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Kathryn M. Kase has represented capital clients at trial the state courts of Texas and New York, and has served as learned counsel in federal court. Her capital defense work has addressed the complexities of intellectual disability, mental illness, and international law. She also consults with and assists trial-level defense teams, with a special focus on teams representing Mexican nationals who are facing the death penalty in the United States.
She 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. After a period in private practice in San Antonio and later in Albany, New York, she joined Texas Defender Service in 2002.
Ms. Kase is a frequent speaker, in Texas and nationally, at CLE seminars devoted to capital defense. She also is a faculty member of the National Criminal Defense College in Macon, Georgia, 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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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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Cathryn Crawford, who joined TDS as the Post-Conviction Director in October 2012, has represented indigent defendants in trial and appellate courts for over a decade. She recently returned to her native state of Texas from Chicago, where she was on the faculty of the Northwestern University School of Law. From 1998-2011, Ms. Crawford served as a clinical professor and a staff attorney at Northwestern’s Bluhm Legal Clinic, where she engaged in post-conviction capital representation, post-conviction non-capital representation, and the defense of adults and teenagers charged with serious felonies in criminal court. Through her cases, Ms. Crawford focused on challenging reactionary and/or unconstitutional laws, exposing and addressing police and prosecutorial misconduct, excluding “junk science” and promoting the use of legitimate social, psychological and behavioral science. At Northwestern, Ms. Crawford also taught Ethics, Interviewing and Investigations, and various seminars. In 2007, while on leave from Northwestern, she served as the inaugural director of New Orleans’ Juvenile Regional Services, an independent juvenile public defender office created post-Katrina. During another leave, she worked on policy advocacy and reform at the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Ms. Crawford lectures extensively on juvenile and criminal justice issues. She is on the faculty of the National Institute of Trial Advocacy and has trained countless attorneys across the nation in trial skills and substantive areas. She is the editor of Promise Unfulfilled: Juvenile Justice in America, (Int'l. Debate Educ. Assn. Pr., June 2012). She received her BA (cum laude) in Government from the University of Texas at Dallas and her JD (cum laude) from Northwestern University School of Law. She is licensed to practice law in Texas and Illinois. |
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Kelly Josh received a Bachelor of Arts in government from the University of Texas at Austin in 2008 and a Master of Public Affairs from the LBJ School of Public Affairs in 2012. 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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Rebecca Bernhardt received her law degree from Yale Law School in 1997. She served as a law clerk for Senior U.S. District Judge William Wayne Justice, Eastern District of Texas. She practiced federal civil rights, immigration and labor law in West Texas and South Texas until 2004. She then worked as a Senior Staff Attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union Foundation, engaged in federal and state court litigation addressing racial disparities and due process violations in drug law enforcement. Starting in 2006, she represented the American Civil Liberties Union of Texas (ACLU of Texas) at the Texas State Legislature on immigration, border security, privacy, criminal justice and police practices. From 2007 to 2010 she served as Policy Director for the ACLU of Texas. She joined Texas Defender Service as Policy Director in April 2010. She is licensed to practice law in Texas and California (inactive) and admitted to practice before the U.S. District Courts for the Northern, Southern and Western Districts of Texas and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. |
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Carlos Garcia graduated from the University of Texas School of Law in 1988 and received his law license in 1989. After practicing felony prosecution for five years in Starr and Travis Counties, he opened his law practice in Austin, Texas. From 2006 to 2010, when he joined TDS, he was a partner in Garcia & True, P.C., practicing criminal defense with Austin attorney Nicole L. True.
Carlos began defending capital defendants in 1999. Of the three death penalty cases he tried as lead counsel, the jury assessed life in two and acquitted his client in the third. Since then, one of the two life verdicts has been reversed and subsequently dismissed by the prosecution. Since 2002, all other capital cases in which Mr. Garcia has served as lead counsel have resulted in plea bargains. At TDS, Mr. Garcia works as 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. Mr. Garcia is a frequent speaker at CLE seminars, speaking on varied capital and non-capital defense topics. He is licensed to practice law in the State of 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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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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Laura Ferry received her law degree, cum laude, 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 2005 to 2007. As a Prettyman Fellow, she represented indigent defendants 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. She was then a staff attorney at the Public Defender Service for the District of Columbia until she joined the Texas Defender Service in 2009. At TDS, Ms. Ferry represents indigent death row inmates in post-conviction proceedings and 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. Ms. Ferry is admitted to practice law in the District of Columbia, Maryland, and Texas and is admitted to practice before the U.S. District Courts for the Southern and Northern Districts of Texas.
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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. Ms. Lagarda joined TDS in 2006 as the recipient of a two-year fellowship
from
Reprieve, where her work focused on monitoring cases of death-sentenced
prisoners in Texas and providing assistance to appointed lawyers in
state habeas proceedings, including the development of mitigating
evidence. Ms. Lagarda now represents indigent death row inmates in
post-conviction proceedings and is 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 Southern District of Texas. |
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Alexandr Satanovsky received a law degree from King Hall School of Law at the University of California, Davis in 2011. At Davis, Alex participated in the King Hall Civil Rights Clinic, served as a board member of the King Hall National Lawyers Guild, and was a Senior Articles Editor at the UC Davis Journal of International Law and Policy. He interned at the Arkansas Federal Public Defender's Capital Habeas Unit, through the Haywood Burns Memorial Fellowship for Social and Economic Justice. He also spent one year as a felony trial intern at the Federal Public Defender's for the Eastern District of California. After graduating law school in the top 15 percent of his class, he was a volunteer attorney at the California Appellate Project, a non-profit resource center assisting condemned prisoners in direct and collateral review of their convictions and sentences. Prior to joining TDS, he worked at the Arizona Innocence Project, a clinical program at Northern Arizona University seeking to uncover and overturn wrongful convictions. |
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Gerald Bennett received a Bachelor of Arts Degree in communications from Prairie View A&M University and a Master of Science Degree in Clinical Sociology from Texas Southern University. He has 11 years executive management experience and has been the CEO of the Boys and Girls Club of Victoria, Texas and the United Way of Odessa, Texas. Recently, Gerald was the Director of Development and Communications for the Greater East End Management, an organization focusing on neighborhood revitalization and economic development in Houston’s east end. |
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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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Suzana Trevino graduated from the Blackstone School of Law in Dallas,
Texas in 1996 and is certified in Bilingual Proficiency
Interpreter/Translator in Spanish from the California State University
at Sacramento. Ms. Trevino began her career in 1996 advocating for
death row inmates with the Office of the State Public Defender (OSPD) in
San Francisco, California. After leaving OSPD as a Senior Legal
Analyst in 2006, Suzana joined the Texas RioGrande Legal Aid Regional
Public Defender’s Office in Del Rio, Texas as an Investigator. Suzana is
deeply committed to social justice issues and criminal defense. She
joined Texas Defender Service as a Mitigation Specialist in June of 2008 |
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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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Sandy Thomas graduated from The University of Texas at Austin with a degree in Government, and minor in Communication Studies in May 2012. While at UT Austin, Sandy received an interdisciplinary certificate in Ethics and Leadership, with a concentration in Social Justice, Politics, and Law. Before joining Texas Defender Service as a Pre-Law Fellow in November 2012, Sandy interned for the Leadership Conference for Civil and Human Rights. Sandy was a Spring 2012 Bill Archer Fellow. After her fellowship Sandy plans to attend law school. |
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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. He now works with TDS on a contract basis. |
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Lee Kovarsky graduated from the University of Virginia School of Law in 2004, where he was an Articles Editor for the Virginia Law Review and an Olin Scholar. Prior to law school, he was a Senior Data Analytics Associate at what is now the Microsoft ad serving platform. After law school, he clerked for the
Honorable Jerry E. Smith on the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth
Circuit and worked in private practice as a Supreme Court and appellate
practitioner. In 2009, Mr. Kovarsky began teaching law, as an Acting Assistant Professor of Law at New York University School of Law. He is currently an Assistant Professor of Law at the University of Maryland School of Law and works with Texas Defender Service on a contract basis. He is licensed to practice law in New York and Texas and is admitted to practice before the U.S. District Court for Southern District of Texas, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second, Fifth and Federal Circuits and U.S. Supreme Court. |
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