About the Event

More than 30 years after the Court's landmark decision in Furman v. Georgia, 408 U.S. 238 (1972), the debate over the limits and constitutionality of capital punishment shows no signs of abating. To the contrary, the Court found itself revisiting the death penalty in an astonishing 12 of the docket's 75 cases during the 2004 Term alone. This year the Division for Public Education's Preview of United States Supreme Court Cases will present an expert panel to analyze how the Court tackled that barrage of death penalty related questions—questions that ranged from whether the juvenile death penalty is cruel and unusual to the circumstances in which jurors must be told that life-without-parole is an alternative sentence to death.

This is a free CLE program.

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Moderator

Linda Greenhouse

Linda Greenhouse has been the Supreme Court correspondent for the New York Times since 1978. In 1990, she was named a Senior Writer for the Times. In other assignments for the Times, she has also covered Congress and the New York State legislature.

She was initially hired by the columnist James Reston as his assistant, after graduating in 1968 from Radcliffe College at Harvard, where she served as an editor of the Harvard Crimson and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. Immediately prior to covering the Court, she spent a year at Yale Law School on a Ford Foundation fellowship (1977-78) and earned the degree of Master of Studies in Law. She has honorary degrees from Georgetown, Brown, Colgate, and Northeastern Universities and from the University of Miami and the City University of New York. Read more

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Confirmed Panelists

Richard A. Devine

Now in his ninth year as Cook County State's Attorney, Dick Devine has had a long history of public service. Most recently he was re-elected for a third term as Cook County State's Attorney in November 2004, when he won almost 80 percent of the vote countywide. In the City of Chicago alone, Mr. Devine won more than 87 percent of the vote, a tribute to his proven ability to balance justice with compassion and advocacy with fairness.

During his tenure, Mr. Devine established the office's first Domestic Violence Unit, now nationally acclaimed. His victim/witness program was singled out as a model by the Department of Justice for its support of victims and their families. He led the reform of the juvenile justice system in Illinois, and his Narcotics Bureau has targeted drug sales through the prosecution of street corner conspiracies and major dealers, while providing treatment for first-time, non-violent offenders. Mr. Devine has also created a five-office Community Prosecutions Unit, a DNA Review Unit, and a Cold Case Unit to investigate unsolved murders. Read more

Christina Swarns

Christina Swarns is the Director of the Criminal Justice Project of the NAACP Legal Defense & Education Fund, Inc. In that capacity, Ms. Swarns represents individuals charged and/or convicted of criminal and capital offenses, prepares amicus briefs to various courts including the United States Supreme Court, and assists in the coordination of nation-wide strategies for criminal justice reform. For example, this term, Ms. Swarns filed amicus briefs to the United States Supreme Court in Roper v. Simmons (juvenile death penalty), Johnson v. California (racial discrimination in the exercise of peremptory challenges) and Miller-El v. Dretke (same). Ms. Swarns is also coordinating LDF's Race and Criminal Justice Reform Initiative: a one-year project designed to identify innovative litigation strategies to challenge the ways in which criminal justice laws and policies detrimentally affect the African American community.

Prior to joining LDF, Ms. Swarns worked as a Supervising Assistant Federal Defender in the Capital Habeas Corpus Unit of the Philadelphia Federal Defender. Ms. Swarns represented numerous Pennsylvania death sentenced prisoners in their state post-conviction and federal habeas corpus appeals. Ms. Swarns was one of the attorneys who represented Nicholas Yarris, the first death sentenced prisoner in Pennsylvania to be exonerated by DNA evidence. Additionally, Ms. Swarns secured new trials in Laird v. Horn, Faulkner v. Horn, and Wilson v. Beard and won new capital sentencings in Commonwealth v. Reyes and Commonwealth v. Chambers. Read more

Kathy Swedlow

Kathy Swedlow is an Associate Professor of Law and Co-Director of the Innocence Project at Thomas M. Cooley Law School in Lansing, Michigan. Since joining the Cooley faculty in 2001, Professor Swedlow has taught Criminal Law, Criminal Procedure, Death Penalty Law, and Civil Procedure. She has also directed the Cooley Innocence Project since its inception, and served as co-counsel in the only successful DNA exoneration case under Michigan's post-conviction DNA testing statute.

After graduating from law school, Professor Swedlow clerked in the United States Courts of Appeal for the Second and Third Circuits. From 1996 to 2002, she represented death sentenced prisoners from the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, working for four years as an Assistant Federal Defender with the Defender Association of Philadelphia, Capital Habeas Corpus Unit. Read more

Michael J. Waller

Michael J. Waller is the Lake County State's Attorney. He received his Bachelor of Arts Degree from the University of Notre Dame in 1970 and his Juris Doctorate Degree from the University of Illinois in 1973, graduating with honors as a member of the Order of the Coif.

Mr. Waller served as a Lake County Assistant State's Attorney from 1973 to 1979. From 1979 to 1986, he was in the private practice of law in Waukegan. In 1986 he returned to the Lake County State's Attorney's Office as Chief Deputy. Mr. Waller was appointed State's Attorney of Lake County in 1990. He was elected State's Attorney in 1992 and re-elected in 1996, 2000, and 2004. Read more

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Sponsors/Co-sponsors

Sponsor

Division for Public Education

Co-sponsors

ABA Death Penalty Representation Project
Criminal Justice Section
Section on Individual Rights and Responsibilities
Young Lawyers Division