too ill to participate in the case.

Death

Dunham died on November 3, 2006, in his home in Alexandria, Virginia; the cause was

brain cancer A brain tumor (sometimes referred to as brain cancer) occurs when a group of cells within the brain turn cancerous and grow out of control, creating a mass. There are two main types of tumors: malignant (cancerous) tumors and benign (non-cance ...

. Dunham was married to his wife Elinor, and had two sons and one grandson.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Dunham, Frank, Jr. 1942 births 2006 deaths Lawyers from Alexandria, Virginia 20th-century American lawyers Virginia Tech alumni Columbus School of Law alumni Deaths from brain cancer in the United States Public defenders American prosecutors