San Diego Criminal Justice Memorial
Honorees
A memorial directory honoring deceased judges, prosecutors, and defense attorneys who advanced criminal justice in San Diego County.
Frank Mangan
1942-2012
Frank Mangan was born in the Bronx, N.Y. on November 3, 1942. He joined the Marist Brothers after high school, but decided the monastic life was not for him. He went back to college and graduated from Catholic University with a degree in mechanical engineering. Following graduation, he won employment as an engineer for General Electric in the Nuclear Power Division. He worked in that capacity for the next six years.
During his time at GE, he decided to become a lawyer and enrolled at Santa Clara University Law School where he graduated summa cum laude in 1973. During law school, he clerked for California Supreme Court Justice Stanley Mosk who wrote and spoke very favorably of his work and future as a lawyer.
In 1973, Frank went to work for San Diego’s Federal Defender as a trial attorney handling all sorts of cases, misdemeanors, felonies, trials and appeals. He left Federal Defenders in 1976 to manage the San Jose branch office of the Federal Public Defender of the Northern District of California. Later, Frank opened his own criminal defense practice in San Jose in 1978, where he defended many high profile clients in federal and state courts including famous phone hacker, Captain Crunch, tax attorney, Harry Margolis, and Hell’s Angels’ Sonny Barger in a very long RICO trial in which Barger was the only one acquitted.
Frank returned to Federal Defenders in San Diego in 1995 as a Senior Trial Attorney. Frank led the office’s new attorney training committee teaching young attorneys how to become superior litigators by imparting his profound knowledge of federal criminal law and wisdom about handling cases. He ensured that each generation of Federal Defender attorneys under his tutelage provided quality representation to their clients. That is a legacy that will live for generations.
Frank served as Chief Trial Attorney from 2002-2005 and was the Acting Executive Director from January to May 2005. Later he assumed the position of Senior Litigator/Special Assistant to the Executive Director. He remained actively involved in supervising, training and mentoring Federal Defender younger trial attorneys until the very end. He died in December 2012. His memory and legacy lives on.