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United States Attorney's Biography - Terrence Berg
Terrence G. Berg
United States Attorney
Eastern District of Michigan
Terrence Berg became the United States Attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan on August 15, 2008.
A career federal prosecutor, Mr. Berg joined the United States Attorney’s Office in 1989 as an Assistant United States Attorney. Mr. Berg worked in the General Crimes Unit, the Controlled Substances Unit, and the Economic Crimes Unit, where he tried a large number of cases, eventually specializing in complex white-collar fraud, computer crime, and intellectual property cases. While in the Controlled Substances Unit, Mr. Berg prosecuted one of the earliest cases in the United States involving the Controlled Substance Analogue statute, which made certain kinds of designer drugs illegal, and resulted in the statute being found constitutional by the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals. He also successfully co-tried a high profile environmental crimes prosecution, United States v. Rapanos, which was a landmark wetlands case.
In 1999, Berg was appointed by Michigan Governor (then Attorney General) Jennifer M. Granholm as Chief of the Michigan Attorney General’s High Tech Crime Unit. Under Mr. Berg’s leadership, the High Tech Crime Unit brought a variety of cases of first impression in the area of computer crime and child exploitation on the Internet, including the first prosecution of the sale of precursors for the date-rape drug , GHB, over the Internet. Berg also served as the Attorney General’s “computer crime fellow,” assigned to work on a one-year detail at the U.S. Department of Justice’s Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section, 1999-2000.
Mr. Berg returned to the United States Attorney’s Office in 2003, where he directed the office’s computer crime program. In 2004, Berg brought the first case under the new federal CAN-SPAM statute, which targets illegal spam e-mail, resulting in conviction and a three-year prison sentence.
In 2005, Berg was appointed First Assistant United States Attorney by former United States Attorney (now U.S. District Judge) Stephen J. Murphy. As First Assistant, Berg was responsible for managing the office, setting priorities and implementing programs, while maintaining a caseload in his area of expertise – computer crime, intellectual property, trade secret offenses, identity theft, and complex white collar crime.
Berg has served as an adjunct professor for the University of Detroit-Mercy School of Law, where he taught courses on Computer Crime and Trial Practice. He has also taught courses at the U.S. Department of Justice’s National Advocacy Center, in Columbia, South Carolina, the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia, and the Prosecuting Attorney’s Associations of Michigan, Ohio, North Carolina, and Utah. He has spoken at conferences sponsored by the National Association of Attorney’s General, in Washington, D.C., the National White Collar Crime Center, in Fairmont, West Virginia, and the National Center for Justice and the Rule of Law, at the University of Mississippi, Oxford, Mississippi. Berg was featured in Michigan Super Lawyers and Rising Stars 2008, “The Top Attorneys in Michigan,” Criminal Prosecution, at 32. His publications include, The Changing Face of Cybercrime, Michigan Bar Journal (June 2007); Practical Issues in Searching and Seizing Computers, The Thomas M. Cooley Journal of Practical and Legal Issues, vol. 7, issue 1 (2004); www.wildwest.gov: The Impact of the Internet on State Power to Enforce the Law, 2000 B.Y.U. Law Rev. 1305 (2000); and Criminal Jurisdiction in Cyberspace: Is There a Sheriff on the Electronic Frontier?, 79 Michigan Bar Journal 659 (June 2000).