Judge Dale Ho ’99 Set to Decide Eric Adams Case in New York City

The controversial corruption trial of New York Mayor Eric Adams has landed in the lap of a Princetonian, Judge Dale Ho ’99, who ascended to the federal bench in 2023.

Ho, a philosophy major, spent a decade building the ACLU’s Voting Rights practice before President Joe Biden nominated him to the District Court for the Southern District of New York.

Now Ho has the unprecedented task of deciding whether to accept a request from the new administration’s Department of Justice to dismiss the indictment against Adams — in the face of claims that the motion is being made for political reasons and is being done in a way that would hold the mayor hostage to the Trump administration.

The DOJ faced its largest crisis since Watergate in mid-February, when eight federal prosecutors resigned rather than follow an order to file the motion to dismiss. In a letter made public, Manhattan U.S. Attorney Danielle Sassoon said she believed Adams may have made a deal to assist the Trump administration with immigration enforcement in New York, in return for the charges being dropped. (Adams’ attorney said in a court filing there was no quid pro quo.)

Legal experts were shocked, however, when the new acting deputy attorney general Emil Bove affirmed to Ho in a hearing last month that the dismissal was being sought because the case was interfering with Adams’ ability to aid Trump policies.

“This case is extraordinary in every direction,” says Deborah Pearlstein, the director of Princeton’s Program in Law and Public Policy. “It’s an incredibly naked assertion of raw political power.”

The Adams case is one of the first tests of whether the Trump administration will steamroll over the bedrock practice of allowing the criminal justice system to operate independently.

“The idea has been that no political leader should be able to leverage the power of criminal prosecution to pursue vendettas or to advance a political goal,” Pearstein says. “It’s what distinguishes ‘rule of law’ systems like ours from authoritarian systems.”

Many organizations have weighed in on the case, including the New York Bar Association, asking Ho to reject the dismissal. A key concern is that the DOJ asked the case to be tossed “without prejudice” — meaning the DOJ could re-introduce the charges at any time.

“The idea is that, if [Adams is] this conflicted, with this sword of Damocles hanging over his head, it does create this huge issue,” says Andrew Weissman ’80, a former federal prosecutor who worked on the Robert Mueller ’66 investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election.

Regardless of the larger issues, a judge’s discretion in a matter like this is narrow. “He has very few options,” Pearlstein says of Ho. “I don’t envy his position.”

Ho grew up in San Jose, California, the child of immigrants from the Philippines. His Princeton peers universally remember him as brilliant. “There’s not many memories I have of somebody truly changing my opinion in school, but Dale was able to do that,” says Rush Howell ’99, who performed with him in plays.

Ho’s thesis on Nietzsche and Foucault won two of the philosophy department’s top honors — an unusually high distinction, says his adviser, Alexander Nehamas, an professor emeritus in the humanities. “It was one of the very best theses I directed.”

Nehamas says he can remember sitting in his office talking with Ho for hours. “He was an outstanding student, but you really felt like you were talking to an equal, rather than a young kid.”

Ho was a star in the campus theater scene, performing with Theatre Intime and the Princeton Shakespeare Company. “Dale was one of these guys who’s so serious about the work but had so much fun doing it,” recalls Sean Mewshaw ’97. “He brought everyone along with him and made you feel like you were there for a reason.”

In his junior year, Ho decided to stage David Henry Hwang’s FOB play, which depicts the experiences and conflicts between established Asian Americans and “fresh off the boat” newcomers. “What I remember was how much confidence and courage it took,” recalls Desi Van Til ’99, who also acted at Princeton. (Van Til and Mewshaw are now married filmmakers in Portland, Maine.) “There was a willingness to ‘other’ himself and name his experience” at a time when that wasn’t common on campus.

PAW reached out to Ho for comment but didn’t hear back. Judges rarely give interviews about their cases, especially before they’re concluded.

After college, Ho spent several years pursuing acting in New York, even snagging a bit part in Law & Order and attending a class with Kerry Washington, the future star of Scandal.

In 2003, Ho switched gears and went to Yale Law School, interning one summer with the United Nations Criminal Tribunal on Rwanda, before going to work for the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund.

In 2013, the ACLU hired Ho to lead its Voting Rights practice. “He was a very young lawyer,” says David Cole, the organization’s former legal director. “The ACLU took a chance on him, and it was one of the best investments the ACLU ever made.” Ho’s hands were soon full countering efforts to reshape voting laws — mostly from conservatives, though Ho also battled Democratic gerrymandering efforts.

In 2018, the ACLU challenged one of the most extreme voter ID laws in recent years, enacted by Kansas’ Republican Attorney General Kris Kobach to require would-be voters to present proof of citizenship — a requirement opponents said violated federal law, and which, they argued, would disenfranchise large swaths of legal voters.

“Not only did Dale beat Kris Kobach, but by the end of the trial, the judge had held Kobach in contempt a number of times,” Cole says. “[Kobach] was up against somebody who was so good, he just couldn’t match Dale, and ended up doing some very stupid things.”

Howell, who also became a trial lawyer and who’s stayed in touch with Ho, says he’d always thought Ho was one of the lawyers he’d least like to go up against. “He’ll outwork anybody, and he’ll have the real courage of his convictions,” Howell says. “He’d get the opponent in his sights and just not give them any room to breathe.” 

In a 2020 documentary called The Fight, which follows four ACLU lawyers battling Trump’s encroachments on various civil rights, Ho says that, before the presumptive Hillary Clinton victory in 2016, he’d been thinking about looking for a new gig that would give him more time with his wife and children. The election torched that plan.

“If I’m not going to be a civil rights lawyer right now, in this moment,” he says in the film, “when?”

The film (on which Kerry Washington was, coincidentally, a producer) shows Ho practicing his opening statement in front of a hotel mirror the night before his first-ever Supreme Court appearance, to oppose Trump’s plan to place a citizenship question on the 2020 census.

Earlier that year, in a short ACLU video with comedian Ike Barinholtz, Ho explained that such a question would discourage people from answering the census and that the resulting undercount would affect some states’ congressional representation and federal funding.

“He understood that part of being an advocate was educating the public about these issues,” Cole says of the many videos and social media posts Ho made during his ACLU years. “Lawyers spend a lot of time focusing on their briefs, but what makes the law move in one direction or another … you have to advocate your case in the court of public opinion as well.”

After the documentary came out, in a Good Morning America interview alongside Washington, Ho recalled being momentarily disoriented while standing in front of the Supreme Court justices.

“I had this surreal moment 45 seconds into the argument where I looked up and saw all nine of them staring at me, and [I’d never seen them] that close,” he said. “I heard this voice inside my head, saying, ‘This is bizarre,’” — and then remembering why he was there — “‘but just keep going!’”

“That’s where the acting training comes in!” Washington quipped.

The film shows the dramatic moment where Ho, back in his office, learns the ACLU has won the case, stopping the Trump citizenship question in its tracks. “I never really thought I’d get an argument before the Supreme Court,” Ho tells the filmmakers. “I sort of thought that if I did, it would be a pretty minor case, not something that’s like the big bombshell of the day.”

Biden initially nominated Ho to the federal bench in 2021 as part of a widespread effort to get more people from nontraditional backgrounds into the judiciary. Historically, presidents have drawn from federal prosecutors and attorneys from large, prominent law firms.

The Biden administration expanded the candidate pool to include people who’d done civil rights and criminal defense work. “It was widely understood in the civil rights community that there are few, if any, better lawyers in the voting rights world than Dale,” Cole says.

The 2021 nomination was pulled, however, in the face of conservative opposition — in part due to Ho’s sometimes spicy social media advocacy. But the administration reintroduced the nomination after the midterm elections, and in the summer of 2023, Ho squeaked through 50-49.

The Adams case was assigned randomly, and while Ho is still relatively new, Weissman says it would be unusual for any judge to end up with a case like this one. “He could have been a judge on the bench for 40 years and never seen this.”

Given the amount that’s been publicized regarding the circumstances driving the dismissal request, Weissman says one step Ho could take is to schedule a hearing where he would question the prosecutors who resigned as well as DOJ figures to find out whether any kind of quid pro quo actually exists. “You don’t know what your legal issue is” — and therefore what your ruling should be — “until you know what the facts are,” Weissman says.

Indeed, on Friday, 14 retired judges filed an amicus brief suggesting Ho do just that. If the court did find a quid pro quo, the judges said dismissing the case would be counter to the public interest, which the judiciary has a duty to serve. “The Court should not be part of an agreement that conditions dismissal on Adams’s agreement to advance the administration’s unrelated policy objectives,” the judges wrote.

In that case, Ho could appoint a special prosecutor to manage the case going forward, the judges said. For now, however, Ho has appointed an outside attorney to do an independent assessment of the motion. (Briefs are due March 7.)

“Normally, courts are aided in their decision-making through a system of adversarial testing,” Ho wrote in his order, “which can be particularly helpful in cases presenting unusual fact patterns or in cases of great public importance.” That testing, however, is absent here, Ho noted, given that the prosecution and the defendant are aligned in their interest to see the case dismissed.

The person Ho chose may have come as a surprise to some court watchers: The conservative “superstar” Paul Clement, who served as solicitor general for President George W. Bush and who’s argued many right-wing causes, including for gun rights and against the Affordable Care Act. He’s also one of the country’s most respected Supreme Court practitioners.

At the ACLU, Ho once filed an amicus brief in a gerrymandering case where Clement represented the other side. Howell, who works at Kirkland & Ellis, where Clement worked at the time, recalls Ho saying of the case, “The briefs are a lot better, so we’re going to have to work harder.”

But the fact that Ho would choose someone like Clement probably doesn’t surprise those who know him well. “Mr. Ho is a person of integrity,” wrote Richard Hasen, a law professor at the University of California, Irvine, in support of Ho’s nomination back in 2021. “He is evenhanded and … invariably shows deep respect to opposing counsel.”

“He has a commitment to fairness and the rule of law,” Hasen continued, “and a deep love for the United States Constitution and its promise of equality and fairness.”