William "Bill" G. Otis (born July 27, 1946) is an adjunct law professor and former federal prosecutor who served as Special Counsel to President George H. W. Bush.
[4] Otis spent much of his career as head of the Appellate Division of the United States Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of Virginia.
In an earlier blog post, Otis had defended a speech given by Fifth Circuit Judge Edith Jones to an audience at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, observing that in the U.S., minorities commit more violence than whites.
He stated that "race and criminality have no causative relationship," and that the disproportionate commission of violent crime by blacks was a product of a breakdown in family structure, not an inherent characteristic, as the Washington Post had included in a headline it altered hours after being published.
He said the lower crime rates of Asian-Americans, as opposed to white or black Americans, resulted from intact, two-parent families that honor "work, education and tradition...values, not race or skin color, influence choices.