In Celebration of Public Defense Week

This article originally appeared in the Spring 2018 issue of Sidebar Magazine, a publication of the Montgomery Bar Association. I was recently seated next to a man at a county-wide event.  When he asked me what I did I told […]

A Virtual Cup of Coffee with a Colleague

Leaders and all public defense professionals, do you have a question, an idea which needs a sounding board, looking for some advice, facing a thorny problem and can’t talk about it with anyone locally, or just need to vent?  Systems […]

Case Refusal: A Duty For A Public Defender and a Remedy for All of A Public Defender’s Clients

Steve Hanlon, General Counsel for the NAPD, has written a law review article that has been published in the Indiana Law Review, entitled: “Case Refusal: A Duty For A Public Defender and a Remedy for All of A Public Defender’s […]

Thank You, Rick Jones

They went there.  Person after person discussed race in America, race in the criminal justice system, race in the practice of criminal defense.  While I wasn’t able to be in Detroit this past fall for the Race Matters seminar put […]

“Waiting for the ‘White Man'”

I woke up in the middle of the night and suddenly understood why, earlier in the evening, two of the strongest, smartest, most courageous women I know stood on the corner in the cold waiting for the “white man” to […]

Public Defenders and Mental Illness

I was appointed to the capital appeal of Eugene Gall v. Commonwealth in 1978 shortly after becoming a public defender.  Eugene’s case had been one of Kentucky’s first death penalty verdicts after the passage of Kentucky’s death penalty statute following […]

Every Day

Every day, what an honor to work alongside other public defenders and all of the people who work in defender offices.  I watch you in your office practice, jail visits, courtroom advocacy, and collaboration with colleagues.  Your tireless hope and […]

Opening Lines

So I’m doing this blog post on opening lines, and I’m stuck on the first sentence. We obsess over the first lines of our openings, the first question we ask on cross and the first argument to present in our […]

Northern Mariana Islands Opportunity!

Just to clarify, we are not in the middle of Asia, but on the edge of it.  We are however in the middle of nowhere. So here, on the edge, in the Northern Mariana Islands, there is a right to […]

Public Defender’s Fight for our Client’s Rights But We Can Do More

This article was priginally published in Delaware Online, on Friday, March 15, 2018. It is being reprinted with permission. You can read the article here: https://www.delawareonline.com/story/opinion/contributors/2018/03/15/delawares-public-defenders-fight-our-clients-rights-but-we-can-do-more/428169002/ Last June, a poor young man was arrested and jailed for a crime for which […]