Justice Action Center
New York Law School
57 Worth Street
New York, NY 10013
T: 212.431.2314
F: 212.431.1864
E: jac@nyls.edu
New Orleans Post-Katrina: Rebuilding Criminal Defense
Thursday, February 15, 2007, at 12:50 p.m.
New YorkLawSchool, Room A400
On Thursday, February 15, 2007, the JusticeActionCenter presented New Orleans Post-Katrina: Rebuilding Criminal Defense. David Utter, Juvenile Justice Project of Louisiana; Stephen Singer, LoyolaLawSchool; and Leonard Noisette, Neighborhood Defender Service of Harlem, discussed the state of the New Orleans criminal justice system post-Katrina. Mr. Noisette discussed his research for a report prepared by the National Legal Aid & Defender Association that set forth a plan to ensure accountability and protect fairness in Louisiana's criminal courts. Mr. Singer discussed the difficult reform environment and what has and has not happened within the system since Katrina. Mr. Utter contrasted the different responses to the storm and the recovery by stakeholders in the criminal justice system and in the juvenile justice system.
Lunch was served to all attendees.
Leonard E. Noisette is Executive Director and co-founder of the Neighborhood Defender Service of Harlem (NDS). Before his work at NDS, Mr. Noisette was a supervising attorney with New York City Legal Aid Society's Criminal Appeals Bureau, and a staff attorney with both Legal Aid's Criminal Defense Division and its Criminal Appeals Bureau. He is a frequent lecturer for the criminal defense clinics at NYU, CUNY and Fordham law schools, and is a regular instructor of the annual Basic Trial Skills Program of the New York State Defenders Association.
Mr. Noisette was invited by Attorney General Janet Reno to be a keynote speaker at the Justice Department’s National Symposium on Indigent Defense in WashingtonDC in February 1999, and is a frequent participant in the Department’s planning committees to improve indigent defense and defense/prosecution relations. He is an active member of a number of bar associations and serves on the boards of the National Legal Aid & Defender Association, the New York State Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, and the New York State Defenders Association.
Mr. Noisette was recently part of a research team that prepared a report, "A Strategic Plan to Ensure Accountability & Protect Fairness in Louisiana's Criminal Courts," to the Louisiana State Bar Association and the Louisiana Bar Foundation on behalf of the National Legal Aid & Defender Association.
Stephen Singer is an Assistant Clinical Professor of Law at Loyola University College of Law in New Orleans, Louisiana where he supervises a criminal defense clinic handling defendants charged with felonies in Orleans Parish Criminal District Court. Currently, however, he and his Clinic have been loaned to the court system to lead the effort to rebuild, restructure, and reform the public defenders’ office in New Orleans, where Professor Singer is currently detailed from Loyola as Chief of Trials for the Orleans Public Defenders’ Office.
Professor Singer is a 1988 graduate of HarvardLawSchool. Prior to joining the faculty at LoyolaLawSchool, Professor Singer was an investigator, and from 1989 to 1997, an attorney at the Public Defender Service in Washington, D.C. Professor Singer also spent about five years at the non-profit LouisianaCapitalAssistanceCenter, representing capital defendants at the trial level throughout the State of Louisiana. He was also on the faculty at the University of Wyoming College of Law where he was director of the criminal defense clinic and taught constitutional criminal procedure.
David Utter is the Director and co-founder of the Juvenile Justice Project of Louisiana (JJPL), His entire legal career has been spent representing indigent individuals throughout the South. He worked as an attorney at the Southern Center for Human Rights in Atlanta representing prisoners in Alabama and Louisiana, challenging illegal treatment and conditions of confinement. He later moved to New Orleans, expanding his work to Mississippi. A year later, he and an associate opened the Louisiana Crisis Assistance Center to address defense of indigent persons facing the death penalty in Louisiana. In 1997, after Human Rights Watch and the US Department of Justice documented unspeakable violence and brutality in Louisiana’s juvenile prisons, Mr. Utter co-founded JJPL.
Mr. Utter and his staff at JJPL have defined advocacy in broad terms, utilizing class action litigation in federal court, individual representation on behalf of children in juvenile, media advocacy, legislative education and grass-roots organizing to both raise public awareness and change public policy. Last year their work culminated with the passage of the Juvenile Justice Reform Act of 2003, reform legislation that is nationally recognized as the most progressive and comprehensive juvenile justice legislation to pass in any state in years.
