Promoting a fair and just criminal justice system in Texas

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 (5) 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.

In 1999 Carlos began defending capital defendants. Of the three death penalty cases which 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 which Carlos has handled as lead counsel have resulted in plea bargains.

In 2003, Carlos received the Austin Criminal Defense Lawyers Association Ambassador Award. In his 2006 book, Litigating in the Shadow of Death, the late Welsh S. White featured three cases, including Carlos’ first capital case, the Martin Gonzalez serial killer case, to illustrate different kinds of successful arguments in aggravated capital cases. Carlos is a frequent speaker at CLE seminars, speaking on varied capital and non-capital defense topics.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Kirsten Brix Jacobvitz graduated from the Illinois Institute of Technology/Chicago-Kent College of Law as valedictorian in January 1985. Primarily a commercial lawyer, she practiced in Chicago, Singapore and Providence, Rhode Island. After moving to Texas she joined Dell, Inc. where she concentrated on building the Asia Pacific Law Department in Penang, Malaysia, and later Dell's United States export regulations practice. After leaving Dell, she obtained her secondary education certificate and taught in East Austin. In 2003 she joined Texas Defender Service. She assists the organization with its publications and data collection, conducting research and editing reports. She also provides research and analysis for ongoing cases through the Capital Trial Project. Kirsten received her certificate in professional ethics from Texas State University, and is pursuing her Ph.D. in Adult Education from Texas State. She is a continuing legal education lecturer in ethics, and has lectured in Texas and other states for several years.

Jared Tyler graduated magna cum laude from the University of Houston Law Center in 2003 and joined the Texas Innocence Network in the summer of 2003. In his capacity as Deputy Director, he has represented both capital and non-capital defendants in post-conviction proceedings in state and federal court. He has taught a course on innocence investigations at the University of Houston Law Center and supervises students in capital case investigations. He joined Texas Defender Service as a staff attorney in 2006 and currently works with Texas Defender Service on a contract basis. Recent published articles include Is It Constitutional to Execute Someone Who Is Innocent (And If It Isn’t, How Can It Be Stopped Following House v. Bell)? with David R. Dow; Jared Tyler; Frances Bourliot; Jennifer Jeans. 42 Tulsa L. Rev. 277 (Winter 2006).