Richard North Patterson (born February 22, 1947, in Berkeley, California) is an American fiction writer, attorney and political commentator. Education and law career Patterson graduated in 1968 from Ohio Wesleyan University and has been awarded that school's Distinguished Achievement Citation and his national fraternity's Alumni Achievement Award. He is a 1971 graduate of the Case Western Reserve University School of Law, and a recipient of that University's President's Award for Distinguished Alumni and its President's Award for Excellence. He has served as an Assistant Attorney General for the State of Ohio; a trial attorney for the Securities & Exchange Commission in Washington, D.C.; and was the SEC's liaison to the Watergate Special Prosecutor. More recently, Patterson was a partner in the San Francisco office of McCutchen, Doyle, Brown & Enersen before retiring from practice in 1993. He has served on the boards of his undergraduate and law schools, the National Partnership for Women and Families, the Family Violence Prevention Fund, PEN Center West, the Regional Panel For The Selection of White House Fellows, the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, and the Renew Democracy Initiative, and was Chairman of Common Cause, the grassroots citizens lobby founded by John W. Gardner. He now serves on the Advisory Council of J Street, the pro-Israel, pro-peace advocacy group, and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Writing career Patterson studied fiction writing with Jesse Hill Ford at the University of Alabama at Birmingham; his first short story was published in the Atlantic Monthly; and his first novel, The Lasko Tangent, won an Edgar Allan Poe Award in 1979. Between 1981 and 1985, he published The Outside Man, Escape the Night, and Private Screening, which made the New York Times bestseller list in 1994. His first novel in eight years, Degree of Guilt (1993), and Eyes of A Child (1995), were combined into a four-hour TV mini-series by NBC TV, called Degree of Guilt. Both were international bestsellers, and Degree of Guilt was awarded the French Grand Prix de Littérature Policière in 1995. The Final Judgment (1995), Silent Witness (1997), No Safe Place (1998), and Dark Lady (1999) all became immediate international bestsellers, and in 2011 Silent Witness became a feature film on TNT. Protect and Defend (2000), about the controversial nomination of the first woman to be Chief Justice, and her entanglement in an incendiary lawsuit regarding late-term abortion and parental