Hi, guys.
My name is Emily.
I'm a senior here at Mount Holyoke.
I'm a sociology major with statistics minor.
And this summer I worked at the law offices of Cliff Gardner.
I got this internship through contracting alums, anybody
I knew in high school, really just anybody
I knew in the legal field.
I knew I wanted to do something in public defense.
So I ended up contacting Cliff Garner,
asking him if he would put me in contact with anybody who
was doing this type of thing.
He looked at my resume and he was
like how about you work here.
So I did.
The law offices of Cliff Gardner does post commission
representation.
So this means that once a criminal has
been tried and sentenced the first time, we come in
and we support them through appellate representation
and habeas corpus representation.
So that means that after they've been sentenced,
then we go back and look at their trial record
and look at what could have gone wrong.
So things like an ineffective assistance of their attorney,
or an alibi that didn't come out the first time.
So in appellate representation, we
can only use things that came out in the original trial.
But in habeas corpus representation,
we can look at anything and everything.
And they basically get a whole new trial,
which is really cool.
But we cannot do that alone, because there's so many people
who need assistance in this area.
And our office is only about four attorneys.
So we work with several other organizations that are all
funded by the government.
The California Appellate Project,
the Habeas Corpus Resource Center,
and the office of the state public defender in California.
All of these offices have different attorneys
who come out and meet with our clients
to make sure that they're all on track
with their appellate representation
and habeas corpus representation make sure
that we can do the best that we can as attorneys.
So going into this internship, I really
knew nothing about post conviction representation.
I knew sort of about the process.
But I didn't know that it was so underrepresented.
Once people are sentenced, a lot of people will sort of just
forget them.
They assume that our clients who are mostly on death row
are just going to be sentenced to death and be executed
and that's the end of it.
But that's really not the end of it for them.
A lot of them have new DNA evidence
that hasn't come out yet, or things
like an alibi that wasn't explored in trial
because their attorney didn't really do their trial justice.
So that's our job to go back and fix those things.
But there are 749 inmates on death row in California.
We only represent about 50 of them at a time.
But some of our cases sit around for years and years,
because it takes about 25 years for a habeas corpus case
to be called in to Supreme Court or an appellate case.
So many death row inmates sometimes
die of old age on the row, or they just don't ever
really get called to trial.
A lot of the Supreme Court cases or different courts
around the country can't take that many cases per year.
So they get about 8,000 and only release
about 90 decisions a year.
So that means that a lot of people
are just waiting and waiting until their case can be called,
or they get something called a postcard denial, which
basically says nope, sorry, you're denied.
So that's a lot of people that are just
sitting around and sort of marginalized by the law
and waiting for their trials to be retried.
So one of the places I got to go this summer
was San Quentin, which is where all of the male death row
inmates are housed in California.
So this is East Block where they are housed in the prison.
And then if you look at this picture right here
is death row.
So one of the big parts of my job
was to look at other old trial records
and see what kind of problems we could
pursue on appeal or through habeas corpus.
But my favorite part of my job was the legal research
that I did.
Most law students are learning how to do legal research.
So I was sort of thrown into the fire
by my boss, who gave me a big legal research
project with a client that we were working with.
He was a juvenile that was sentenced
to life without parole when he was 17 in 2006,
I believe it was.
So then in 2012, the Supreme Court of the United States
released a decision called Miller V. Alabama,
which basically says that juveniles cannot be sentenced
to life without parole unless there's a rare case,
so unless their crime's especially heinous.
So California was one of the first states
and one of the five states so far
to release a decision that said that all juveniles
that had been sentenced to live without parole,
now get to go back and be resentenced and retried.
But my boss had an idea that maybe juveniles in California
were, in fact, being resentenced to life without parole
and that every case was being seen
as the rare, heinous crime.
And that is a big injustice.
So my job was to look through every county in California,
every case of a juvenile being sentenced
to life without parole, and see if this was true.
And, in fact, it did turn out to be true in California.
Most juveniles that have been sentenced to life
without parole are now being resentenced,
have been resentenced to life without parole,
and are being told that their crime was the rare case.
But if every case is a rare case,
then nothing's the rare case.
So that really interested me and I was really excited
about that research.
And it really helped our case and hopefully,
the young men that we represented
will have his case reheard and hopefully,
that argument that we discovered in California
can be an argument in the court and he
won't get the same outcome.
But right now, I'm actually working on an independent study
to look at all the other state in the United States
and see what they're doing with this kind of thing,
to see how they are sentencing their juveniles.
So hopefully that independent study
will help me discover more about this
and go into another independent study next semester.
I had a lot of challenges while working at the law firm.
I was given a lot of tasks that law students and attorneys
were doing in the office.
I assumed that I would be getting coffee, making copies,
just sort of following the attorneys around.
But I was really just sort of thrown into it.
I had to do legal research and I had never done before.
I had to read records and try to find what was important
and try to decipher that for myself, which
was difficult at first.
But I really ended up loving doing that.
And I also had to relate to clients and families.
I had to go meet with a death row inmate
at San Quentin, which was scary.
But also really fun and interesting.
But it was really hard to read these heinous crimes
that people were committing and then come home
after a long day of work and sort of detach
yourself from that.
So that was a really big lesson that I learned this summer
about being in this line of work that I still
am not done learning.
But hopefully in the future, I'll get better at it.
The last I that really challenged me
was the amount of reading that I did.
I had to sit and just read about these horrible crimes all day
long.
And I really learned about myself
that in the future, whatever job I go into,
I really want to be able to interact with clients more.
And I think that was partially because I was an intern.
But also, in the future maybe, another sort of
representation where I get to interact
with clients and their families a little bit more.
And this is a picture of the exercise
yards at San Quentin, where death row inmates get to go out
and they don't get to exercise with other inmates,
so they're in a little cell outside.
And I just wanted to say thank you
to Cliff Gardner, who hired me, for allowing me to be part
of the link process and to [INAUDIBLE] and [INAUDIBLE]
for letting me come to their trainings
and teaching me about this group of people who is represented
and waiting for their trials to come.
[APPLAUSE]