Clifton T. Barrett Receives Distinguished Service Award

Clifton T. Barrett received the John B. McMillan Distinguished Service Award on September 18, 2024, at the Guilford Inn of Court meeting held in Greensboro, North Carolina. State Bar President-Elect Matthew W. Smith presented the award and State Bar Councilor Manisha P. Patel also participated in the presentation.

Mr. Barrett graduated cum laude from Wake Forest University with a bachelor of arts in htory in 1982 and earned his JD from Wake Forest University School of Law in 1985. Following his graduation from law school, Mr. Barrett began his legal career as an assistant district attorney in Forsyth County. Over the next nine years, he tried over 175 jury trials to verdict, including 18 murder trials and the first criminal trial in North Carolina (and one of the first criminal trials in the country) involving the admission of DNA evidence. Mr. Barrett subsequently advised prosecutors all over the United States about the use of DNA evidence in criminal trials.

In 1994 Mr. Barrett became an assistant United States attorney for the Middle District of North Carolina, a position he still holds today. From 1997 to 2022 Mr. Barrett served as the chief of the Criminal Division, with responsibility for overseeing all federal criminal prosecutions in the Middle District of North Carolina. He also continued to prosecute a wide variety of criminal cases himself, while training and mentoring an entire generation of federal prosecutors in his office. Most importantly, Mr. Barrett always modeled and promoted civility and professionalism in the practice of law. As a result, he has earned the respect of not just fellow prosecutors, but also the criminal defense bar and the judiciary as well.

Mr. Barrett’s public service has extended beyond his work in the Middle District of North Carolina. For the last nearly two decades, he has participated in the United States Department of Justice’s Evaluation and Review Program, first as an evaluator and then as a team leader. In those roles, Mr. Barrett traveled around the country assessing operations in United States Attorney’s Offices and offering suggestions to improve the administration of justice. In addition, he served on the Criminal Chiefs’ Working Group from 2000 to 2007, providing advice to the United States Attorney General, and regularly taught criminal trial advocacy at the United States Department of Justice’s National Advocacy Center in Columbia, South Carolina.

Mr. Barrett also devoted himself to legal education in North Carolina, as an adjunct professor at Wake Forest University, where he has taught trial practice since 1996. Notably, as one of his colleagues commented, Mr. Barrett “didn’t just come for the class period – he’d take [his students] out to dinner after class so they could sit in a relaxed atmosphere and...learn about being an attorney...He devoted a tremendous amount of time to that effort because he thought it was important to train the next generation of attorneys who would eventually take our place.”