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David R. Dow graduated from Rice University with a Bachelor of Arts in history and received a law degree and Master of Arts from Yale University. He served as a law clerk for the Honorable Carolyn Dineen King, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit and practiced commercial litigation for two years before joining the faculty at the University of Houston Law Center in 1988, where he is now a University Distinguished Professor of Law. Dow has represented death-sentenced inmates since the late 1980s in all stages of appeals, including direct appeal, state habeas, and federal habeas. He is the author of five books, including The Autobiography of an Execution, and more than 100 articles and essays. |
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John Niland graduated from the University of Texas Law School in 1971. From 1971 through 1984 he practiced in El Paso where he was President of the El Paso Young Lawyers Association and chosen Outstanding Young Lawyer. He served as a member of the Board of Directors of the Texas Young Lawyers. He practiced law in Kentucky from 1992 until May of 2000 during which time he was contract manager, directing attorney and regional manager for Kentucky's Department of Public Advocacy. Since May of 2000 he has served as Director of the Capital Trial Project at the Texas Defender Service. He has also served as an adjunct professor at the University of Texas School of Social Work. He is licensed to practice law in Texas.
Mr. Niland was the 2000 Kentucky Department of Public Advocacy’s Gideon Award recipient and was named the 2005 Public Citizen of the Year by the Austin Chapter of the National Association of Social Workers of Texas. He was named among Texas Super Lawyers in Criminal Law in 2005 and received the Robert Louis Cohen award from the New York Criminal Bar Association in 2009 and the President’s Award from the Texas Criminal Defense Lawyers Association.. The Center for American & International Law conferred upon Mr. Niland and fellow recipient Phillip Wischkaemper the award formerly known as the Atticus Finch Award in May 2010. In 2010, the award was renamed the Niland/Wischkaemper Award to permanently honor Mr. Niland and Mr. Wischkaemper for their outstanding contributions to capital defense throughout their careers. |
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Greg Wiercioch received his law degree from the Washington and Lee School of Law in Lexington, Virginia in 1992. After law school he served as a law clerk for U.S. District Judge Jerry Buchmeyer, Northern District of Texas. Since then he has worked exclusively on the post-conviction cases of indigent death row inmates, first with the Texas Resource Center and since 1995, for Texas Defender Service. He is licensed to practice law in Texas and admitted to practice before the U.S. District Court for the Northern, Southern and Western Districts of Texas, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit and the U.S. Supreme Court. Mr. Wiercioch successfully argued Panetti vs. Quarterman before the U.S. Supreme Court in 2007. |
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Kathryn M. Kase received a law degree, cum laude, in 1990, from St. Mary's University School of Law, where she was an Articles Editor for the St. Mary's Law Journal. Before joining Texas Defender Service in 2002, she practiced criminal defense with Crane, Greene & Parente in Albany, New York. She served on the board of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers from 1998 to 2006, and is a past-president of the New York State Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers. She is a faculty member of the National Criminal Defense College and NACDL's Capital Voir Dire College. In 2002, the Criminal Justice Section of the New York State Bar Association named her the Outstanding Criminal Practitioner. In May 2005, Ms. Kase was elected to membership in the American Law Institute. She is licensed to practice law in Texas, New York and the District of Columbia, and she is admitted to practice in a number of federal courts, including the Southern District of Texas, the Southern District of New York and the U.S. Supreme Court. |
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Alma Lagarda received a law degree from Boalt Hall School of Law at the University of California, Berkeley in 2005. She participated in the Boalt Hall’s Death Penalty Clinic and served as Co-Editor-in-Chief of the Berkeley La Raza Law Journal. During law school she interned at Texas Defender Service through the University of San Francisco's Keta Taylor Colby Death Penalty Project, which sends law students each summer to work with capital defense attorneys in the Southern United States. Upon graduation she was the recipient of a two-year fellowship from Reprieve and has continued with Texas Defender Service after the completion of her fellowship. Ms. Lagarda screens new arrivals on Texas’ death row to identify cases with meritorious issues and provides assistance to appointed lawyers in state habeas proceedings. She is licensed in Texas. |
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Kate Black received her law degree from the University of Denver in 2008. During law school she interned with the Office of the Colorado State Public Defender and the Gulf Region Advocacy Center and clerked for Magistrate Judge Craig B. Shaffer of the District of Colorado. After law school she received a one-year Reprieve Fellowship at Texas Defender Service to research the use of prosecution experts in death penalty trials who speculate whether a particular defendant will be a future danger. As a staff attorney, she now represents indigent death row inmates in post-conviction proceedings. She is licensed to practice law in Texas and the District of Columbia and is admitted to practice before the U.S. District Courts for the Eastern, Northern and Southern Districts of Texas and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. |
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Laura Ferry received a law degree from Harvard Law School in 2004. She then clerked for U.S. District Judge Nancy Gertner, District of Massachusetts. She completed the E. Barrett Prettyman Fellowship at Georgetown University Law Center from 2006 to 2008. While at Georgetown, she represented indigent persons accused of felony and misdemeanor offenses in the District of Columbia, supervised third year law students in the Georgetown Criminal Justice Clinic, and received an LL.M. degree. Prior to joining Texas Defender Service in 2009, she also practiced criminal law at the Public Defender Service for the District of Columbia, representing both juveniles and adults charged with felonies and misdemeanor offenses. She is admitted to practice law in the District of Columbia, Maryland, and Texas. |
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Paul E. Mansur received a law degree with honors from the University of Houston Law Center in 1995, where he was an Articles Editor for the Houston Law Review. He then served as a law clerk for Justice Ann Crawford McClure on the Court of Appeals for the Eighth Judicial District of Texas at El Paso, and from 1996 to 1997, served as a law clerk for Justice Eric Andell on the Court of Appeals for the First Judicial District of Texas at Houston. After working for a small civil litigation firm in Dallas, he opened a law practice in his hometown of Denver City, Texas, concentrating primarily on criminal defense. For the last ten years, his practice has been devoted primarily to representing individuals on appeal and in post-conviction. He has actively represented individuals on Texas death row since 2004. He is licensed to practice law in Texas and admitted to practice before the U.S. District Courts for the Northern and Southern Districts of Texas, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, and in the U.S. Supreme Court. He joined Texas Defender Service as a staff attorney in March 2010. |
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Ben Smiley received a law degree from Harvard Law School in 2009. He is currently on deferral from the New York City office of the law firm Morrison Foerster. In law school he interned in the Miami Dade State Attorney's Office. He joined Texas Defender Service in September 2009, where he works primarily in the habeas division. He is licensed to practice law in Texas. |
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Naomi E. Terr received a Master of Science in Social Work from the University of Texas at Austin in 1993 and is a licensed Master Social Worker. She received a law degree from Cornell Law School in 2001. Upon graduation she received a two-year Equal Justice Works fellowship with Texas Defender Service. As an Equal Justice Works Fellow, she developed and implemented a project to incorporate social work students into capital defense teams. In 2004 she moved to private practice and rejoined Texas Defender Service in 2009.
Ms. Terr has devoted her legal practice exclusively to death penalty defense. A major focus of her work is developing mitigation evidence in capital cases. She has worked extensively in cases with defendants who show evidence of mental retardation. She is also a program attorney with the Mexican Capital Legal Assistance Program, a program funded by the Foreign Ministry of Mexico to assist Mexican nationals facing the death penalty in the United States. She is licensed to practice law in Texas and admitted to practice before the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. |
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Peter Walker graduated in 2009 from the University of Houston Law Center. During law school, he interned with Texas Defender Service, the Capital Habeas Unit of the Federal Community Defender for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, and the Federal Public Defender for the Southern District of Texas. He also volunteered with the Texas Innocence Network. He joined TDS as a staff attorney in November of 2009. |
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Kelly Josh received her Bachelor of Arts in government from the University of Texas at Austin in 2008 and is currently a Master of Public Affairs candidate at the LBJ School of Public Affairs. She joined Texas Defender Service in 2005 after she returned to Texas from 12 years working in Central America where she monitored the construction of civilian police forces and efforts to reform national judicial systems. While in Central America she worked on projects throughout the region and from 2000 to 2005 was the Deputy Chief of Party for a USAID project focusing on democratic development, transparency in governance and civil society strengthening. |
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Jessica Lindley received a Bachelor of Science in Criminal Justice from the University of North Texas in 1996. She has over 15 years of combined experience in fundraising, marketing/development, government and health care consulting. She has worked as a Sentencing Specialist for the North Carolina State Administration of the Courts and most recently was Director of Grants with United Way Capital Area and Vice-President of Development with Meals on Wheels. Jessica has worked for justice and social reform organizations including New Options for Violent Offenders (NOVO), Common Cause, Basic Needs Coalition of Central Texas, Texas Council on Offenders with Mental Impairments and the Community Action Network. Jessica is a member of the Austin Chapter of the Association of Fundraising Professionals, Austin's Campaign for Philanthropy, St. David’s Community Health Foundation and the Volunteer Healthcare Clinic. She joined Texas Defender Service in 2008. |
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Suzana Trevino received a paralegal certificate from the Blackstone School of Law in Dallas, Texas in 1996 and studied Spanish at California State University at Sacramento in 2000. She began her career advocating for death row inmates in 1996 as a volunteer with the Office of the California State Public Defender (OSPD) in San Francisco, California. Over the next ten years, she helped develop the legal analyst position for the OSPD. Through Ms. Trevino's work, the OSPD came to rely on legal analysts to investigate guilt and penalty issues in capital cases; gather, maintain, and organize case-related documents; serve as the primary point of contact for defendants; and translate documents and in-person interviews. In 2006 Ms. Trevino joined the Texas RioGrande Legal Aid, Inc. Regional Public Defender Office in Del Rio, Texas as an investigator. At the Regional Public Defender she was responsible for pre-trial investigation in juvenile, misdemeanor and felony cases. She also organized and managed inmate tracking, and served as a translator. She joined Texas Defender Service as mitigation specialist in June of 2008. |
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Neil Hartley attended Auburn University where he majored in criminal justice and minored in psychology. He has been involved in capital litigation since 1989 when he began working as the coordinator of a non-profit mitigation office in Alabama. The office provided investigative assistance to appointed counsel in trial-level capital cases state-wide and focused on the development of penalty phase evidence. In 1992 he began working in post-conviction mitigation with the Texas Resource Center. Later, he worked as an independent contractor with the United States Administrative Office of Courts on federal capital trials. During his career he has been involved in over 200 capital cases, both at trial and in post-conviction. He joined Texas Defender Service in July 2009. |
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Ariell Hardy graduated from The University of Texas at Austin with a Bachelor of Science in Human Development and Family Sciences. She received a Master of Science in Social Work from Columbia University in 2008. While at Columbia University she interned with the Neighborhood Defender Service of Harlem. After graduation, she spent a year working with elementary school children and their families as a caseworker with Communities in Schools of Central Texas. Ms. Hardy joined Texas Defender Service in 2009. As a licensed Master Social Worker and mitigation specialist, Ms. Hardy serves a dual role in understanding how a client’s social history and mental health effect his/her behavior, while also determining the mitigating factors to highlight in each case. |
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Randi Chavez received a Master of Science in Social Work in 2003. While completing her graduate degree she interned at Texas Defender Service as a mitigation specialist. Upon graduation, she was hired as the first full-time mitigation specialist for the Gulf Region Advocacy Center (GRACE) and later worked independently as a mitigation specialist at both the trial and post-conviction levels. She then honed her clinical skills for three years as a clinical social worker in an inpatient psychiatric hospital in Austin, Texas. She returned to Texas Defender Service in December of 2009 as a mitigation specialist with the Capital Trial Project. |
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Gloria Flores received an Associate Applied Science Legal Assistant Degree in Legal Technology from the Houston Community College. She worked for 22 years for Transco/Williams, as a Data Entry Operator, a Gas Scheduling Administrative Assistant and as a Gas System Scheduling Analyst. After leaving Transco/Williams, she volunteered as a legal administrative assistant for the Texas Attorney General Child Support Bankruptcy Division before joining Texas Defender Service in 2004. |
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Melisa Waters received an Associate of Applied Science in Paralegal Studies from Pitt Community College in Greenville, North Carolina in 1994 and a Bachelor of Science in Justice and Policy Studies from Guilford College in Greensboro, North Carolina in 2004. She has 16 years of paralegal experience and has been committed to social justice issues since childhood. She is trained in victim/offender mediation and dedicates her spare time volunteering in the areas of conflict transformation, community building, and restorative justice. She joined Texas Defender Service in 2006. |
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Rindy Fox began her work in Bryan-College Station, TX where she advocated for people living with mental retardation, both on a local and state level. When the HIV/AIDS crisis hit, she provided support and case management to people battling the disease at AIDS Services of Brazos Valley. She has also worked as a case manager at AIDS Services of Austin and for the Austin-Travis County MHMR C.A.R.E. Program. There she provided case management and specialized in housing support for people living with HIV, substance abuse, mental illness, mental retardation and homelessness. Throughout her career in the social work field, she has acquired substantial knowledge about mental retardation, mental illness, physical abuse, substance abuse, and incarceration. She uses this knowledge to assist Texas Defender Service’s clients as a paralegal. |
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