LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Janet Reno: United States
built 354 days ago
As state attorney, Reno managed an office of 940 employees with an annual budget of $30 million and a yearly docket of 120,000 cases. She established a career-criminal unit that worked with federal officials and local law enforcement to arrest and convict career criminals and to sentence them to substantial prison time. Reno ... helped establish the Miami drug court, which has been a model for courts in the United States. The drug court provides alternative punishment for nonviolent offenders who have a drug-abuse problem. More than half of those offenders who have completed the program have remained free of drugs.
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Reno's earliest employment in the legal profession was with the Miami firm of Brigham and Brigham (1963-1967); this stint was followed by a junior partnership with the firm of Lewis and Reno (1967-1971). In 1971, adding political experience to her professional background, she was named staff director of the Judiciary Committee of the Florida House of Representatives (1971-1972), where she helped draft a revision of the state constitution that would make possible the reorganization of the court system in the state. In the spring of 1973 she served as counsel for the Florida Senate's Criminal Justice Commission for Revision of the Criminal Code. These experiences were followed by a job as assistant state attorney for the Eleventh Judiciary Circuit of Florida (1973-1976).
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After the April 19th fire Methodist Minister Joseph Bettis wrote Attorney General Reno, "from the beginning, members of the Cult Awareness Network have been involved in this tragedy. This organization is widely known for its use of fear to foster religious bigotry. The reliance of federal agents on information supplied by these people, as well as the whole record of federal activity deserves your careful investigation and public disclosure. . .Cult bashing must end, and you must take the lead." Larry Shinn, a vice president of Bucknell University wrote to the chair of the House Subcommittee on Civil and Constitutional Rights, "media, legal institutions, and law-makers too often rely on the word of self-styled cult experts like C.A.N. whose overly negative agenda often slides into purely anti- religious attack." And in early May, a coalition of 16 religious and civil liberties organizations, including the American Civil Liberties Union, the American Conference on Religious Movements, Americans United for Separation of Church and State, the Episcopal Church, the General Conference of Seventh-Day Adventists, the National Association of Evangelicals, the National Council of Churches of Christ and the Union of American Hebrew Congregations issued a statement which read in part, "We are shocked and saddened by the recent events in Waco. . .Under the religious liberty provision of the First Amendment, the government has no business declaring what is orthodox or heretical, or what is a true or false religion.
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In 1990, after his election loss, Thompson began a campaign against the efforts of Switchboard of Miami, a social services group of which Reno was a board member. Thompson charged that the group placed “homosexual-education tapes” in public schools. Switchboard responded by getting the Florida Supreme Court to order that he submit to a psychiatric examination. Thompson did so and passed, and since then has stated on more than one occasion that he is “the only officially certified sane lawyer in the entire state of Florida."[13]
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In retrospect, Reno made her mistakes as well as basked in the glow of her triumphs. She showed that even her tough-minded, sometimes intimidating, manner emanating from her six foot, three inch stature, could have a laugh at her own humanity, as exemplified by a spoof of her on Saturday Night Live; Will Farrell did the honors.
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