Commissioners

Kathy Hirata Chin, Acting Chair

Kathy Hirata Chin is a Partner at Crowell & Moring LLP, where she is a member of the healthcare and litigation groups. She served as Commissioner on the New York City Planning Commission from 1995 to 2001 and has served as a Commissioner on the New York City Commission to Combat Police Corruption since August 2003. She has served on the Federal Magistrate Judge Merit Selection Panel for the Eastern District of New York, Governor Mario Cuomo's Judicial Screening Committee for the First Department, the Gender Bias Committee of the Second Circuit Task Force, former Chief Judge Judith Kaye's Commission to Promote Public Confidence in Judicial Elections, the Board of Directors of the New York County Lawyers Association, and the Board of Directors of New York Lawyers for the Public Interest, a non-profit that advocates for marginalized New Yorkers. She currently serves on the Attorney Emeritus Advisory Council and the Commercial Division Advisory Council, appointed to both by former Chief Judge Jonathan Lippman of the New York State Court of Appeals; Co-Chair of the Board of Directors of the Medicare Rights Center, a national nonprofit organization dedicated to helping older adults and people with disabilities get affordable health care; and as a member of the Board of EmblemHealth. Since 2016, she has served on the Governor's First Department Judicial Screening Committee and on the Second Circuit Judicial Council Committee on Civic Education & Public Engagement. In 2012, 2014, and 2021 she was nominated for appointment to the New York State Court of Appeals by the New York State Commission on Judicial Nomination. She has received the NYC Bar's Diversity and Inclusion Champion Award, the Women's Leadership Award of the Asian American Bar Association of New York, the inaugural Hong Yen Chang Awards from Columbia APALSA and the Columbia Law School Association and the 2022 Daniel K. Inouye Trailblazer Award from the National Asian Pacific American Bar Association.

Jabbar Collins

Jabbar Collins is a former adjunct professor at St. John's Law School and President of Horizon Research Services, a consulting firm providing legal research and writing for appellate, civil rights, and criminal defense attorneys, particularly with respect to municipal liability based on police and prosecutorial disciplinary practices. A frequent lecturer on criminal justice issues, Mr. Collins is also an Instructor for Continuing Legal Education courses on the New York Freedom of Information Law, federal habeas corpus, and post-conviction litigation. In 1995, Mr. Collins was wrongfully convicted of murder and spent 16 years in prison before he was exonerated in 2010, largely due to his own legal work. A federal judge dismissed all charges against him and barred a retrial through a rare unconditional writ of habeas corpus, finding his conviction resulted from egregious prosecutorial misconduct. His resultant civil litigation exposed systemic misconduct and resulted in one of the largest wrongful conviction settlements in New York City history. While incarcerated, Mr. Collins worked as a Legal Research Instructor, assisted several men in successfully challenging their convictions, and established a Second Circuit precedent recognizing prisoners' Fourteenth Amendment right to information necessary to make informed decisions regarding medical treatment. His legal work following his exoneration resulted in several wrongfully convicted men being freed, including a man who served 27 years in prison for a crime he did not commit.

Randall W. Jackson

Randall W. Jackson is a Partner in the Litigation Department at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz. Mr. Jackson graduated from Harvard Law School, where he was a Senior Editor of the Harvard Civil Rights Civil Liberties Law Review, and Morehouse College. Randall focuses on government and internal investigations, white collar criminal defense, complex civil litigation and regulatory compliance. Randall is ranked by Chambers USA (2022) as one of the leading attorneys in the area of Litigation: White-Collar Crime & Government Investigations and recognized as a “Litigation Star” in the 2023 edition of Benchmark Litigation. Prior to working in private practice, Randall was an Assistant U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, where he was a senior member of the Securities Fraud, Public Corruption and Terrorism and International Narcotics Unit. Randall has served as lead or co-lead attorney in over 20 federal trials, including some of the longest and most complicated in recent history. In 2022, he co-led the defense to a complete acquittal of client Thomas Barrack, founder of Colony Capital, in a highly publicized trial in the Eastern District of New York alleging illegal foreign lobbying, obstruction of justice and other charges. In 2019, Randall co-led the successful defense against securities fraud charges brought by U.S. Department of Justice against shipbuilding executive Jean Boustani, securing a complete acquittal on all counts after a two-month long jury trial in the Eastern District of New York. In 2013, as a prosecutor, Randall successfully co-led the six-month long prosecution of five lieutenants of Bernard L. Madoff. Randall has also briefed and argued numerous appeals before the U.S. Courts of Appeals. He was awarded the U.S. Department of Justice’s Distinguished Service Award in 2011 and the John Marshall Award in 2014 for his work as a prosecutor on the Times Square Bomber and Madoff cases, respectively.

Howard S. Master

Howard Master is a Partner, Managing Director, and Counsel to the CEO at Nardello & Co., the global investigations firm.  Mr. Master supports the firm's anti-corruption and fraud investigations as well as its criminal defense, civil litigation and arbitration, and monitorship and compliance practices.  He also advises the firm on major strategic initiatives.  Mr. Master has been recognized by Chambers and Partners (2023) for his work.  Mr. Master previously served as a leader, investigator, and trial lawyer in federal, state, and local prosecutors' offices.  At the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York (SDNY), where Mr. Master served as a public corruption prosecutor and as Deputy Chief of the Criminal Division, he investigated and prosecuted individual and corporate wrongdoers responsible for significant corruption offenses and financial crimes. Notable SDNY cases included his prosecution of those responsible for defrauding the City of New York out of hundreds of millions of dollars on the CityTime information technology project and his prosecution of the Speaker of the New York State Assembly for taking millions of dollars in bribes.  Mr. Master later served as Senior Enforcement Counsel at the New York State Office of the Attorney General and as Special Counsel to the District Attorney of Suffolk County.  In the latter role, Mr. Master supervised all of the office's official corruption investigations, founded its Conviction Integrity Bureau, and led a conviction integrity investigation that exonerated a man who served 33 years in prison for a murder he did not commit.  Mr. Master serves as an Adjunct Professor at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School, where he teaches an advanced seminar on corruption law, and is a frequent writer and speaker on corruption- and investigation-related topics.  He is a graduate of Yale University and New York University School of Law, and a former law clerk to the Hon. Victor Marrero of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York and the Hon. José A. Cabranes of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. 

Benjamin E. Rosenberg

Benjamin E. Rosenberg has been a partner at Dechert since 2005. He focuses his practice on white collar criminal defense and securities litigation, with a specific emphasis on defending executives and corporations in connection with governmental investigations, and proceedings of federal grand juries and offices of the United States Attorney, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Attorney General of New York, and the New York District Attorney. He has appeared in federal and state appellate and trial courts, and before administrative tribunals, in civil, regulatory, and criminal matters. In 2013, he was ranked by The Legal 500 U.S. for his white-collar criminal defense practice, and was recognized by The International Who's Who of Business Crime Defense Lawyers. Mr. Rosenberg twice left Dechert to serve in government. He took an 18-month leave of absence from Dechert beginning in 2007 to serve as the Chief Litigation Counsel of the New York State Attorney General. He was in charge of the Office's most high-profile investigation, and led the AG's team investigating unlawful student lending practices. He also represented the Office in successfully defending the constitutionality of New York's lis pendens statute. From 2014 through 2016, Mr. Rosenberg served as the General Counsel to the Manhattan District Attorney, where he represented the District Attorney in both trial-level and appellate courts, and was deeply involved in the District Attorney's cyber-related initiatives, as well as his forfeiture and conviction integrity programs. Following graduation from Harvard Law School, Mr. Rosenberg clerked for the Honorable Judge Edward R. Becker of the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, and from 1990 to 1994 he was an Assistant United States Attorney in the criminal division in the Southern District of New York, where he tried and investigated cases involving narcotics trafficking, identification theft, perjury and obstruction of justice, and gang violence. Mr. Rosenberg teaches as a Lecturer in Law at Columbia Law School, and as a Lecturer in American Studies at Columbia University. He has written extensively, including articles about grand jury practice, conspiracy law, discovery under the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure, petit jury instructions, sentencing matters, and harm and loss calculations in financial cases. Several of the articles have been cited in federal and state courts. Mr. Rosenberg was twice nominated (in 2015 and 2016) to serve on New York's Court of Appeals.