To provide effective and impactful representation for our clients, criminal defense professionals must address racial injustice directly. The keynote will inspire defenders to be tenacious in addressing racial injustice at various stages of their cases.

Presenter

Tara I. Allen is an Associate Professor of Law at Roger Williams University where she teaches Trial Advocacy, Evidence, Criminal Procedure, and Criminal Law. She serves on the faculty of the National Criminal Defense College Trial Practice Institute (NCDC) and has been a panelist, presenter and instructor for numerous legal skills workshops. A former adjunct professor at the University of California, Hastings College of the Law, she taught courses in legal research and writing and appellate advocacy.

Tara was an Assistant Federal Public Defender in Rhode Island (Providence) and Western Pennsylvania (Pittsburgh), and a Research & Writing Attorney in Eastern California (Sacramento). Prior to joining the federal defender organizations, she was a supervising staff attorney for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, a law clerk on the Second Circuit court of appeals, and a judicial intern in the federal district of Massachusetts.

Tara received her JD from Northeastern University School of Law in Boston, MA and her BA from Wesleyan University in Middletown, CT.

In May 2021, Tara will begin serving as Sentencing Resource Counsel (SRC) for the Federal Public and Community Defenders and Criminal Justice Act (CJA) attorneys nationally.

Start time is 3:30 p.m. EST (12:30 p.m. PST). 

This session will focus on how to keep your client out of jail. The bond stage is every bit as important as trial and sentencing and affects every other stage of the case. This session will break down how to conduct pretrial interviews that enable you to craft a compelling bond narrative, will demonstrate how to link your client’s story to the best aspects of the legal standard, and will ensure that you know the Bail Reform Act better than anyone else in the courtroom.

Presenter

Alison Siegler is a Clinical Professor of Law and the founder and director of the Federal Criminal Justice Clinic (FCJC), the nation’s first legal clinic solely devoted to representing indigent clients charged with federal felonies. The FCJC defends individual clients and pursues impact litigation in federal district court, in the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals, and before the United States Supreme Court, and engages in legislative advocacy. Siegler received the Seventh Circuit Bar Association’s Justice John Paul Stevens Award for Outstanding Public Service Work in the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals in 2016, the American Constitution Society Chicago Chapter’s Ruth Goldman Award in 2014, and the Excellence in Public Interest Service Award from the US District Court and the Federal Bar Association in Chicago in 2012. She has also served on Senator Durbin’s screening committee for the selection of federal district court judges. She was previously a staff attorney with the Federal Defender Program in Chicago, a Prettyman Fellow at Georgetown University Law Center’s Criminal Justice Clinic, and a law clerk for US District Judge Robert W. Gettleman. She graduated magna cum laude from Yale College, earned a JD from Yale Law School, and holds an LLM from Georgetown.

Start time is 3:30 p.m. EST (12:30 p.m. PST)