LibertyBell Law Group

E. Thomas Dunn, Jr. is an experienced certified specialist in criminal defense and a certified appellate specialist with our team at LibertyBell Law Group, handling both state and federal appeals, writs, and law and motion matters throughout the country. Mr. Dunn has over 25 years of experience handling both trial and appellate work. Since January 1995, Mr. Dunn has been certified as a specialist in Criminal Law and he has been certified as a specialist in Appellate Law by the Board since December 2003.

In June 2001, after nearly two decades of public service, Mr. Dunn joined a prominent firm, where he successfully handled complex civil rights cases in state and federal trial and appellate courts for two years, appearing opposite attorneys Steven Yagman and Johnny Cochran on a regular basis. Prior to joining the firm, Mr. Dunn was a Senior Judicial Attorney for the California Court of Appeal, Fourth District, Division Three, in Santa Ana, where he served as Lead Appellate Counsel in the Chambers of Justice William W. Bedsworth for almost four years. Prior to joining Justice Bedsworth’s staff, Mr. Dunn was a Senior Deputy District Attorney for the County of Orange, where he prosecuted criminal cases for more than 11 years, and also served for two years as a Deputy Attorney General for the State of California, representing the district attorneys of all 58 California counties in the federal United States District Court for the Eastern District of California, handling complex civil and constitutional litigation.

During his years as a state and county prosecutor, Mr. Dunn accumulated an exemplary trial record, achieving a 100% conviction rate in all his felony trials. Mr. Dunn was also recognized for his special skills as an appellate lawyer, having begun his legal career by winning his first case—Hicks v. Feiock (1988) 485 U.S. 624—in the United States Supreme Court. Mr. Dunn has numerous published opinions to his credit, including In re Feiock (1989) 214 Cal.App.3d 141, which changed the law in California to make it easier for single parents to collect child support, and the landmark decision of the California Supreme Court in Tobe v. City of Santa Ana (1995) 9 Cal.4th 1069, where the Court upheld the city’s anti-camping ordinance against multiple constitutional attacks. Most recently, Mr. Dunn won a published reversal of his client’s Riverside County conviction for misappropriation of public funds (keeping allegedly false accounts) in People v. Aldana (2009) 94 Cal.Rptr.3d 831.

In 1991, Mr. Dunn became an Associate Professor at Orange County University School of Law and subsequently served for several years as an Adjunct Professor of Law at Whittier Law School and Trinity Law School in Santa Ana. Since 1992, he has been an Adjunct Professor at Western State College of Law, where he continues to teach advanced courses in criminal law, evidence, factual investigation and pretrial litigation. Mr. Dunn has been named Attorney of the Year by the Constitutional Rights Foundation of Orange County, and was Adjunct Professor of the Year in 2008 at Western State. His written legal works have been published at both the state and national level. He is an author of several chapters in California Criminal Law: Procedure and Practice, published annually by Continuing Education of the Bar, and has been listed in Who’s Who in American Law since 1998. He recently completed working on his part of a new treatise on Scientific Evidence, published in October 2008 by the Continuing Education of the Bar in Berkeley, California: Scientific Evidence in California Criminal Cases.