NAPD Online Courses

COURSE DESCRIPTION

Next Level Leadership takes place over 6 weeks with one asynchronous week and includes 5 90 minute engaging group learning sessions, self-reflection exercises, project-based learning applications, and one-on-one coaching, on a state-of-the art online learning platform. The course is in a virtual classroom setting. No matter where you fall on the leadership spectrum of experience, there is always room for growth. Our course faculty are experts in the area of transformational leadership. This course will help leaders define what kind of leaders they aspire to be and ways in which to achieve their leadership goals, and facilitators will assist participants by offering innovative ways to approach challenges and obstacles. In this leadership course, you will develop your leadership goals and we will help you develop plans to achieve them as well.

COURSE OBJECTIVES

By the end of the course, participants will be able to

• Develop your leadership goals during times of crisis and beyond
• Demonstrate an understanding of the steps involved in setting goals.
• Identify the skills necessary to be an effective team leader
• Discuss the role of a leader in initiating change and helping others to adjust to change
• Identify common misconceptions about leaders and leadership during a crisis
• Demonstrate effective techniques and strategies for articulating a vision
• Discuss the importance of values alignment and misalignment
• Define your crisis and the challenges you’re facing
• Demonstrate comprehension of the elements and processes involved in decision-making.
• Assess barriers to effective decision-making
• Identify the elements of effective team building
• Understand the Law of Motivation
• Benefit from an enhanced self-awareness

FACULTY

Lori James-Townes, NAPD Executive Director
Lori earned her master’s Degree in clinical social work (University of Maryland SSW) and her B.A. in Social Work from Morgan State University. Lori has over 25 years of clinical, training, and organizational development experience, which includes program development, program management, collegiate instruction, as well as, leadership and management training. Lori has served as faculty for several universities and as a member of national and regional leadership, development, communication, and team-building training. Lori is also President of Expand-Now, LLC, through this entity, she can fulfill her lifelong passion of adding value to others through teaching and learning. She is a part-time Clinical Professor in the Family Studies and Community Development Department at Towson University. Prior to joining the Towson University family, she served as Director of Leadership and Program Development at Maryland Office of Public Defender which has more than 800 employees across the state of Maryland. While in this position, she demonstrated her ability to help others grow in the areas of teamwork, leadership, and management. She also led the agency’s social work staff, consultants, and interns. In 2015, The Daily Record Newspaper named her as one of Maryland’s Top 100 Women. In addition to working as a Licensed Clinical Social Worker, she is also an author, and John Maxwell Certified Coach, Facilitator, Teacher, Trainer, and Speaker.

Dr. Pamela Love
“Dr. Pam Love” is the founder of the Finishers Network, an inspirational speaker, and has extensive training and leadership consulting experience. Pam has coached and conducted workshops nationally and internationally, has taught for a number of universities including the University of Southern California, and has trained violence interrupters and returning citizens. Pam is the author of 5 books including See You At the Finish Line: Cultivating the Mindset of a Finisher.
Pam holds degrees in psychology, and social work (MSW and PhD) and has an MBA. She is a member of a number of professional organizations and is a mentor to a number of women. Pam has received numerous awards and recognitions for her service to various individuals and organizations.

Leonard Noisette, Adjunct Professor at Fordham Law School
Lenny has over 30 years of experience helping social justice organizations and their leaders achieve ambitious goals. He was the long-serving Executive Director of the Neighborhood Defender Service of Harlem (NDS), a nationally renowned community-based defender office that demonstrated a radically different approach to providing holistic and effective legal services. He more recently headed the Justice team at Open Society Foundations US, where he oversaw grant-making and field engagement activities to reform, and ultimately transform, the country’s criminal legal system. In that work, Lenny and his team sought to confront racially disparate practices and support the leadership of BIPOC leaders and communities most affected by current approaches. Through Noisette Consulting, launched in the spring of 2022, Lenny’s coaching and organizational consulting work is grounded in an understanding of the challenges of running and growing nonprofit organizations, the critical importance of effective management and leadership, and the necessity of nurturing the capacity, passion and conviction needed to do both. Lenny has a love for classroom teaching as well, and currently serves as an adjunct professor at Fordham Law School, where he teaches lawyering skills courses. He has been a trainer in NLADA and NAPD leadership programs and currently serves on the boards of Equal Justice USA, New York-based Youth Represent, and the New York State Indigent Legal Services Board. Lenny lives in Queens, NY with his wife and where they raised two sons. In his spare time, he enjoys cooking, watching sports, gardening, and spending time with his granddaughters.

Leane Renee, Chief of the Capital Habeas Unit for the Middle District of Pennsylvania Federal Public Defender
Leane is the Chief of the Capital Habeas Unit for the Middle District of Pennsylvania Federal Public Defender. She supervises attorneys and core staff using an interdisciplinary team approach to incorporate clients, attorneys, paralegals, investigators, and experts in the representation of state and federal death-sentenced prisoners in federal habeas corpus proceedings. Leane began practicing law in 1996 and, prior to entering federal service in 2016, Leane represented clients in a variety of state public defender offices. As a trial attorney in the NYC Legal Aid Society’s Manhattan Criminal Defense Division, she represented nearly 2,500 clients; as a trial attorney in a small rural public defender office in California, she became a founding member of one the state’s very first Mental Health Court programs, in 2002. She later managed the legal services division of a non-profit organization as well as her own private practice which focused on criminal, juvenile, child welfare, family law, and mental health litigation in several rural Northern California counties. Leane also served as Mitigation and Policy Director on the leadership team of a mid-size county public defender office in Pennsylvania, where she conducted extensive public outreach and in-house training to develop a client-centered holistic representation model, provided motivational presentations to diverse stakeholder agencies on justice reform initiatives, and worked on local and national justice committees to launch programs addressing disproportionate minority contact.

Lina Garcia, Deputy Director for the Maricopa County Public Defender’s Office in Phoenix, AZ

Lina was born and raised in Maricopa County and is a proud first-generation citizen, college attendee, and university graduate. She graduated from Arizona State University with her B.S. and J.D. and began her career with the Maricopa County Public Defender in 2006. With over 400 employees, MCPD is one of the largest PD offices in the country and is located in the fastest-growing jurisdiction in the country. Over the last 16 years, Lina has worked as an attorney in the high-volume courts and trial divisions, an attorney mentor in the high-volume courts, a supervisor overseeing a trial division, and for the last 4 years as the Deputy Director. She also served previously as the Director for the Public Fiduciary. Lina serves on various boards, including the Arizona Fiduciaries Association, Arizona Attorneys for Criminal Justice, and the Alumni Council for the Arizona State University WP Carey School of Business. She is also a member of the State Bar of Arizona Attorney Mentor Program and the Council for Minorities and Women in the Law. She has collaborated with leaders across various departments and organizations on client-centered initiatives, community collaboration efforts, and increased access to leadership and employee development opportunities.

Audience – Defender Chiefs, Deputies, Leadership Team Members, Supervisors
This is a course for lawyer and nonlawyer supervisors and team leaders at all levels in both full-time and managed assigned counsel programs about growth and development of staff to help clients even better and comply with ethical responsibilities of supervision.

Expanding our capacity as a coach and the capacity of our staff to take effective action for clients is a primary responsibility of a defender supervisor-leader. Quality performance for clients is the primary responsibility of public defense programs. With quality representation as a defender core value, active coaching is not an optional undertaking. Supervision is an ethical obligation. The objective of supervision is to assure that all defense services provided by lawyers and staff are effective in accordance with the prevailing professional public defense standards and competency within the meaning of the rules of professional conduct.

Through the course, you will create a comprehensive coaching and communication strategy, performance agreements, and evaluations, as well as ways to provide strengths-based developmental feedback. This course will build on your coaching strengths. You will be applying the information in the presentations to the actual situations that you face now.

You will learn:
•  A theory of successful, dynamic coaching
•  Offering effective feedback
•  Engaging employees
•  Using a 3-step performance process
•  Managing, creating, and leading interdisciplinary teams
•  Promoting productive conflict
•  Leading the case-review process
•  Conducting file reviews
•  Creating performance agreements
•  Conducting progressive discipline for unsatisfactory performance or misconduct
•  Leading staff meetings and having key coaching conversations
•  Communicating and framing your coaching process to staff
•  Learning about ways to thrive for the long haul as a hardy coach

There are a total of seven Sections over seven consecutive weeks. Each Section has video presentations and other materials to review at your convenience. Each Section has an assignment based on the work unit situation you bring to the course and you as a coach. The videos, materials and assignments will be discussed in a weekly 90 minute Zoom small group with a structured discussion. These weekly Zoom discussions will be on the same day and at the same time every week.

In taking this online course, you agree to keep conversations in the small group confidential. Time expectations for this course per week are:
• Watching course videos – about 1 – 2  hours
• Weekly assignment – about 1 – 2 hours
• Weekly small groups – 1.5 hours

Designed and facilitated by Jeff Sherr, NAPD’s Training Director

NAPD’s Public Defender Bring Your Own “Course” Train the Trainer program for the development of distance learning courses for your organizations.   This course will utilize both synchronous and asynchronous instruction methods. Participants will be expected to read materials and watch short videos on your own in preparation for each class meeting. The class will meet in regular online Zoom video conferences and will also use small group breakout sessions during class where you will work on the course that you are developing. We model best practices for you to incorporate into the course you create.

You will have the option of placing your finished course inside NAPD’s learning management system [LMS].  You will also be able to create a section within NAPD’s LMS for your organization with its own webpage address and design.  After the course you will be able to add additional courses and offer them to your own participants. (Your registration fee for this course includes using NAPD’s LMS for one course and up to 25 active participants in that course. Additional courses and active participants will be available for a reasonable cost to be determined to cover NAPD’s costs with the LMS provider (TalentLMS).

You will be part of a cooperative of public defense trainers from across the nation which provides you the opportunity to copy and modify portions of other courses for your use.

Learning Objectives

By the end of this course, participants will have developed and created a ready-to-launch public defense distance learning course by:

Course Description: This course is a must-take for attorneys, investigators, mitigation specialists, social workers, and all defense team members who want to conduct thorough investigations to answer questions essential to defending individuals impacted by the criminal legal system. Where we come from matters. We know that history is directly linked to many of the issues that directly impact the trajectory of our client’s lives. But how often do we collect information that allows us to tell a story of historical impact, prejudice, oppression, community, and trauma and how it affects our clients? This course will give participants the tools to conduct such an investigation. This course will include lectures from nationally recognized experts. In small group sessions, faculty and coaches will assist participants with an active case to complete a multi-level historical investigation that would be helpful at any dispositional phase of your case.

Course Objectives:  By the end of this course, participants will be able to:

• Utilize strategies and tools to investigate and humanize clients’ lives.
• Elevate litigation and mitigation tactics to protect and affirm clients’ due process rights.
• Review studies, research, reports, etc., documenting the impact of violence, injustice, and poverty on clients’ well-being and long-standing effects.
• Participate in and model normalizing forthright dialogues about the relevance of history and its social context to clients’ lived experiences via discussion boards and group discussions.
• Increase awareness, appreciation, and utilization of the impact of historical trauma, prejudice, oppression, culture, and community trauma.
• Support each other in a small group space for debriefing, brainstorming, incubating ideas, and providing accountability for goals.

Course Faculty: Dr. Sharon Jones-Eversley and Dr. Donavan Bailey, with additional guest faculty

This ten week course is intended for anyone working in indigent defense, in any job category, who would like to increase their tools and strategies to sustain their own well-being and support the well-being of other defenders. Working in public defense has very real impacts on our well-being. Though we must maintain our physical and mental health in order to provide high quality and client-centered advocacy to the people we represent, we face constant obstacles of working within under-resourced agencies, being exposed to trauma, and handling casework demands that challenge our boundaries and rest. These resources are intended to support development of individualized strategies to sustain well-being while working in public defense, community care strategies to create public defense culture supportive of well-being, and strategies to advocate for systemic change to support indigent defense and increase access to justice.

This course includes one hour of material to review each week within the online learning management system (such as short videos to view, and articles and research to read), in preparation for a 75 minute weekly group meeting.

This course is for Sentencing Advocates, Client Service Professionals, Mitigation Specialist/Experts, Life History Investigators, Mental Health Social Workers, and those in similar fields who work in and want to know more about the function and development of mitigation.

Do you interview clients to develop mitigation, then memorialize that mitigation in writing through story telling for a compelling case outcome? This training course provides in-depth opportunities to investigate aspects of our clients’ lives and the environments in which they live or grew up in order to create compelling writing for mitigation.

In this course participants will engage in strategic training which includes the intersectionality of and use of self in mitigation development, client-centered representation advocacy, environmental and community factors impacting clients, report writing, and the inclusion of special topics to understand and explain a client’s history. You are encouraged to have a case in mind (though not required) to explore how individual, community, and social determinant elements discussed in the course impact a specific client. The capstone project at the conclusion of the course will require you to prepare a report and summary presentation that relies on the content learned from the modules through this course.

Course length and time expectations for participants
This course will last five weeks meeting on Wednesdays Each week will involve:

• Some course videos and reading to be done at your convenience (~ 1 hour)
• Participate in course online forum (~ 30 minutes)
• Live instruction and small groups ( ~ 90 minutes) (5 meetings – see below)
• The final work product for this course is creation of a sample sentencing memorandum

Each meeting will include a large group presentation and small group discussion

Course Description:
You want the best possible outcome for your client and zealous advocacy includes learning the details of your client’s life to compel the court to make a just and fair ruling appropriate for your client’s needs, not just their actions. With the goal of reducing your client’s sentence and emphasizing that incarceration or lengthy incarceration will not serve anyone well, learning and using the details of your client’s life culminates in mitigation presented to the court.

This five-session course for attorneys, investigators, and paralegals new to mitigation development in their legal case, will approach ways to develop mitigation from the start of the criminal case assignment. You will learn how to begin the development of mitigation from the initial client interview, how to look for mitigation themes, explore specific mitigation topics that may be relevant to representation, how to get the most from your expert and collateral witnesses, how to prepare your client for allocution, and finally how to write the sentencing memorandum. This course is geared to new legal practitioners who do not have social workers, sentencing advocates, or dispositional specialists in-office, but need to develop rich, robust mitigation to zealously advocate for merciful sentencing for your clients.

Target Audience:
Attorneys new to mitigation, attorneys who are interested in producing a sentencing memorandum, investigators and paralegals interested in interview clients for mitigation, and attorneys who want to enhance their interviewing skills to develop mitigation from the start of the case. *Note: This course differs from the Critical Examination of Mitigation and Our Role in Uncovering It! course as the focus is on interviewing for mitigation and developing a sentencing memorandum. For a more in-depth course on how to spot and develop mitigation, consider the Critical Examination course.

Stephanne Thornton
Stephanne Cline Thornton is the Clinical Director for the West Virginia Judicial and Lawyer Assistance Program and owner of Transform Legal, focusing on mitigation and training for legal advocates. She is a Licensed Independent Clinical Social Worker and Master Addiction Counselor focusing on access to trauma and substance use disorder treatment to ensure the health and well-being of affected individuals including practitioners of the law. Stephanne has two decades of mitigation experience including in Capital defense work and feels privileged to focus on the well-being and sustainability of legal practitioners because she has seen how this work can take a toll on its zealous advocates. Stephanne earned a Master of Divinity degree from Emory University Candler School of Theology in the Honors Program, and a Master of Social Work degree from the University of Georgia. She has been clinically licensed as a social worker and addictions counselor since 2004 and additionally holds certificates as Certified Addiction Counselor Level III, Certified Clinical Trauma Professional, and Certified Sex Offender Treatment Provider. Stephanne’s clinical training background is in trauma, and she is on the Trauma-Informed Care Network Speakers Bureau and presents on trauma, substance use, and self-care across the state and at national conferences. Stephanne is a West Virginia State Advisory Committee Member to the United States Commission on Civil Rights, Co-Chair of the Court Systems and Criminal Justice Populations Subcommittee to the Governor’s Council on Substance Abuse Prevention and Treatment, and is a Board Member on the West Virginia Board of Social Work. She also sits on other non-profit boards.

Target Audience

• Public defenders, social workers, investigators, paralegals or anyone in a public defender office who works with clients
• People who want know the basics of working with trans clients and want to increase their skills even further.
• People who know the basics of working with trans clients but are learning to be a resource to other public defenders regarding trans clients or conduct trainings on working with trans clients.

 Course length and time expectations for participants

This course will last six weeks. Each week will involve:

• Some course videos and reading to be done at your convenience (~ 1 hour)
• Live instruction and small groups ( ~2 hours minutes)
• Preparation to facilitate or lead group activities and exercises in order to receive feedback – 30 minutes
• During the last week, there will be less video content to review but you will need to spend approximately 2 hours working on a project or workshopping a case to prepare for the small group session.

Note: This class is designed for people who already want to support and affirm their trans and non-binary clients and want to learn how to do it better – it is not a good fit for people who do not already value inclusion.

Learning Objectives

• Participants will be confident with basic terminology and concepts relating to sexual orientation and gender identity.
• Participants will be able to explain to others how and why to ask their clients what name and pronouns they would like to use in various situations. Participants will be able to answer basic questions that challenge colleagues who are new to working with transgender or non-binary clients.
• Participants will be familiar with common barriers faced by trans and non-binary clients in the criminal legal system
• Participants will be able to demonstrate and explain multiple client-centered strategies for addressing disrespect to a transgender person when practicing in a small group
• Participants will understand how to balance confidentiality and disclosure when working with transgender clients
• Participants will be able to deliver basic content about transgender people in a short interactive presentation
• Participants will be able to facilitate a short activity related to working with transgender clients
• Participants will able to identify, implement and instruct others on verbal and non-verbal signals that they are open and affirming toward trans, non-binary and LGBQ clients.
• Participants will know what to do when they mistakenly misgender a client, colleague or friend.
• Participants will be able to identify (and hopefully advocate for) at least one way their office could change in order to be more welcoming to trans or non-binary and LGBQ clients.

Led by Jennifer Friedman, Julia Leighton, Maneka Sinha, and Janis Puracal

Forensic “science” often plays a key role in criminal prosecutions. Because of the “CSI Effect” prosecutors seek out the forensic evidence jurors expect to hear. But how much science is at the foundation of the disciplines that were developed not in research or medical institutions but instead by law enforcement for the purpose of “solving crimes.”

To appreciate the limits and weaknesses of forensic evidence we must first understand the role of empirical testing, study design and peer review in establishing the scientific validity of a particular method or technique.

In this newly revised four-week course we will spend the first three weeks, using firearms and toolmark examination (FATM) as the example, developing the building blocks for effectively challenging the foundational validity of the discipline.  We will learn how to evaluate the underlying research how to argue for limiting the FATM examiner’s testimony to only that which is scientifically defensible.  To that end, we will address:

·                How to overcome the legal obstacles that exist in your jurisdiction.

·                The AFTE theory of Identification and it’s circular and subjective nature.

·                What science demands and what the courts should embrace before admitting the result of an examination – empirical testing demonstrating the method’s performance, not the training and experience of the examiner.

·                What counts as sound empirical testing and what does not.

·                How to interpret the research data and what’s cheating and what isn’t.

You will learn that FATM examination has no meaningful standards, and has a higher error rate and greater inconsistency than previously understood.

In the fourth week we will focus on challenging the forensic examination in a specific case by assessing:

·                Internal validation, proficiency testing and cognitive bias – is your lab doing it right?

You will learn how to build an effective challenge to the forensic examination conducted in your  case by demonstrating that the method was not validly applied in your case.