As a Valley View sophomore competing on his high school’s mock trial team, Sean Camoni recalled an attorney pulling him aside with advice.
“This is what you need to do for a living,” his classmate’s father, who was a lawyer, told him after a competition. “You’re good at this.”
Assistant U.S. Attorney Sean Camoni will be sworn in as a federal magistrate Wednesday. (COURTESY OF SEAN CAMONI)
The teen from Jessup shrugged it off at the time, telling the attorney, “No, that’s alright. I want to be an actor.”
Now, after more than three decades, a career change from performing arts to law and nine years as a federal prosecutor, Camoni, 48, will be sworn in Wednesday as a federal magistrate in the Middle District of Pennsylvania, where he will serve from the United States Courthouse and Herman T. Schneebeli Federal Building in Williamsport.
‘Do some kind of good’
A Jessup native, a husband and a father of three now living in Shavertown, Camoni graduated from Valley View High School in 1995 and had been accepted into Villanova University’s premed program, but without telling his parents, he changed his major to communication.
“I decided I’d rather act than go to medical school,” he said.
Camoni earned dual bachelor’s degrees followed by a master’s in theater from Villanova, where he later spent five years teaching while performing.
His career included performing in a play in Prague and helping produce a film in Ghana, but as jobs became harder to find and more competitive when his apprenticeship ended, he reconsidered his path.
Camoni always felt drawn toward public service, and while doing volunteer advocacy work supporting anti-poverty measures and education for women and girls in developing countries, which grew out of his time in Ghana, he saw poverty firsthand and how he could help others.
“The biggest reason to go to law school is that I wanted to try to do some kind of good,” Camoni said.
So, at 32 years old, Camoni received a public service scholarship to attend Seton Hall University School of Law in Newark, where he earned his Juris Doctor degree in 2011.
“The only thing I was certain of when I started in law school was that I wanted to do public service, if it was at all possible,” he said.
‘A just outcome’
As a newly minted lawyer, Camoni spent three years practicing law at Sullivan & Cromwell LLP in New York City — a firm that gave him the latitude and resources to pursue more than 1,000 hours of pro bono work.
“However many hours they were going to let me get away with it to do pro bono, I wanted to use as many of the firm’s resources and as much of my time to do that kind of work as possible,” he said. “I actually was part of the trial team for the last voters Voting Rights Act trial before the Supreme Court kind of struck down a major provision of the law that requires pre-clearance for voting changes.”
In the case, South Carolina v. United States, South Carolina sued the government to try to implement a photo ID law for voters that would have excluded large numbers of Black voters from rural areas of the state, Camoni said.
In 2014, Camoni returned to Northeast Pennsylvania to work as a law clerk under late U.S. District Court Judge James M. Munley, who served in the Middle District until his death in March 2020.
“He was such a great mentor and an amazing guy,” Camoni said.
He also interned during law school with federal Judge Joseph A. Greenaway Jr., who was serving in the United States District Court for the District of New Jersey at the time.
“Between the two judges, I saw a lot of what a judge does, how they can affect the case, how we can really make a difference in making sure that the outcome of the case is a just outcome,” Camoni said.
‘Do the right thing’
When a position opened up in 2016 at the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Scranton, Camoni jumped at the opportunity and became an assistant United States attorney, prosecuting cases and rising to the rank of deputy chief of its criminal division in Scranton and Williamsport in March. He lauded the local U.S. Attorney’s Office for mentoring him as a novice prosecutor and the wealth of experience among its attorneys.
As a criminal prosecutor, his cases involved sex and drug trafficking, child exploitation, guns and drugs, though he gravitated toward fraud and more complex white collar crime fort the second half of his tenure, including a $115 million Ponzi scheme that conned hundreds of victims out of their retirements in an investment scheme, he said.
“Whenever you have victims in a case, those are the most meaningful,” Camoni said. “Those are the ones you work hardest on.”
However, Camoni considers his most important case being the conviction of hotel owners and two hotel companies in Monroe County who had allowed gang members, pimps and drug dealers to use parts of the hotels as bases of operation for crimes.
Camoni spoke to his bosses about bringing sex trafficking charges against the hotel itself, but there was no precedent — it had never been done, though he found a model for it on the civil side.
His superiors warned him they might lose the case, but he pushed to pursue it, spending nearly six years on it and talking to around three dozen sex trafficking victims who had been through the hotel. Hotel investors who were not involved in the criminal operations paid $2 million to keep their property, with a chunk of that going to the victims as restitution, Camoni said.
Camoni still keeps in touch with one of the victims, who turned her life around after drug rehab and mental health counseling, using the restitution to start her own business while also advocating for crime victims.
“When I hear that, 100% worth it — like everything we did on that case was worth it,” he said.
‘Third time was the charm’
As a prosecutor, Camoni asks himself, “What’s the right outcome?” rather than, “How do I win this case?”
That aligns with how judges operate, he said.
“This has been something that I’ve been aiming at for awhile,” he said.
Camoni previously applied for two magistrate judge positions in Scranton and Wilkes-Barre but didn’t get the job.
“The third time was the charm,” he said.
The process to become a magistrate judge has taken about six months, including interviews with a panel of five attorneys and two non-attorneys who then recommended five names to district judges. The judges interviewed the finalists and selected Camoni. He was offered the job in April pending a background check that concluded last week. It’s an eight-year appointment.
Camoni will start his new role on Thursday, with about 100 cases already on his docket. As a magistrate judge, the vast majority of his cases will be civil, ranging from Social Security appeals to employment cases surrounding compensation as he deals with people from all walks of life and from all socioeconomic levels.
“As a judge, you have to be able to relate to anybody that comes in front of you,” he said. “That’s just in my DNA, because that’s how I was raised.”
As he prepares for his new position, Camoni reflected on advice he received the day he was hired as an assistant U.S. attorney.
The criminal chief at the time told him, “I know everything looks really complicated — there’s a lot of moving parts, there’s a lot of things you have to learn, but you were really only hired to do one thing, and that’s do the right thing.”
“A lot of this job boils down to figure out what the right thing is, and then do it,” Camoni said. “From the bench, it’s really the same thing.”