Criminal Defense and Community Advocacy Clinic

Courses

• Criminal Defense and Community Advocacy Clinic - 4/3 credits
• Criminal Defense and Community Advocacy Clinic - 1/0 credits

Professor: Isis Misdary
Offered: Year-long course, both fall and spring semesters. Students must enroll for 5 credits in the fall and 3 credits in the spring. The fall includes 1 credit for the seminar and 4 credits for the clinic work. The spring includes 3 credits for the clinic work.
Credits: 8

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INTRODUCTION

The Criminal Defense and Community Advocacy Clinic is more than defending community members facing charges. It is wrestling with ways to break away from an unsustainable system and explore, with community members and community partners, where to go from here. The clinic shifts the focus from attorneys and the courts, from the system itself, to communities and their collective power and ingenuity.  In particular, the clinic shifts the focus to the community members most affected by the criminal legal system: those facing charges and their loved ones.  This is the goal of Participatory Defense, a movement that will guide students’ work in the clinic.

Participatory Defense is a community organizing model that shifts the “landscape of power” in the courts to community members facing charges and their families.  The community members and their families participate in the defense process, work alongside the defender in case preparation, and have a stronger presence in the court process through weekly, community-led meetings. Students will engage with a mission central to the model’s approach: ending mass incarceration, transforming “time served to time saved” from incarceration (one of the metrics of Participatory Defense).

Partnering with community and grassroots organizations, students will support the community in developing an active Participatory Defense practice. The clinic students will engage with this model by gaining knowledge and hands-on experience defending community members, including children and young people, facing criminal charges from police station representation and arraignment through hearings, trial, appeals, parole revocation, expungements, sealings, and executive clemency. In addition to the clinic work, students may be assigned to support advocacy and litigation in criminal defense with trial, civil rights or appellate offices in Newark.

Clinic students will engage in community and movement legal work, using the law for community members and legal tools to support building the power of movements to create enduring and transformative social change.  As a part of the clinic’s policy advocacy, clinic students will engage in projects in related areas of dire need, such as the rights of community members who are incarcerated, holistic reentry based in community-directed and community-led redistributive policies, accountability for – and reduction of –state-sanctioned violence, community member self-advocacy, community empowerment through public legal education projects and community-based solutions, including community-based public safety and collective care.

Informed by the approach of the global legal empowerment movement, the clinic’s work will be "community-directed and community-located," and clinic students will collaborate with community partners to run clinic programs.  Clinic students should be prepared to travel to − and work within − the neighborhood spaces of community partners, organizers and activists in Newark’s West, South and Central Wards.

Course Structure

The Criminal Defense and Community Advocacy Clinic has two complementary portions in the fall semester: a two-hour, 1-credit, weekly seminar and a 4-credit clinical component in which students work for 195 hours on clinic cases and projects, including a two- or three-day orientation prior to the start of classes. In the spring, students will be enrolled in a 3-credit clinical component that will require 150 hours of case work.

The Seminar

The two-hour one-credit seminar in the fall semester meets weekly to brainstorm about cases, strategies for advocacy, movement legal work, community lawyering projects, policy advocacy and skills curriculum. The weekly skills curriculum includes interviewing community members; building relationships with community members, organizations and activists; crafting community members’ stories in case litigation and advocacy; applying ethics in practice; legal writing; factual investigation; and learning cultural humility and cultural safety; and practicing criminal defense and community advocacy in an antiracist way. Through a combination of skills instruction, simulations, and exercises, the seminar addresses core lawyering skills while also exposing students to the urgent issues of social justice with an emphasis on the criminal legal system as a means of racial, social and legal control. During the seminar, students engage in regular “case rounds” requiring each to present current developments and issues in the community member’s cases, anticipate challenges, strategize paths forward both inside and outside the courtroom, and think through the potential consequences of lawyering and advocacy choices, including activism and direct action. The experience aims to develop and refine students’ lawyering skills, but most importantly to provide students with a foundation of ethical and reflective community and movement lawyering that will foster continued self-directed learning throughout their future advocacy.