Denny Chin

American judge (born 1954)

Denny Chin (陳卓光; born April 13, 1954) is a senior United States circuit judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, based in New York City. He was a United States District Judge of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York before joining the federal appeals bench. President Bill Clinton nominated Chin to the district court on March 24, 1994, and Chin was confirmed August 9 of that same year. On October 6, 2009, President Barack Obama nominated Chin to the Second Circuit. He was confirmed on April 22, 2010, by the United States Senate, filling the vacancy created by Judge Robert D. Sack who assumed senior status. Chin was the first Asian American appointed as a United States District Judge outside of the Ninth Circuit.

Chin was born in 1954 in Kowloon, Hong Kong and came to the U. S. in 1956. He graduated from Stuyvesant High School in 1971. He graduated magna cum laude with a B. A. in psychology from Princeton University in 1975 after completing a 130 page long senior thesis titled "The Old Ones of Chinatown: A Study of the Elderly Chinese." While a student at Princeton, Chin was a staff writer and later managing editor at The Daily Princetonian. In 1978, Chin graduated from Fordham University School of Law with a Juris Doctor, where he was the Managing Editor of the Fordham Law Review. Chin currently teaches first year Legal Writing at Fordham as an adjunct professor. Following a 1978 to 1980 clerkship with Judge Henry Frederick Werker in the Southern District, Chin worked for the law firm of Davis Polk & Wardwell from 1980 to 1982. and he was confirmed by a 98–0 vote on April 22, 2010. He received his judicial commission on April 23, 2010. Chin assumed senior status on June 1, 2021.

In 2009 Chin presided over U. S. v. Madoff. Madoff admitted to committing securities fraud via a Ponzi scheme starting in the early 1990s, which involved potentially as much as $65 billion. On March 12, 2009, Madoff pleaded guilty to 11 federal charges relating to the scheme. Following his pleading, Chin revoked Madoff's $10 million bail and ordered him to report immediately to jail at the request of the federal prosecutors, citing that Madoff had both the resources and the incentive to flee before his formal sentencing. On June 29, 2009, Chin accepted the prosecutor's recommendation to sentence Madoff to a prison term of 150 years, thus effectively handing down a life sentence. Chin explained that imposing the maximum sentence on Madoff was appropriate because he had concluded that Madoff's crimes were "staggering" and "extraordinary evil" and wanted the sentence to have a stronger deterrent effect.