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Staff Profile
U.S. Attorney

Jan W. Sharp

Jan W. Sharp
Former United States Attorney
District of Nebraska

U.S. Attorney Jan W. Sharp is a career prosecutor who began with the U.S. Department of Justice, United States Attorney’s Office in 1988.  Prior to joining the  United States Attorney’s Office, Mr. Sharp was a Deputy County Attorney for the Lancaster County Attorney’s Office from 1982 to 1988.  He received his law degree from the University of Nebraska College of Law.   In the United States Attorney’s Office, Mr. Sharp served as a line assistant in the Criminal Division until 1993.  Mr. Sharp has served twice as Criminal Chief for the District:  1993 – 1994 and 2001 to 2018.  In 2018 he became First Assistant.  Under the Vacancies Reform Act, Mr. Sharp now serves as the U.S. Attorney until a successor is nominated by the President and confirmed by the U.S. Senate. 

"The United States Attorney is the representative not of an ordinary party to a controversy, but of a sovereignty whose obligation to govern impartially is as compelling as its obligation to govern at all; and whose interest, therefore, in a criminal prosecution is not that it shall win a case, but that justice be done. As such he is in a peculiar and very definite sense the servant of the law, the twofold aim of which is that guilt shall not escape or innocence suffer. He may prosecute with earnestness and vigor -- indeed he should do so. But, while he may strike hard blows, he is not at liberty to strike foul ones. It is as much his duty to refrain from improper methods calculated to produce a wrongful conviction as it is to use every legitimate means to bring about a just one."

-- Mr. Justice Sutherland in Berger v. United States, 295 U.S. 88 (1935)

Dates of Service
2021 - 2022
Updated May 31, 2022