Gov.-elect Mikie Sherrill will nominate Jennifer L. Davenport, an experienced career prosecutor who has held state and federal law enforcement positions, as the 57th Attorney General of New Jersey, the New Jersey Globe has confirmed.
Sherrill has scheduled the announcement of a cabinet member for 11 AM Monday in Newark. A Sherrill spokesperson declined to comment.
Davenport will replace Matt Platkin, whose term expires on January 20, 2026, the day Sherrill takes office as governor. Davenport had emerged as one of the two finalists for the post over the last ten days, along with former Acting U.S. Attorney Vikas Khanna.
The Monmouth County resident served as First Assistant Attorney General from 2018 to 2020, working for Gurbir Grewal; she also spent nearly seven years as an Assistant U.S. Attorney, and almost three years as an attorney for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration.
Gov. Phil Murphy nominated Davenport as New Jersey’s commissioner of the Waterfront Commission of New York Harbor. After seven decades, New Jersey withdrew from the panel following the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2023 decision allowing its exit.
Davenport, 50, is the deputy general counsel and chief litigation counsel at PSEG, and has worked there since 2022. That will likely require her to recuse herself from energy matters, including Sherrill’s day-one executive order to freeze electricity costs that she promised during her campaign for governor. Responsibility for defending Sherrill’s executive order on energy, if challenged by PSEG and others, will fall to a still-unnamed first assistant who would become acting attorney general for these matters.
As a candidate, Sherrill also committed to expanding the state’s nuclear capacity, a move that might include the PSEG-owned Salem and Hope Creek nuclear power plants in Lower Alloways Creek.
At her Senate confirmation, Davenport is expected to face questions about her role in creating the embattled Office of Public Integrity and Accountability in 2018, when she was Attorney General Gurbir Grewal’s second-in-command.
Another contender for the attorney general post, former Executive Assistant Attorney General Shirley Emehelu, is a possible candidate to succeed Kevin Walsh as State Comptroller.
Others interviewed or considered by Sherrill for attorney general included: Sherrill campaign attorney Raj Parikh, former State Comptroller Matt Boxer, and Hamilton Township Mayor Jeff Martin.
She served as First Assistant Attorney General from 2018 to 2020, seven years as an Assistant U.S. Attorney – she was the chief of the general crimes unit — and almost three years as an attorney and division counsel for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration. She briefly served as acting Union County Prosecutor.
A graduate of DeSales University and Seton Hall Law School, she clerked for U.S. District Court Chief Judge John Bissell. She worked as a litigation associate at Latham & Watkins and Patton Boggs, two prominent American law firms.
Davenport grew up in a law enforcement family: her uncle, Bob Davenport, was the Wildwood police chief for more than a decade. When she was 22, Davenport served as an election judge during a controversial November 1997 referendum on early closing hours for bars – from 5 AM to 3 AM. After witnessing a local bar owner, Stanley Stefankiewicz, electioneering within 100 feet of a polling place, Davenport filed a criminal complaint (Stefankiewicz’s son was the municipal prosecutor; he recused himself) but was acquitted. The judge found that Stefankiewicz’s conduct was atrocious, but not illegal.
She becomes the fifth woman to serve as state attorney general, following Deborah Poritz, Zulima Farber, Anne Migram, and Paula Dow.
