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Virtual Event
Building a Holistic Defense: Leveraging Special Education Law for Your Clients
Price
Free – $50.00
School Justice Project (SJP) uses special education law to ensure that older, court-involved students with disabilities can access a quality education, whether they are incarcerated or in the community. By integrating special education law into the criminal defense context, special
education attorneys can increase access to education, decrease future court contact, improve case outcomes, and reshape the education and justice landscapes for older court-involved students with disabilities. Special education attorneys can play a critical role in preserving both the substantive education rights and liberty interests of young people. Having access to free special education legal services as part of a holistic defense team can disrupt the pipeline that funnels older court-involved students with disabilities from the juvenile system into the adult criminal system.
Join this training to get an overview of how public defenders can leverage special education law for better client outcomes. Learn strategies for integrating a persuasive disability framework into defense advocacy. Gain skills in identifying various leverage points to advance a client’s education rights throughout the life of a criminal case. Learn strategies for developing special education-related mitigation and release plans in advance of sentencing. Finally, there will be a focus on integrating education advocacy throughout the reentry process.
Aubrey Dillon is the Managing Attorney at School Justice Project (SJP) where he leads a team of special education attorneys who represent system involved young people. In working with special education students, SJP attorneys fight for access to education, mitigate the harms of the criminal legal system, and work to disrupt the deep end of the school to prison pipeline. Aubrey joined SJP after over twelve years as a public defender advocating for our most marginalized community members facing accusations ranging from traffic violations to homicide charges. He is a proud alum of Queens Defenders (formerly known as Queens Law Associates), the Maryland Office of the Public Defender and the Public Defender Service for the District of Columbia, where he served as a Supervising Attorney. He has handled dozens of jury trials, hundreds of bench trials, and has represented thousands of individual clients. He holds a B.A. summa cum laude in Women’s and Gender Studies and Political Science from the City University of New York-Hunter College and a J.D. from Berkeley Law School. Prior to law school, Aubrey worked in the LGBTQ+ civil rights movement. Aubrey is an attorney admitted to practice in DC, Maryland, and New York and speaks Spanish.