Race, Class, and The Law:
Daniel Olmos’ Legal Awakening.
Daniel Olmos did not set out to become an attorney—though many saw it as inevitable. His father Mario was a celebrated Fresno County Superior Court judge known for having overcome the barriers placed on children of California’s immigrant agricultural laborers to reach the bench. Mario met Daniel’s mother, civil rights attorney and legal scholar Mary Louise Frampton, while working together at California Rural Legal Assistance in the Central Valley town of Madera. Daniel is one of the two children they had together before Mario was killed in a car accident in 1990.
Growing up in Fresno, Daniel took interest in the fields of math and science. It was only after he began his undergraduate years at Harvard University that he realized he was better suited to the study of politics and social issues. He graduated with an interdisciplinary degree in social studies and headed to Compton in South Los Angeles to teach first grade at a public elementary school.
Daniel’s time as a teacher was foundational in two ways. One, it was while working at the school that he met a fellow teacher named Erika who became his wife. The other was that he became disillusioned with the meritocracy myth. His young students were bright and talented but, with so much stacked against them, opportunities to succeed seemed shockingly scarce. With this reality weighing on his shoulders, Daniel knew he needed to do more to improve the lives of children like these. He decided he would go to law school.
At Boalt Hall School of Law at UC Berkeley, Daniel became immersed in social justice issues. He met inspirational figures such as California Supreme Court Justice Cruz Reynoso and future U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor when she came to deliver the Mario Olmos Memorial Lecture. He was an editor of the Berkeley La Raza Law Journal, represented farmworkers at Legal Aid of Napa, and spent a summer with the ACLU of Southern California working on the education equity case Williams v. State of California. The experience that cemented his professional course, however, was the time he spent working at Boalt Hall’s Death Penalty Clinic.
Having come to law school with the intention of understanding the intersections of race, class, and the law, death penalty cases made clear to Daniel that the criminal justice system was where these issues hit hardest. Before scholars such as Michele Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow, brought widespread public attention to the relationship of America’s racial history and policy of mass incarceration, Daniel was making the same chilling connections. He saw the fight for criminal justice as his generation’s way of carrying on the struggle for civil rights.
Daniel pursued two clerkships after graduation and found mentors in District Judge Claudia Wilken of the Northern District of California and Circuit Judge Stephen Reinhardt of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. Following these valuable experiences, he served as a Deputy Public Defender in Contra Costa County for approximately one year before connecting with Tom Nolan, the founding partner of the firm that became Nolan Barton Olmos & Luciano.
Tom hired Daniel to work with him on a federal theft of trade secrets case against a former Broadcom engineer who had allegedly taken Broadcom trade secrets with him when he went to work for a rival company. The case, which was Daniel’s introduction to criminal theft of trade secrets litigation, resulted in resounding victory for the firm’s client. After Daniel delivered the closing argument, the judge returned a 48-page decision pronouncing the engineer not guilty. That opinion is still considered today to be one of the most comprehensive and instructive in the history of prosecutions under the Economic Espionage Act.
Not long after the acquittal, Daniel began work on behalf of an engineer at a Silicon Valley technology company. A Chinese American, the engineer had been accused of stealing the designs for a computer chip to set up his own company in China with the financial backing of a venture capital arm of the Chinese government. The case was the first economic espionage case to go to jury trial in the United States.
Again, Daniel and Tom were successful. The firm’s client and his co-defendant were acquitted after the jury found that the alleged trade secrets were actually non-confidential data sheets, and that they were not going to be used to benefit the Chinese government. Daniel discovered through these early cases that he had a unique knack for the combination of quantitative analysis and technical learning that was required to defend his clients against accusations made by large, multinational corporations working in concert with the government.
Daniel’s success in trade secret and economic espionage litigation brought recognition and further cases. It also brought about an observation—Asian Americans were disproportionately being charged with these serious crimes. After many years defending some of the highest profile clients to be targeted for prosecution under federal theft of trade secrets laws, Daniel co-authored a piece for the Los Angeles Times asking why, if more than 70 percent of economic espionage cases involved China, were the conviction rates significantly lower than for cases involving other countries? Daniel suspected that the disproportionate attention placed on monitoring Asian Americans was being driven by political interests rather than solid evidence. With this in mind,
Daniel continues to be a leading advocate for Asian Americans and Chinese nationals caught in the trade war between countries.
After three years in Palo Alto, Daniel got a call in late 2009 from Harvard professor and constitutional law scholar Laurence Tribe. Tribe was looking for attorneys to join him in creating an Access to Justice initiative within the Department of Justice, and he wanted Daniel to be part of the team. Daniel accepted the offer and moved with his family to Washington, D.C.
While at the Department of Justice, Daniel focused on indigent defense, immigration, and strengthening tribal court systems. In response to rampant sexual abuse against indigenous women by non-indigenous people, Daniel helped expand tribal courts’ capacity to prosecute non- indigenous people criminally. As part of this work, Daniel traveled the country conducting legal trainings for tribal court officials. Daniel also fought to change legal interpretations to allow the federal government to direct funding to non-profits to provide legal representation to immigrants in removal proceedings.
Two years into his work with Access to Justice, Daniel was called to work in the White House for the Obama Administration as Senior Policy Advisor for the Domestic Policy Council. The Administration’s goal at that time was to pass comprehensive immigration reform, but after losing Democratic control of the House of Representatives in the mid-terms, a new strategy was required. So, Daniel and a team of senior Administration officials went to work drafting the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) policy. The policy allowed for immigrants brought to the U.S. as children to defer deportation for a renewable two-year period during which they would become eligible for work permits. Daniel’s goal in drafting DACA was to narrow the exceptions to eligibility—especially those relating to previous criminal convictions.
Despite both finding professional success in Washington, Daniel and his wife Erika decided it would be best for their family to return to California. In 2013, Daniel returned to criminal defense practice at the firm that was then known as Nolan, Armstrong & Barton.
Aware that standards within the criminal justice system are primarily set through case law, Daniel knew that positive change comes when an attorney takes a personal investment in his clients. Back in California, this is exactly what he did—frequently seeking to work on the hardest cases with the most damaging evidence in order to prevent bad facts from breeding bad law. A case that demonstrates Daniel’s approach well involved a small-time contractor.
The case began during the 2016 Soberanes Fire that raged along the Big Sur coastal region of Monterey County. Daniel’s client, a bulldozer operator, and his friend, also a bulldozer operator, were taking turns driving the client’s bulldozer while building fire lines under contract with Cal Fire. While out of the burn zone, the client received news that his friend had been killed when the bulldozer he was driving rolled down an embankment.
The criminal trial centered around a hotly contested issue in California labor law: was the client’s friend an independent contractor or an employee? Immediately, Daniel was concerned that the state had targeted the wrong person in the race to solve this core issue presented by the expanding gig economy model. He fought to prevent his client from becoming a scapegoat. Though not able to fend off all counts, Daniel was ultimately able to keep his client from going to jail.
In line with his early interest in death penalty cases, Daniel has also remained dedicated to serving clients behind bars. He has assisted in winning freedom for numerous people serving life sentences, including brothers Nick and Arnulfo Garcia. In the case of Arnulfo, the then Editor-in-Chief of the San Quentin News, Daniel collaborated with the District Attorney’s Office to secure his release from an original sentence of 75-to-life plus 19 years. Recently, he has been involved in fighting for post-conviction relief for an inmate on California’s death row.
When Daniel left Washington, D.C. to return to California, he was eager to rejoin the collaborative partnership he had found working alongside Tom Nolan, Dan Barton, and the rest of the talented people at their Palo Alto firm. Now a partner himself, Daniel has continued to appreciate and contribute to the uniquely supportive environment fostered at Nolan Barton Olmos & Luciano. As a litigator, he has found that this support has allowed him to bring the level of expertise and quality necessary to achieving the just result at trial, and it is justice that has continued to drive him.
From his time teaching in a Compton elementary school classroom, to his work in the White House, to his practice in California, Daniel has fought for everyone to be afforded an equal opportunity, be it for a better future, an education, or to be heard before a court of law. In this endeavor, Daniel has and will continue to defend people accused of all manner of crimes with compassion, thoughtfulness, and vigor.