Conference Speakers
Stuart Banner
Moderator -- Death Penalty 101: Current Issues, Recent Changes, and Public Opinion
Stuart Banner, recent author of The Death Penalty: An American History (2002) and How the Indians Lost Their Land: Law and Power on the Frontier (2005), is Professor of Law teaches at UCLA School of Law. He clerked for Judge Alex Kozinski of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and Justice Sandra Day O'Connor of the U.S. Supreme Court. He practiced law at Davis Polk & Wardwell and at the Office of the Appellate Defender in New York City. Before coming to UCLA, he taught for eight years at Washington University in St. Louis.
Frank R. Baumgartner
Stories of Wrongful Conviction: Why They Are So Important
Frank R. Baumgartner is Distinguished Professor of Political Science at Penn State University. His work focuses on public policy, agenda-setting, and interest groups in American politics. His most recent book is The Politics of Attention: How Government Prioritizes Problems , with Bryan D. Jones (University of Chicago Press, 2005). His current research projects include a large study of Washington lobbying processes (conducted with extensive support of the National Science Foundation, and with four collaborators, involving over 300 interviews with Washington-based policy advocates and decision-makers), and a study of the changing nature of public discussion surrounding the death penalty.
Richard Berk
New Deterrence Studies
Richard Berk is a professor in the Department of Statistics at UCLA. An elected fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Statistical Association and the Academy of Experimental Criminology, he has been a member of the Committee on Applied and Theoretical Statistics of the National Research Council and the Social Science Research Council's Board of Directors. Berk has been awarded the Paul F. Lazarsfeld Award by the Methodology Section of the American Sociological Association.
Janice Brickley
Moderator -- Getting Help From The Innocence Projects
Moderator -- The Ethics of the Prosecutor and the Defense Attorney
in Wrongful Conviction of Peter J. Rose
Janice Brickley has practiced criminal as both a trial and appellate attorney. In 2003, she joined the Northern California Innocence Project (NCIP) at GGU School of Law as a supervising attorney. There, she and Professor Susan Rutberg represented Peter Rose who was in exonerated in 2005 after having spent almost ten years in prison for a rape he did not commit. Since the NCIP office at GGU closed this year, Ms. Brickley has continued to work on policy and legislative issues related to wrongful convictions and exonerees.
Stephen Bright
Plenary 2: Disparities in the Death Penalty
Stephen Bright is president and senior counsel
for the Southern Center for Human Rights in Atlanta and teaches
at Harvard and Yale Law Schools. Bright has testified before
committees of both the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives,
and has represented people facing the death penalty and prisoners
challenging inhumane conditions and practices. The work of
the Center and Bright has been the subject of a documentary
film, "Finding for Life in the Death Belt," (EM
Productions 2005), and two books, Proximity to Death
by William McFeely (Norton 1999) and Finding Life on Death
Row by Kayta Lezin (Northeastern University Press 1999).
Melissa Broome
Victims' Families and the Death Penalty
Melissa Broome is an ‘03 graduate of Loyola Marymount University and holds a Master's degree in Liturgical Studies from the University of Notre Dame. She is currently working at Most Holy Trinity Church in the Diocese of San Jose. She was 11 years old when she lost her father to homicide and has always believed that the death penalty is not the answer to healing a loss.
Linda Carter
Moderator -- Applying International Models of Justice to the U.S. System
Linda Carter is Professor of Law and Director of the Criminal Justice Concentration at McGeorge School of Law. Her teaching and research areas are criminal law, criminal procedure, evidence, capital punishment law, and international criminal law. Carter litigated civil and criminal cases with the Civil Rights Division of the United States Department of Justice in Washington, D.C. and the Legal Defender Association in Salt Lake City, Utah. Her most recent publications include Understanding Capital Punishment Law, articles on the rights of detained foreign nationals in capital cases under the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations, and a forthcoming book on international issues in criminal law.
Jeff Chinn
Getting Help From The Innocence Projects
Moderator -- Compensation and Social Services for the Wrongly Convicted
Jeff Chinn is Assistant Director/Case Manager at the California Innocence Project at California Western School of Law. He is responsible for the daily case management of all case files and supervision of staff and law students investigating claims of wrongful conviction. Chinn has also worked on two successful California compensation cases for exonerees. He previously worked at Street Law, Inc. as program director of law-related education programs for DC youths involved in the court system. Chinn was also Assistant Director and Public Interest Coordinator for the Office of Career Services at the Washington College of Law, American University.
Lynne Coffin
Defending the Great Writ: Fighting Back Against Attacks on
the Right to Habeas Corpus
Moderator -- The Role of the Jury: New Issues and Perspectives
Lynne Coffin began practicing criminal law in San Francisco in 1986, forming a private law firm in 1995, the Law Offices of Coffin & Love, which represented death row inmates on appeal and habeas corpus in the California Supreme Court and in the federal courts. From 2000-2004, Coffin served as the director of the Office of the State Public Defender. She is currently counsel of record in a six capital habeas corpus cases pending in the California state court, federal district courts and the Ninth Circuit court of appeals and will begin a capital federal trial in the central district soon.
Simon Cole
When There Is No DNA
Simon Cole is Assistant Professor of Criminology, Law and Society at the University of California, Irvine. He specializes in the historical and sociological study of the interaction between science, technology, law and criminal justice. Cole is the author of Suspect Identities: A History of Fingerprinting and Criminal Identification (Harvard University Press, 2001), which was awarded the 2003 Rachel Carson Prize by the Society for Social Studies of Science. He is a recipient of a CAREER Award (2004-2009) and a member of the American Judicature Society Commission on Forensic Science and Public Policy.
Eric DeBode
Moderator -- Principles of Restorative Justice
Eric DeBode is a restorative justice mediator who founded and coordinated the victim/offender program at the Archdiocese of Los Angeles. For the past several years, he has been the coordinator for California People of Faith Working Against the Death Penalty in Southern California.
Richard C. Dieter
Death Penalty 101: Current Issues, Recent Changes, and Public Opinion
Death Penalty 102: Strategy and Messaging
Richard C. Dieter is a graduate of the Georgetown University Law Center, where he was one of the University's first Public Interest Law Scholars. Since 1992, he has served as the Executive Director of the Death Penalty Information Center in Washington, DC, and is an Adjunct Professor at the Catholic University School of Law. Dieter has worked for many years on issues related to human rights and the death penalty. He has prepared reports for the U.S. House of Representatives and testified at numerous state legislative hearings and has written numerous articles and reports on the death penalty.
Rachel Dioso
The Supreme Court and the Rights of the
Innocent: Workshop on Robin Lovitt Case
Rachel Dioso is an international doctoral student from Canada studying at University of California, Irvine in the Department of Criminology, Law and Society. She has most recently worked as a Research Coordinator for the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto, supervising national research grants on anti-smoking legislation in public and private spaces. Her current research interests are in public attitudes towards scientific identification evidence in the courtroom, miscarriages of justice and representations of crime and criminality.
Jon Eldan
Compensation and Social Services for the Wrongly Convicted
Jon Eldan is the Legal Director for the Life After Exoneration Program. He coordinates pro bono legal services for exonerees, and also works to promote the passage of statutes that provide exonerees with fair compensation and access to social services. Eldan is a graduate of the University of California, Berkeley (Boalt Hall School of Law) and works as a commercial litigator at Coblentz, Patch, Duffy & Bass LLP in San Francisco.
Ellen Eggers
Reforming the Criminal Justice System Legislatively
Ellen Eggers is an attorney at the Office of the State Public Defender in Sacramento. She is also the President of the Sacramento chapter of Death Penalty Focus. In that capacity, she has met with numerous legislators and organized dozens of events to educate policy makers on the death penalty. She is a graduate of Valparaiso University Law School.
Dorothy Ehrlich
Moderator -- Plenary 2: Disparities in
the Death Penalty
Dorothy Ehrlich was named the fourth executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California (ACLU-NC) in 1978, the first woman to occupy the post. As executive director, Ehrlich heads the organization of 26,000 members in northern California, the largest ACLU affiliate in the nation, and directs the work of 30 staff members, including seven ACLU-NC staff attorneys and two lobbyists in a legislative office in Sacramento. An accomplished spokesperson and writer, Ehrlich has directed the 65-year-old affiliate during a period of extraordinary growth. She has led civil liberties campaigns around reproductive rights, opposition to the death penalty, censorship, and civil rights. She also helped establish the ACLU's Lesbian and Gay Rights Project. Dorothy also serves as a member of the California Coalition for Reproductive Rights, and the Bay Area Civil Rights Coalition. Ehrlich was a founder of Death Penalty Focus, a statewide organization dedicated to changing public opinion on the death penalty, and currently serves on its advisory committee. She was the recipient of a Gerbode Fellowship for professional development in 1992.
Mike Farrell
Moderator -- Executing the Innocent:
Compelling New Evidence in Three Execution Cases
Best known for his role in the hit television series M*A*S*H, Mike Farrell, is a man of many talents and interests. A dedicated human rights activists, he serves as the President of Death Penalty Focus and has received dozens of awards for his human rights work. He was also appointed to the California Commission of Judicial Performance, the body that investigates complaints of misconduct by judicial officers in California.
Barry Fisher
Twisting the Facts: The Problem of "Junk Science" in the Courtroom.
Barry Fisher began his career with the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Crime Lab in 1969 and was promoted to lab director in 1987. He holds an MS degrees in chemistry and an MBA. He is a past-president of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences, the International Association of Forensic Sciences, and the American Society of Crime Laboratory Directors. He serves on the editorial boards of several publications, including the Journal of Forensic Sciences and Forensic Science, Medicine and Pathology. His textbook, Techniques of Crime Scene Investigation , is in its 7th edition. He served on the ABA Criminal Justice Section's Ad Hoc Committee to Ensure the Integrity of the Criminal Process and is a member of the American Judicature Society's National Forensic Science Commission.
Timothy J. Foley
Gideon's Broken Promise: Inadequate Defense
and Bad Lawyering
Timothy J. Foley is an Assistant Federal Defender in Sacramento specializing in capital habeas cases. He has represented death row inmates in California, Nevada, and Arizona, and currently teaches a Death Penalty Seminar at King Hall (UC Davis) School of Law. He has taught at Boalt Hall School of Law, Hastings School of Law, and the University of San Francisco School of Law. His articles on death penalty, habeas corpus and criminal defense have appeared in the California Criminal Defense Practice Reporter, The Champion, CACJ Forum, Loyola Law Review and other publications.
Susan Garvey
Clemency: Strategies and Options for When the Courts Fail
Susan Garvey received a JD from University of California Davis Law School. Garvey has been with the Habeas Corpus Resource Center since 1999. Prior to attending law school, she worked as an investigator at the California Appellate Project. Garvey was counsel for Donald J. Bearsdlee.
William Genego
Moderator: Incriminating Ourselves? False Confessions
William Genego is a partner at the firm of Nasatir Hirsch et al in Santa Monica. He has the distinction of having successfully won freedom for two of California's exonerees: Gloria Killian and Harold Hall. He is a graduate of Yale Law School and received his undergraduate degree from the New York University.
Eric Greene
Moderator: The Supreme Court and the
Rights of the Innocent: Workshop on Robin Lovitt Case
Eric Greene is a policy assistant for the American Civil Liberties Union of South California where he works on a variety of issues, including criminal justice and the death penalty. He is a graduate of Stanford Law School.
Samuel R. Gross
Executing the Innocent: Compelling New
Evidence in Three Execution Cases
New Research on the Wrongful Convictions/Death Penalty
Samuel R. Gross is the Thomas and Mabel Long Professor of Law at the University of Michigan, where teaches evidence law, criminal procedure and courses on the use of the social sciences in law. He has recently litigated cases on racial discrimination in the federal death penalty and on the constitutionality of executing defendants in the face of a substantial known risk of factual innocence. He is the lead author of a 2005 study of exonerations in the United States, and, on behalf of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, he coordinated the investigation that uncovered convincing evidence that Larry Griffin, who was executed in Missouri in 1995, was innocent.
Isabelle Gunning
Twisting the Facts: The Problem of "Junk Science" in the Courtroom
Isabelle Gunning is Professor of Law at Southwestern Law School. Motivated to study law during the civil rights movement of the 197os, she clerked for Chief Judge William Bryant of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia, served as a staff attorney with the Public Defender Service in Washington, D.C., and later with the Southern Africa Project of the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. Under the auspices of the ABA's African Law Initiative and other entities, she has traveled to Ethiopia, South Africa and Tanzania to speak on clinical legal education and trial advocacy.
Steve Hall
Moderator -- Clemency: Strategies and Options for When the Courts Fail
Steve Hall is the director of the StandDown Texas Project, which identifies and advocates for best practices in the criminal justice system. The project began in August 2000, and is based in Austin. He was the Chief of Staff to the Attorney General of Texas from 1983 to 1991, and an administrator at the Texas Resource Center, a non-profit legal services program, from 1993-1995. Hall has worked for state representatives, the U.S. Congress, and served as director of communication for two statewide political campaigns in Texas. Prior to his work in public affairs and media relations, Hall was a journalist and recipient of an Associated Press Broadcasters award for investigative journalism.
Craig Haney
The Role of the Jury: New Issues and Perspectives
Craig Haney is Professor of Psychology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He has studied the backgrounds and social histories of people accused or convicted of capital crime for more than 25 years, and has done much systematic research on and written extensively about the nature of capital jury decision-making process. Haney also has served as an expert witness in dozens of death penalty trials and has provided expert testimony to the California legislature and the United States Senate. His recent book, Death by Design (Oxford University Press, 2005), summarizes his research on capital punishment.
Maya Harris
Death Penalty 102: Strategy and Messaging
Maya Harris is the associate director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California. Ms. Harris previously served as the director of the ACLU-NC's Racial Justice Project and was a leader in the successful campaign to defeat Proposition 54. She is a graduate of Stanford Law School.
Aundré M. Herron
Moderator -- The Role of Race in the Criminal Justice System
Aundré M. Herron joined the staff of the California Appellate Project in 1991, where she serves as staff attorney and works with inmates on California's death row. Aundré is actively involved in the struggle against the death penalty and, in addition to her work, is affiliated with Murder Victims' Families for Reconciliation and serves on the Board of Directors for Death Penalty Focus and the ACLU. She is a sought-after speaker and commentator on capital punishment. In November 2000, she was honored for Outstanding Legal Service by a national coalition of anti-death penalty organizations.
Robert W. Hoelscher
Moderator -- Victims' Families and the Death Penalty
Robert W. Hoelscher manages public policy education and advocacy in his role as the Deputy Director of the Texas Innocence Network. He is the co-founder and former Executive Director of Innocence Project New Orleans, an organization responsible for four Louisiana exonerations. Mr. Hoelscher is also a family member of a murder victim and serves on the national board of Murder Victims' Families for Reconciliation.
John Holdridge
The Role of the Jury: New Issues and Perspectives
Moderator -- Edward Fink and Other Unbelievable Stories: Snitch Witnesses
John Holdridge is the director of the ACLU's Capital Punishment Project in Durham, North Carolina. Prior to that, Holdridge was a public defender in Connecticut's Capital Defense and Trial Services Unit, where he spearheaded the litigation seeking to prevent the execution of Michael Ross, the first person executed in New England in 45 years. Holdridge also spent 11 years as director of the Mississippi and Louisiana Capital Trial Assistance Project in New Orleans, where he represented numerous clients at trial and on direct appeal. He also wrote the pleadings and co-argued the seminal case of State v. Peart, in which the Louisiana Supreme Court recognized that indigent defendants have a pre-trial right to effective counsel.
Cynthia Ellen Jones
Post-Conviction DNA Testing
Cynthia Ellen Jones is Assistant Professor of Law at the American University, Washington College of Law. From 2000-2002, Prof. Jones was the Executive Director of the Public Defender Service for the District of Columbia. During her tenure she made major improvements within the agency and within the D.C. criminal justice system. In the past few years, Prof. Jones has researched, written, and given numerous lectures and presentations on the delivery of indigent defense services, racism in the criminal justice system, and wrongful convictions.
Sean K. Kennedy
Moderator -- Gideon's Broken Promise:
Inadequate Defense and Bad Lawyering
Sean K. Kennedy was appointed as federal public defender for the Central District of California on march 23, 2006 for a four-year term. Kennedy has worked in the Central District's Office of the Federal Public Defender since January 1992. He was in the Trial Unit for eight years, handling a variety of narcotics, violent crime and fraud cases. He later focused on capital trial and habeas corpus representation. In 2001, he joined the Appeals and Non-capital Writs Unit where he litigated direct appeals arising from federal trials and post-conviction state court cases. In 2004, he became the supervising deputy of the Capital Habeas Unit, overseeing the litigation of all capital habeas cases from pre-petition representation through the duration of the proceedings. Kennedy completed undergraduate degree at Loyola Marymount University, graduating cum laude in 1986. He received his law degree in 1989 from Loyola Law School. He later was with a Los Angeles criminal defense law firm for almost three years, assisting partners in state and federal criminal cases. He is currently involved with the moot court program at Loyola Law School as an adjunct professor, organizing and running Moot Court competitions and also teaches courses in Appellate Advocacy and Capital Punishment. As federal public defender, Kennedy will supervise a staff of 160, including 60 attorneys, working in offices in Los Angeles, Santa Ana and Riverside.
Ellen Kreitzberg
New Research on the Wrongful Convictions/Death Penalty
Ellen Kreitzberg is Professor of Law at Santa Clara University Law School. She specializes in the death penalty, criminal law and evidence issues. She is the co-author of Understanding Capital Punishment Law (2003 LexisNexis). Ellen is a co-founder and director of the Death Penalty College, designed to teach defense counsel to investigate, prepare and present the penalty phase of a capital trial. Professor Kreitzberg is active in the moratorium movement in California and a frequent speaker in the community and schools on this issue. She is currently on the Board of Directors of the Northern California Innocence Project based at Santa Clara University.
Denny LeBoeuf
The Role of Race in the Criminal Justice System
Denny LeBoeuf, who began representing clients facing death in 1989, works in state and federal courts, primarily in Louisiana, at trial, on direct appeal, and in post-conviction. Ms. LeBoeuf was coauthor of the winning brief to the US Supreme Court in Kyles v. Whitley and co-counsel in the three subsequent retrials that finally freed Curtis Kyles from death row. She is a member of the board of the Louisiana Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, the executive board of the Moratorium Campaign, and a member of the national board of the American Civil Liberties Union.
Richard A. Leo
Incriminating Ourselves? False Confessions
Richard A. Leo will soon be leaving the University of California, Irvine, where he is presently an associate professor of Criminology, Law and Society and an Associate Professor of Psychology and Social Behavior, to become an associate professor at the University of San Francisco School of Law. He has published dozens of articles and book chapters on police interrogation practices, false confessions, Miranda requirements, and miscarriages of justice. Lee has also consulted and testified as an expert witness on hundreds of criminal and civil cases involving disputed interrogation and confession evidence, and he lectures regularly to criminal justice professionals across the country.
Laurie L. Levenson
Edward Fink and Other Unbelievable Stories: Snitch Witnesses
Laurie L. Levenson is Professor of Law, William M. Rains Fellow at Loyola Law School, and the Director of the Loyola Center for Ethical Advocacy. From 1996-1999, she served Associate Dean of Academic Affairs. Levenson teaches criminal law, criminal procedure, ethics and evidence. Prior to joining the Loyola faculty, she served for eight years as an Assistant United States Attorney. Levenson is also the author of numerous articles and books, including California Criminal Procedure (2002-2003); California Criminal Law ( 2003); Handbook on the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure (2003).
Mary Likins
Post-Conviction DNA Testing
Moderator -- The Importance of Investigation
Mary Likins, RN, LNC is a forensic nurse specialist. She has worked at the Northern California Innocence Project (NCIP) since 1999 and was instrumental in the creation and formation of many of the policies and procedures there. At NCIP, Ms. Likins oversees the tracking, evaluation and testing of physical evidence and acts as liaison between testing labs (both government and private) and the project. She also coordinates investigations and works closely with the dedicated group of professional investigators who donate their time to NCIP. Ms. Likins is a second year law student in the evening program at Santa Clara University School of Law.
Lance G. Lindsey
Moderator -- Death Penalty 102: Strategy and Messaging
Lance Lindsey has been the executive director of Death Penalty Focus for more than 10 years, and has worked as a teacher, social justice activist, community organizer and nonprofit manager for all of his adult life. With degrees in English and Comparative Literature from the University of California, he has taught in schools for developmentally disabled children, and in hospitals, jails and prisons. He is a past member of the board of directors of the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty and founder of California People of Faith Working Against the Death Penalty and Californians for a Moratorium on Executions.
Rory K. Little
Misconduct by Police and Prosecutors
Rory K. Little is Professor of Law at UC Hastings. He has served as an Associate Deputy Attorney General to Attorney Janet Reno in the United States Department of Justice, as the Chief of the Appellate Section in the U.S. Attorney's office for the Northern District of California, and as a Trial Attorney for the Organized Crime and Racketeering Strike Force in San Francisco. He teaches and publishes extensively in the areas of criminal law and procedure, and legal ethics.
Francisco Lobaco
Moderator -- Reforming the Criminal Justice System Legislatively
Francisco Lobaco is the director of the American Civil Liberties Union Legislative Office where he serves as the chief lobbyist for the three California affiliates of the ACLU. He has worked as a lobbyist for more than 17 years. He is a graduate of Hastings College of the Law and the University of California at Berkeley.
Lawrence C. Marshall
Plenary 1: Faces of Wrongful Conviction
Moderator -- When There Is No DNA
Lawrence C. Marshall is Professor of Law at Stanford Law School, where he also serves as the David & Stephanie Mills Director of Clinical Education. Professor Marshall co-founded and served as legal director for the world-renowned Center on Wrongful Convictions. Professor Marshall conceived and organized the National Conference on Wrongful Conviction and the Death Penalty in 1998, an event that has been recognized as having reinvigorated the debate over capital punishment in the United States. A Chicago Tribune editorial has praised his work as heroic and former Illinois Governor George Ryan has credited Marshall with having been a major force behind his decision to commute the sentences of all those on Illinois's death row.
Daniel S. Medwed
When There Is No DNA
Daniel S. Medwed is an associate professor of law at the University of Utah, S.J. Quinney College of Law, where he teaches criminal law, evidence, wrongful convictions and appellate practice. He was previously an instructor at Brooklyn Law School and also served as assistant director of the school's Second Look Program, where he worked with students in investigating and litigating innocence claims by New York state prisoners. His research and teaching interests revolve primarily around criminal law and appellate/post-conviction practice, with a particular emphasis on wrongful convictions. Medwed has also worked as an associate at the Boston firm of Goodwin, Procter & Hoar and the New York firm of Shearman & Sterling.
Sam D. Millsap, Jr.
Executing the Innocent: Compelling New
Evidence in Three Cases
A University of Austin Law School graduate ('72), Sam D. Millsap Jr. has been litigating civil and criminal cases in state and federal court since 1987. (Western, Southern, Northern Federal District Courts of Texas). He is the recipient of numerous awards and honors, including the 2006 Courage Award from the Texas Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, the Texas Womens' Political Caucus Good Guy' Award, the Mary Polk Award of the Texas Commission on Family Violence. During his tenure as Bexar County District Attorney (1982-1987), he was named Politician of the Year by both major San Antonio newspapers. Nina Morrison
Twisting the Facts: The Problem of "Junk Science" in the Courtroom
Misconduct by Police and Prosecutors
As a staff attorney at the Innocence Project, Nina Morrison litigates claims for access to post-conviction DNA evidence from around the nation, under both federal civil rights laws and state DNA testing statutes. Morrison became a staff attorney at the Project in March 2004. Since January 2002, she had served as the Project's Executive Director, supervising day-to-day management of the Project while assisting with litigation and policy reform initiatives. Before that, Morrison was an attorney with the firm of Emery Cuti Brinckerhoff & Abady PC, specializing in police misconduct and other civil rights litigation. From 1992 to 1995 she was an investigator with the California Appellate Project, which represents California's death row inmates in post-conviction proceedings.
Alexandra Natapoff
Edward Fink and Other Unbelievable Stories: Snitch Witnesses
Alexandra Natapoff is an Associate Professor at Loyola Law School. Prior to joining the faculty, Natapoff founded the Urban Law & Advocacy Project with a grant from the Open Society Institute, and served as an Assistant Federal Public Defender in Baltimore. She clerked for the Honorable David S. Tatel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, and for the Honorable Paul L. Friedman, U.S. District Court, Washington, DC.
Charles E. Patterson
Clemency: Strategies and Options for When the Courts Fail
Chuck Patterson is a partner in the Los Angeles office of Morrison & Foerster. He has extensive experience in complex litigation and has tried more than 100 cases to a verdict before a jury and over 30 cases to the court. Patterson has served as both a prosecutor and defense counsel in felony cases including capital murder. He was counsel for Manny Babbitt in his Habeus Corpus appeals and petition for clemency and was a part of the team who represented Clarence Ray Allen in his petition for clemency. He was lead outside counsel for the investigation of Madison Guaranty Savings & Loan including Whitewater Development Company by the United States government.
Rafael Pérez-Torres
The Role of Race in the Criminal Justice System
Rafael Pérez-Torres, professor of English
at UCLA, has published numerous articles on Chicano/a literature
and culture, postmodernism, multiculturalism and contemporary
American literature in such journals as Cultural Critique,
American Literary History, Genre, Aztlán: A Journal of
Chicano Studies and American Literature . He
has written three books: Movements in Chicano Poetry:
Against Myths, Against Margins (Cambridge University
Press, 1995), Mestizaje: Critical Uses of Race in Chicano
Culture (University of Minnesota Press, 2006), and To
Alcatraz, Death Row, and Back: Memories of an East L.A. Outlaw
written with Ernest B. López (University of Texas
Press, 2005).
Maurice Possley
Executing the Innocent: Compelling New
Evidence in Three Execution Cases
Maurice Possley is an award-winning criminal justice reporter for the Chicago Tribune with thirty years experience. His work has been considered for the Pulitzer Prize on four occasions, for excellence in trial coverage and investigative reporting. Possley is known for his role in covering several high profile death penalty cases, including John Wayne Gacy, Timothy McVeigh and Theodore Kaczynski.
Samer Rabadi
Moderator -- Tainted Trials, Stolen Justice: What the San Jose Mercury News Uncovered
Samer Rabadi is the deputy director for the Western Region of Amnesty International USA. Rabadi has been closely involved with AIUSA for 10 years as an office membership program coordinator, a trainer, Chair of GLAD, and Culver City group coordinator. Recently he served as the Area Coordinator for Oregon and was the Chair of the Regional Standing Committee on Membership Development.
Michael L. Radelet
Plenary 2: Disparities in the Death Penalty
Michael L. Radelet is professor and chair of the Department of Sociology, University of Colorado-Boulder, a position he assumed in May, 2003. He served as chair at the Department of Sociology, University of Florida from 1996-2001. Radelet's research focuses on capital punishment. His work on erroneous convictions in the 1980s and his 1992 book, In Spite of Innocence (with Hugo Adam Bedau and Constance Putnam) became the first major research to address the issue of miscarriages of justice in the modern era, and remains the most comprehensive. In 2002, at the request of Illinois Governor George Ryan, he completed a study of racial biases in the death penalty in Illinois that Governor Ryan used in his decision to commute 167 death sentences.
Vera Ramirez-Crutcher
Victim's Families and the Death Penalty
A 77 years young native of Oxnard California, Elvira Ramirez
Crutcher was number six in a family of 10 siblings. Married
to Lawrence Crutcher since November 10, 1951, she is the mother
of five sons and a retired as administrative assistant and EEO
counselor. Crutcher belongs to Death Penalty Focus, Murder Victims
For Human Rights, Amnesty International, and NARFE (Retired
Federal employees Association). She was president of the women's
Council at St. Anthony's Catholic Church in Oxnard, California,
and belongs to the prison ministry of the Los Angeles archdiocese.
She joined the Journey of Hope on the Texas trip in October,
2005 and has spoken at California Youth Authority, other conferences,
and religious organizations.
Ashley Ratliff
Compensation and Social Services for the Wrongly Convicted
Ashley Ratliff is in her final semester of a dual degree program to earn her Juris Doctor from California Western School of Law in conjunction with a Master's of Social Work from San Diego State University. Ashley's master's thesis is a qualitative study of the experience of wrongfully convicted people who are transitioning back into society after their incarceration. To complete the work, "Addressing the Needs of the Exonerated," she has undertaken extensive field research with assistance and support from the California Innocence Project, exonerees, and staff at innocence projects nationwide.
Ira Reiner
Moderator: Misconduct by Police and Prosecutors
When Ira Reiner was elected district attorney he was already a well-known public figure in Los Angeles, He had been a member of the Community Colleges Board of Trustees, a fire commissioner and City Controller. He began his career as a litigator in the City Attorney's Office and was Los Angeles City Attorney when he ran for district attorney in 1984. In office he pursued criminal injuries of workers by organizing the Occupational Safety and Health Section. He also gave priority to prosecuting of illegal hazardous waste disposal and other environmental crimes, hate crimes, consumer protection, drink-driving cases and abuse of patients in nursing homes. To discourage crime among young people, Reiner gave support to the Street Gang Enforcement Program and truancy mediation, to encourage students to remain in school.
Cookie Ridolfi
Getting Help From The Innocence Projects
Professor Cookie Ridolfi is the Executive Director of the Northern California Innocence Project, a law school clinical course in which students work with attorneys and other professionals to investigate claims of wrongful conviction and seek post-conviction relief where appropriate. Professor Ridolfi's areas of specialty include criminal law, criminal procedure, post-conviction procedure, evidence, trial advocacy, jury selection, battered women, clemency and clinical teaching. Professor Ridolfi has taught at Santa Clara University School of Law since 1991.
Ramona Ripston
Moderator -- New Research on the Wrongful Convictions/Death Penalty
Ramona Ripston has served as the executive director of the ACLU of Southern California since August of 1972. She was a founding member of Death Penalty Focus and serves on the boards of numerous community organization. She was appointed to the California Commission of Judicial Performance, the body that investigates complaints of misconduct by judicial officers in California, and has received several awards in recognition of her many years of activism and community service.
Stephen F. Rohde
Defending the Great Writ: Fighting Back Against Attacks on the Right to Habeas Corpus
Stephen F. Rohde is a constitutional lawyer, writer, and past President of the ACLU of Southern California. Since September 11, 2001, Rohde has written numerous articles for the Los Angeles Daily Journal , among others, and has spoken frequently to bar associations, community groups, colleges and universities and religious organizations on threats to civil liberties. Rohde received the 2004 First Amendment Award from the ACLU Foundation of Southern California. He has held leadership positions with the Beverly Hills Bar Association, Progressive Jewish Alliance, PEN USA, and Death Penalty Focus. Rohde received his J.D. degree from Columbia Law School in 1969.
Gloria Romero
Plenary 1: Welcome Address
As Senate Majority Leader, Senator Gloria Romero is the highest ranking woman in the California Legislature, and is the first woman to hold this leadership position. She is a legislator, an educator, a dedicated social activist, an aggressive prison reformer, and a forceful advocate for California's most disadvantaged citizens. One of her most crucial committee assignments is that of chair of the Senate Select Committee on the California Correctional System where she has taken on the formidable task of investigating and authoring reforms for the state's massive array of youth and adult correctional facilities.
iann Rust-Tierney
Death Penalty 101: Current Issues, Recent Changes, and Public Opinion
Diann Rust-Tierney currently serves as Executive Director of National Campaign to Abolish the Death Penalty. Previously, she directed the Capital Punishment Project of the American Civil Liberties Union. As the ACLU's lead strategist and spokeswoman on the death penalty, she helped develop and coordinate national strategy on capital punishment. Her efforts included expanding efforts to educate the public about the problems associated with the death penalty and building broad coalitions with new partners to help spread the abolitionist message.
Susan Rutberg
The Ethics of the Prosecutor and the Defense Attorney in Wrongful Conviction of
Peter J. Rose
Moderator -- Post-Conviction DNA Testing
Susan Rutberg has worked as a criminal defense attorney and innovative clinical law professor for more than thirty years. Since 1991, Rutberg has taught Criminal Litigation, Trial Advocacy and Wrongful Convictions: Causes and Remedies at Golden Gate University and has directed GGU's Criminal Litigation Clinic. From 2001 to 2005, in collaboration with the Northern California Innocence Project (NCIP), Rutberg ran a branch office of NCIP at GGU. She and Adjunct Prof. Janice Brickley (and a team of students) represented Peter J. Rose, winning his release from prison in late 2004 and his complete exoneration in 2005. Rose served nearly 10 years of a 27- year sentence for a rape he didn't commit.
Robert Sanger
New Deterrence Studies
Robert Sanger is a partner at the law firm
of Sanger and Swysen in Santa Barbara where he specializes
in criminal defense. He is author of the article, "Comparison
of the Illinois Commission Report on Capital Punishment with
the Capital Punishment System in California," Santa Clara
Law Review, Dec. 2003. He is on the board of directors of
Death Penalty Focus and is a graduate of UCLA Law School.
Barry C. Scheck
Plenary 1: Faces of Wrongful Conviction
Moderator -- When Memory Fails: The Problems
of Mistaken Eyewitness Identification
Barry Scheck, is a Professor of Law at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law and Co-Director of the Innocence Project. Scheck has done extensive trial and appellate litigation in significant civil rights and criminal defense cases. He has published extensively in these areas, including Actual Innocence: When Justice Goes Wrong And How To Make It Right, with Jim Dwyer and Peter Neufeld. For the past twelve years, Scheck and Neufeld have run the Innocence Project, now an independent non-profit, affiliated with Cardozo Law School, which uses DNA evidence to exonerate the wrongly convicted. Since 1989, 174 individuals have been exonerated in the United States through post-conviction DNA testing.
Michael Schill
Plenary 1: Welcome
Michael Schill, present Dean of UCLA Law School, is a national expert on real estate and housing policy, deregulation, finance and discrimination. He has written and edited extensively on various aspects of housing, real estate and property law. He is an active member of a variety of public advisory councils, editorial boards and community organizations. From 1994 to 2004, Dean Schill served as the director of the Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy. He has taught at Harvard Law School, University of Pennsylvania, New York University's Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service, and New York University School of Law.
Elisabeth Semel
Gideon's Broken Promise: Inadequate Defense
and Bad Lawyering
Elisabeth Semel is a member of the faculty at the University of California at Berkeley (Boalt Hall) and Director of its Death Penalty Clinic, which represents individuals under capital sentence, with an emphasis on habeas corpus proceedings. The Clinic is counsel for death-sentenced clients in Alabama and California and served as counsel in capital cases before the United States Supreme Court. She formerly served as director of the American Bar Association Death Penalty Representation Project in Washington, DC. The Project's work includes the recruitment of pro bono lawyers to represent death row inmates, training for appointed and volunteer counsel, and involvement in other aspects of litigation, legislative and policy issues concerning capital punishment.
Virginia E. Sloan
Reforming the Criminal Justice System Legislatively
Virginia E. Sloan founded the Constitution Project in 1997 and now serves as its President. She also serves on its Board of Directors and Executive Committee, and directs its Death Penalty, Constitutional Amendments, Separation of Powers, and Right to Counsel Initiatives. She served as chair of the Council of the American Bar Association's Section of Individual Rights and Responsibilities Criminal Justice Committee, which co-sponsored the successful ABA resolution in favor of a death penalty moratorium. Ms. Sloan is a member of the Board of Directors of the Southern Center for Human Rights and of the Mid-Atlantic Innocence Project, as well as the Honorary Board of the Washington Council of Lawyers.
Kenneth W. Starr
Plenary 3: Where do we go from here?
The Supreme Court and the Rights of the
Innocent: Workshop on Robin Lovitt Case
Kenneth W. Starr is Dean and Professor of Law at Pepperdine Law School. In addition to working in the private sector, he has served as Counselor to U.S. Attorney General William French Smith, Judge for the U.S. Court of Appeals, D.C. Circuit, Solicitor General of the United States, and Independent Counsel on the Whitewater matter. As Solicitor General,
he argued twenty-five cases before the Supreme Court involving a wide range of governmental regulatory and constitutional issues of commercial importance. Dean Starr's areas of expertise are antitrust, federal courts and federal jurisdiction, and constitutional law. He teaches Current Constitutional Issues.
Linda Starr
Plenary 3: Where Do We Go From Here?
Linda Starr is a Supervising Attorney for the Northern California Innocence Project. She directs the NCIP Advanced Practice Clinic and the Northern California Innocence Project at Santa Clara University. In her private practice, she specializes in criminal post-conviction matters.
Javier Stauring
Principles of Restorative Justice
Chaplain Javier Stauring is Co-Director of the Office of Restorative Justice for the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, overseeing four vital programs: Ministry to the Incarcerated, Ministry to Victims of Crime, Ministry to Families of the Incarcerated, and the Resettlement Program. Javier is also the Policy Director for Faith Communities for Families and Children (FCFC). FCFC is an interfaith coalition of over 70 faith-based groups in Los Angeles County, which provides community-based support for youth and families involved in the foster care and juvenile justice systems. In 2003, Javier was honored by Human Rights Watch for his advocacy work on behalf of incarcerated youth.
Bryan A. Stevenson
Plenary 3: Where Do We Go From Here?
Bryan A. Stevenson is the Executive Director of the Equal Justice Initiative of Alabama in Montgomery, Alabama and also Professor of Law at the New York University School of Law. His efforts to confront bias against the poor and people of color in the criminal justice system have earned him dozens of national awards including the National Public Interest Lawyer of the Year, the ABA Wisdom Award for Public Service, the ACLU National Medal of Liberty, the Reebok Human Rights Award, the Olaf Palme Prize for International Human Rights and the prestigious MacArthur Foundation Fellowship Award Prize. He has published articles on race and poverty and the criminal justice system, and manuals on capital litigation and habeas corpus.
Thomas Sullivan
Incriminating Ourselves? False Confessions
Thomas Sullivan has specialized in civil and criminal trial and appellate litigation with the Chicago firm of Jenner & Block since 1954, except when he served as U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois, from 1977 to 1981. He was co-chair of the Illinois Governor's Commission on Capital Punishment, and is now chair of the Illinois General Assembly Capital Punishment Reform Study Committee, and serves on Northwestern University Law School Center on Wrongful Convictions Advisory Board. He has received numerous awards, including Chicago Lawyer's Person of the Year Award and the Legal Assistance Foundation of Metropolitan Chicago Lifetime Achievement Award (2005).
William C. Thompson
The Supreme Court and the Rights of the
Innocent: Workshop on Robin Lovitt Case
William Thompson is a professor in the Department of Criminology, Law & Society at the University of California, Irvine (UCI). He received a JD from the University of California, Berkeley (Boalt Hall Law School) and a Ph.D. in psychology from Stanford University. He frequently writes and speaks about scientific evidence, particularly forensic DNA testing. He also does research on human decision making, focusing on people's ability to evaluate and draw conclusions from scientific and statistical evidence. Although primarily an academic, Thompson occasionally returns to the courtroom to litigate cases involving novel scientific and statistical issues. He argued the first case concerning the admissibility of DNA evidence before the New Mexico Court of Appeals and Supreme Court. He represented defendants in a number of high profile criminal trials, including O.J. Simpson, Sammy Marshall, John Cuff and Corey Robinson. He has also represented indigent prison inmates seeking post-conviction DNA tests. Thompson has also been involved in efforts to investigate fraud, misconduct and poor scientific practices in forensic laboratories. Thompson has also investigated and written about cases in which poor scientific work and misleading testimony by FBI laboratory examiners led to false convictions .
Fredric N. Tulsky
Tainted Trials, Stolen Justice: What the San Jose Mercury News Uncovered
Fredric Tulsky has undertaken journalistic projects involving injustice for the past 30 years, since working as a young reporter in Jackson, Mississippi, and writing about systemic abuse of black people by the Jackson police. Other past projects included studies of the representation of indigents in capital cases for The Philadelphia Inquirer , and the way that race, class and media attention affected homicide prosecutions at the time of O.J. Simpson's case for the Los Angeles Times . He received a law degree from Temple University, and was a Nieman fellow at Harvard. His past awards include a Pulitzer Prize and two Robert F. Kennedy Foundation journalism awards.
Wes Van Winkle
Just the Facts Please: The Importance of Investigation
Wes Van Winkle currently represents three death row inmates before the California Supreme Court, as well as three death row inmates in federal habeas proceedings. In two other cases, Mr. Van Winkle serves as resource counsel to attorneys representing capital appellants. In addition, Mr. Van Winkle represents an Alabama death row inmate. He is a frequent lecturer at the annual CACJ/CPDA Capital Defense Seminar in Monterey and has also conducted numerous training sessions for the California Appellate Project, the Habeas Corpus Resource Center, and the Office of the State Public Defender.
Alejandro Villaseñor
Moderator -- Understanding the Effects of Incarceration
Born to undocumented Mexican workers in San Francisco's Mission district, Alejandro graduated from the University of Utah, College of Law in 1999. While working for the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund (MALDEF) he worked on several civil rights cases dealing with Affirmative Action and immigrant rights. Alejandro currently works at the California Appellate Project in San Francisco. He is responsible for running the Unrepresented Condemned Inmate Project which serves a group of over 150 condemned inmates in California that have not been appointed attorneys. He was recently appointed to the Board of Directors for Death Penalty Focus and has been an Expert Presenter for the Habeas Corpus Resource Center.
Lola Vollen, M.D., MPH
Understanding the Effects of Incarceration
Lola Vollen is a physician specializing in helping communities that emerge in the aftermath of large-scale human rights abuses and social injustice. Her extensive international experience includes projects in Somalia, South Africa, Kosovo, Israel, Croatia and Bosnia where she has worked with hundreds of survivors of abuse, some of which hailed from the Bosnian town Srebrenica. After attending an innocence conference in 2002, she learned that, like the families with missing from the fall of Srebrenica, the needs of the exonerated, who were struggling after their release, were not being addressed. She also recognized similarities between the exonerees and political asylum seekers and torture survivors. With Dave Eggers, she began the Voice of Witness/VoiceBox Series in 2004, a new multimedia project to give voice to the victims of social injustice and human rights abuses through oral histories. The first in the series Surviving Justice: America's Wrongfully Convicted and Exonerated (2005 McSweeney's).
Cheryl Ward-Kaiser
Principles of Restorative Justice
Cheryl Ward-Kaiser tells the story of her family's unimaginable nightmare -- being burglarized and beaten by intruders, and then seeing her daughter raped and husband murdered -- she raises the question of whether it is possible to forgive someone who has so cruelly torn a family apart. The Salinas, CA, resident extends the first offering of peace to her husband's murderer, and chooses not to hate. Ward-Kaiser has since become an advocate for inmate rehabilitation, and her work in a victim-offender reconciliation group is a heart-warming illustration of healing and forgiveness.
Lynne Weathered
Applying International Models of Justice to the U.S. System
Lynne Weathered is the co-founder and Director of the Griffith University Innocence Project, which operates on behalf of the wrongly convicted across Australia. She is the Executive Director of the Australian Innocence Network and an Advisory Board member of the UK Innocence Network. Her work covers many aspects of wrongful conviction and innocence project work in Australia and internationally, including causation, correction and prevention of wrongful conviction and post-exoneration issues. Lynne has published articles on wrongful conviction in Australian and international journals. She has spoken on this topic in a variety of forums including conferences in Australia, New Zealand, the United States and the United Kingdom.
Heather Weigand
Understanding the Effects of Incarceration
Heather Weigand joined the Life After Exoneration
Project in 2005 as the first Western Regional Case Services
Coordinator. She worked as a substance abuse counselor and
clinical coordinator for one of California's largest substance
abuse programs, helping marginalized and at-risk individuals
including the homeless and those re-entering society after
incarceration. She has authored and facilitates a curriculum
drawing from her own experience called "Recovery Development
-- Exploring Cognitive Change" targeted to people in
recovery and the formerly incarcerated. As a motivational
speaker for women, she speaks in the California Prison System.
Robert Weisberg
New Deterrence Studies
Robert Weisberg is the Edwin E. Huddleson, Jr. Professor of Law at Stanford Law School, and an affiliated faculty member in the Program in Modern Thought and Literature. Professor Weisberg is co-author of Literary Criticisms of Law, and Criminal Law: Cases and Materials, 4th ed. Professor Weisberg was also the winner of the 1985 John Bingham Hurlbut Award for Excellence in Teaching at Stanford University.
