NAPD 2024 Women's Virtual Conference

This session, presented by a team of experts, who are survivors, advocates, criminal defense lawyers, and a mitigation specialist, centers on the power of stories, identifies the deficits, and shares practical tools to bridge the gender justice gaps. We will engage participants with the wisdom from lived expertise in fighting for criminalized women. We will share the Center’s research and insights on narrative deficits in defending women and provide participants with a series of practical gender justice tools for defense teams. We, at the Cornell Center on the Death Penalty Worldwide, created these tools to be applied for a practical gender justice approach in a wide range of capital and non-capital cases. As survivors, advocates, and former public defenders at the Cornell Center on the Death Penalty Worldwide, our work in narrative construction and intersectional gender justice is applicable to a wide range of cases – whether misdemeanors or felonies -- where women are criminalized. Our resources are free for the public defense community. We will complete our session with a closing round of reflections from our expert panel.

Despite years of trial work, both Autumn and Amanda suffer from imposter syndrome. In this seminar, they will discuss how to combat perfectionism by embracing our “weaknesses” to connect with our clients and our work. There will be a writing exercise too.

This session will explore the benefits of quality legal representation for children involved in child protection cases, optimal legal service delivery, the specialized needs of youth involved in public defense and child protection systems, the alignment and shared values of both systems and legal services funding opportunities.

Healing justice has been described by Cara Page as “a framework that identifies how we can holistically respond to and intervene on generational trauma and violence and to bring collective practices that can impact and transform the consequences of oppression on our bodies, hearts and minds.” In this session, speakers—which include clinical law professors (criminal defense and immigrant rights), a movement lawyer with trauma expertise, and a social worker and restorative justice practitioner–will discuss experiences with incorporating the framework of healing justice into their practice with clients and the training of new lawyers.

By bringing healing justice into the practice of law, we seek to tap into the well-being and survival practices that have been handed down to us through generations, many by women, that are now being recognized as essential for those engaged in movements for transformative social change. We reject a “neutral” understanding of well-being and embrace one that explicitly works towards anti-subordination. In addition, we aim to shift understandings of trauma and harm from one that is personalized, inflicted primarily by private actors, to one that is more relational, collectivized, and historically informed, caused both by private and state actors. By centering processes grounded in community, our hope is to invite practitioners to feel more safely tapped in and connected to, rather than depleted, by their work.