DEATH ROW ATTORNEYS

The GW Law ACLU is presenting a panel of Death Row Attorneys as part of Human Rights Week. Tuesday, February 26 at 4pm. All three panelists are attorneys who work on death penalty cases and issues. They will be discussing their work on death penalty trials, their role in advocating against the death penalty, the current state of capital punishment in America, and the future of capital punishment in America. The panelists are:

Deborah Fleischaker, Director

Death Penalty Moratorium Implementation Project
American Bar Association

In this position, she encourages bar associations to press for moratoriums in their jurisdictions and encourages state government leaders to establish moratoriums and undertake detailed examinations of capital punishment laws and processes. She also teaches a class on capital punishment law as an adjunct professor at the University of Maryland School of Law. Prior to her work at the Project, Deborah served as the Campaign Coordinator for a U.S. Congressional campaign and worked at the Maryland General Assembly. She has worked in private practice as an associate at the Baltimore, Maryland firm of Brown, Goldstein & Levy LLP and as an Equal Justice Fellow at Public Citizens Congress Watch. Deborah earned her bachelors degree from Vanderbilt University and obtained her law degree from the University of Maryland.

Diann Rust-Tierney

Executive Director 
National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty

Diann Rust-Tierney comes to NCADP from the Capital Punishment Project of the American Civil Liberties Union, which she has directed since 1991. As ACLU’s lead strategist and spokeswoman on the death penalty, she helped develop and coordinate national strategy on capital punishment. Her efforts included expanding efforts to educate the public about the problems associated with the death penalty and building broad coalitions with new partners to help spread the abolitionist message. A former NCADP board member, Diann received her undergraduate degree in political science from the College of Wooster in Ohio and her law degree from the University of Maryland.

Ginger D. Anders

Associate

Jenner & Block

Ginger D. Anders is an associate in Jenner & Block’s Washington, DC office. She is a member of the Firm’s Litigation Department and Appellate and Supreme Court Practice. Since joining the Firm, Ms. Anders has participated in litigation matters before federal district and appellate courts, representing clients in copyright and commercial cases. Ms. Anders graduated summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from Yale University with a B.A. in East Asian Studies in 1999, where she also received the Fellow’s Prize. She received her J.D. in 2002 from Columbia Law School, where she was a Kent Scholar and an articles editor on the Columbia Law Review. Before joining the Firm, Ms. Anders served as a law clerk to Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the U.S. Supreme Court; the Honorable Sonia Sotomayor on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit; and the Honorable Gerard E. Lynch on the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. Ms. Anders is admitted to practice in the District of Columbia and New York.

Women of Human Rights Law Speakers

 

Jill Tauber

Skadden Fellow, Advancement Project DC

Jill Tauber came to Advancement Project in 2006 as a Skadden Fellow. Prior to that, she clerked for the Honorable Richard A. Paez on the Ninth Circuit United States Court of Appeals in Pasadena, California. Ms. Tauber is a graduate of Cornell University and Harvard Law School, where she was the Outreach Director of the Harvard Legal Aid Bureau. During law school, she also worked as a teaching fellow for Professor Lani Guinier and research assistance for Professor Christine Desan, and interned at the New York Legal Assistance Group and the Washington Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights & Urban Affairs

Lyn Beth Neylon

Human Rights Activist

Lyn Beth Neylon has been involved in the U.S. and internationally with social justice and human rights work as a community activist and as a lawyer for over 20 years. Recently, Ms. Neylon was the Legal and Gender Specialist for the Benin and Rwanda programs of the Women’s Legal Rights Initiative, a global USAID/Women in Development-funded program. Ms. Neylon was previously the Associate Director of the Washington Kurdish Institute in Washington, DC. She has had her own human rights consulting business, worked in the Federated States of Micronesia and the Republic of Palau, and founded and was co-executive director of the NGO Human Rights Access (HRX), where she later became the president of the board of directors. Ms. Neylon was also Director of Human Rights USA, a national human rights education initiative. Ms. Neylon earned her J.D. degree from the University of California at Hastings College of the Law (San Francisco), and an LL.M., with Distinction, in International and Comparative Law, with a concentration in international human rights law, from Georgetown University Law Center (Washington, DC). Ms. Neylon also attended the International Institute of Human Rights in Strasbourg, France, and has a BGS from Roosevelt University in Chicago.  

Muslim Law Society

Restoring Habeus: Representing Detainees at Guantanamo Bay

 

Carol Elder Bruce

Ms. Bruce received one of the 2007 Beacon of Justice Awards from the National Legal Aid & Defender Association for her pro bono representation of Guantanamo Bay detainees. Ms. Bruce also received, with other Guantanamo Bay detainee lawyers, the Frederick Douglass Human Rights Award from the Southern Center for Human Rights (November 2007). In 2005, she received from George Washington University Law School the Belva Ann Lockwood award given to distinguished woman alumnae of the law school.
Ms. Bruce is a Fellow of the American College of Trial Lawyers, widely considered to be the premier professional trial organization in America where Fellowship is extended by invitation only to experienced trial lawyers within the top 1% of the trial bar in the U.S. and Canada.  Ms. Bruce just completed a two year tenure as Chair of the College's International Committee (2005 – 2007).  She also is a Vice Chair of the White Collar Committee of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers.  She serves on the Honorary Board of the Innocence Project of the National Capital Region and on the George Washington University Law School Dean’s Board of Advisors.  Ms. Bruce also is a charter member of and Master in the Edward Bennett Williams American Inn of Court.

David J. Cynamon

David J. Cynamon, a partner at Pillsbury Winthrop in Washington, DC, represents the four remaining Kuwaiti detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, including Fawzi Al-Odah, the lead named plaintiff in Al Odah v. United States. Mr. Cynamon currently serves on the Board of Directors of the Washington Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights and Urban Affairs. In the past, he has co-chaired the Committee's Board.  He is a senior litigator with more than 30 years of experience in complex civil trial and appellate litigation, including class actions, corporate merger and acquisition litigation, commercial product liability cases, nuclear energy litigation, employment discrimination cases and insurance subrogation and defense actions. He has tried or argued jury and non-jury cases in federal and state courts in the District of Columbia, Maryland, Virginia, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, California, Illinois, Colorado and Arkansas. Mr. Cynamon also has briefed and argued appeals in most of the federal appellate circuits.

Tom Wilner

Of Guantanamo, Tom Wilner has written:
Very few outsiders are allowed to see the prisoners. The government has orchestrated some carefully controlled tours for the media and members of Congress, but has repeatedly refused to allow these visitors, representatives of the United Nations, human rights groups or nonmilitary doctors and psychiatrists to meet or speak with prisoners. So far, the only outsiders who have done so are representatives of the International Committee of the Red Cross — who are prohibited by their own rules from disclosing what they find — and lawyers for the prisoners.
I am one of those lawyers. I represent six Kuwaiti prisoners, each of whom has now spent nearly four years at Guantanamo. It took me 2 1/2 years to gain access to my clients, but now I have visited the prison camp 11 times in the last 14 months. What I have witnessed is a cruel and eerie netherworld of concrete and barbed wire that has become a daily nightmare for the nearly 500 people swept up after 9/11 who have been imprisoned without charges or trial for more than four years. It is truly our American gulag.

Local Heroes: Protecting Human Rights in D.C.

Art Spitzer,

Legal Director of the ACLU for the National Capital Area

Arthur Spitzer is the Legal Director of the American Civil Liberties Union of the National Capital Area. He is a native of New York City and a graduate of Cornell University (1971) and the Yale Law School (1974). He practiced for several years at Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering (now Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr LLP) before assuming his current position in 1980. He is a member of the American Law Institute and a Master at the Edward Coke Appellate Inn of Court. While at the ACLU, Mr. Spitzer has represented such interesting clients as Louis Farrakhan (when he was barred from attending D.C. Mayor Marion Barry's criminal trial in 1990), the Ku Klux Klan (when it was denied a permit to march along Constitution Avenue), and People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (when its design of a sad circus elephant was barred from the Party Animals display of donkeys and elephants on the District s sidewalks in 2002). He has worked on successful First Amendment challenges to D.C. s law limiting the size of campaign contributions, the Presidential Inaugural Committee s refusal to allow anti-abortion protesters to hold up their signs along the Inaugural Parade route, and the Capitol Police regulation that banned leafleting and other free speech activities at the foot of the Capitol steps. He argued Ake v. Oklahoma in the Supreme Court, which held that indigent criminal defendants are entitled to necessary trial and pre-trial expert assistance at government expense. Among his current matters are a lawsuit against Donald Rumsfeld and other military leaders seeking to establish their personal liability for torturing U.S. prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan, and a challenge to D.C. Fire Department grooming regulations that require Muslim and astafarian firefighters to violate their religious beliefs by shaving and cutting their hair. He is not related to New York Attorney General Elliot Spitzer. But he is glad that fewer people now have to ask him how to spell his name.

Joanna Day
Adjunct Professor, Supervising Attorney
D.C. Law Students in Court

Ms. Day joined LSIC in September 2006 after relocating from Houston. Prior to moving to Houston, Ms. Day was a staff attorney in the trial division of the Public Defender Service for the District of Columbia. During her tenure at the Public Defender Service, she represented juvenile and adults in all stages of the criminal process, from presentment through post-conviction matters. As a Supervising Attorney with D.C. Law Students in Court, Ms. Day supervises law students from the 5 participating schools, (American, Catholic, George Washington, Georgetown, and Howard universities). LSIC works to fight the consequences of poverty, to prevent homelessness and to alleviate inequalities in the justice system. Since 1970, LSIC has prevented thousands of DC residents from being wrongfully evicted, each year offering legal help to almost 7,000 Washingtonians.