Tara I. Allen is the Federal Public Defender for the Districts of Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island. Prior to this role, she was an Associate Professor of Law at Roger Williams University School of Law in Bristol, Rhode Island where she taught Criminal Law, Criminal Procedure, Evidence and Criminal Trial Practice.

Prior to academia, Tara was a trial lawyer in Federal Public Defenders Offices in Rhode Island, Pennsylvania and California. She was a supervising staff attorney for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, a law clerk in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, and a judicial intern in the Federal District of Massachusetts.

Currently, Tara is a member of NCDC’s Board of Regents. She is a frequent panelist, presenter, and instructor for legal skills workshops nationally. Tara regularly provides expertise to trial lawyers on various subjects, including evidence law, trial strategy and addressing race in federal courts. She received her JD from Northeastern University School of Law in Boston, MA and her BA from Wesleyan University in Middletown, CT.

A child of counterculture, raised off the grid by back-to-the-land hippies on the Lost Coast in Northern California, Jenny Andrews is a graduate of Cornell University and Harvard Law School. She started her career as a public defender in Oakland, California in 1996, but left after seven years, after experiencing burnout and moral injury, and didn’t practice law for three years. She returned to public defense work in 2007, and continued working as a public defender in Sonoma County and Santa Barbara County, in a wide variety of positions, including: Forensic Resource Counsel, Felony Team Leader, Director of Training, and Senior Deputy.

For 23 years, she consistently and aggressively litigated cases, including misdemeanor, felony, juvenile, civil commitment (mentally disordered offender and sexually violent predator), mental competency, homicide and multi-jurisdiction (and multi-jury) trials. She has carried specialized caseloads requiring complex, forensic and capital litigation. In 2022, she became California’s first Director of Training at the new Indigent Defense Improvement Division of the Office of the State Public Defender.

She teaches on the faculties of Gideon’s Promise, the National Association for Public Defense, the National Criminal Defense College, the Trial Advocacy Workshop at Harvard Law School, and the California Public Defenders Association. She has taught in public defense training programs in New York, New Jersey, Montana, Mississippi, Missouri, Tennessee, Louisiana, Kentucky, and Georgia, and in public defense offices throughout California. She has designed and presented training programming for public defenders working at all levels, from intern through capital litigation, and in specialized areas such as challenging forensic evidence, discovery litigation, mentorship, and sustaining well-being. She conceptualized and launched a Felony Team Unit, a Pre-Arraignment Unit, and Be Well Wednesday, a weekly wellness meet-up with experiential practices for public defenders. She created and teaches a series of online course for the NAPD Academy on Sustaining Well-Being in Public Defense, created BeSustained.org to support the well-being of defenders, and presents frequently on supporting and sustaining well-being.

Robert Louis Bank, Jr. graduated from the University of South Carolina with a Bachelor of Arts Degree in Criminology and Criminal Justice in 2010. Subsequently, he graduated from the University of South Carolina School of Law in 2013. He then began is legal career with the Richland County Public Defender’s Office from 2013-2022. He completed an International Fellowship with the International Legal Foundation in Myanmar in 2018-2019. He currently is the Deputy Chief Attorney with the Capital Trial Division within the South Carolina Commission on Indigent Defense.

Keith Belzer is a nationally recognized lecturer and teacher on criminal defense issues, trial techniques and strategies. In addition to his position on the faculty at the National Criminal Defense College in Macon, Georgia, and the Wisconsin Trial Skills Academy, Mr. Belzer has lectured or taught criminal defense lawyers in most of the 50 states. He also has presented to the Israeli National Public Defender, the Puerto Rican CJA Panel and The People’s Republic of China, where Mr. Belzer was the keynote speaker at the first public defender regional training ever held in China. Mr. Belzer has been named a Wisconsin Super Lawyer by his peers every year since its inception in 2005. In 2006 Mr. Belzer received one of 12 statewide Leaders in the Law awards from the Wisconsin Law Journal. Mr. Belzer is also a frequent commentator on national, statewide and local legal issues and has appeared on such nationally syndicated shows as 48 Hours, Good Morning America, Crime Scene Investigation, The O’Reilly Factor and Geraldo at Large.
Mr. Belzer has had the honor and privilege of representing three Wisconsin Innocence Project clients who were ultimately exonerated. One of these clients, Evan Zimmerman, a man previously falsely convicted and sentenced to life in prison for a homicide that he did not commit, was the subject of a feature length documentary, Facing Life, the Retrial of Evan Zimmerman, which can be seen in syndication on the Arts and Entertainment Network and the History Channel. Keith has also worked as an actor, director and playwright. Keith has acted in Illinois, Wisconsin, Vermont and Connecticut. Plays he has written have been produced in California, Illinois, Connecticut, and Wisconsin. Prior to law school, Keith co-founded one theater company and managed two others and devoted close to a decade of his life exclusively to the world of theater.

Michael Bloch is an accomplished trial attorney with an unparalleled record of courtroom success. Most recently, he was one of the lead attorneys in Sines v. Kessler, the historic federal civil rights lawsuit brought against the neo-Nazis and white supremacists who conspired to commit racially-motivated violence in Charlottesville, Virginia in August 2017. The four-week jury trial resulted in a $26 million judgment for Michael’s clients.

Prior to launching Bloch & White LLP, Michael practiced at Kaplan Hecker & Fink LLP, where he represented individuals investigated by various state and federal regulatory agencies, in addition to leading other plaintiff-side matters, including the Charlottesville litigation. Before Kaplan Hecker, Michael spent over seven years as a public defender at the Bronx Defenders and three years at Williams & Connolly LLP.

At Bronx Defenders, Michael represented hundreds of clients charged with criminal matters at all stages of litigation. He tried more than a dozen felony and misdemeanor cases to verdict and earned an acquittal or dismissal of all criminal charges in all but one case. In his last four years as a public defender, he tried seven cases to jury verdict – as lead counsel on five of them – and earned a full acquittal on all of them. In addition to working as a staff attorney, Michael was a supervisor in the Criminal Defense Practice, counseling a team of five to eight felony-certified attorneys on criminal matters from arrest through trial. Michael was also a member of the Homicide Practice Group, and previously served as a supervisor of the Investigations Practice, training and overseeing the team of Bronx Defenders investigators. At Williams & Connolly LLP in Washington, D.C., Michael worked primarily in the areas of commercial litigation and legal malpractice defense.

Michael has been a member of the faculty of the leading trial advocacy schools in the country, including Harvard Law School’s Trial Advocacy Workshop, National Criminal Defense College, the New York State Bar Association’s Trial Academy and The Defenders’ Academy. He has been a guest lecturer on civil procedure at Columbia Law School, the University of Virginia School of Law, and Georgetown University Law Center, among others. Michael has conducted numerous trainings on trial advocacy and criminal defense investigations.

Michael graduated cum laude from Harvard Law School, where he represented clients charged with crimes in Roxbury District Court as part of the Criminal Justice Institute, and he worked with the NAACP representing a client in post-conviction proceedings as part of the Death Penalty Clinic. He was also a member of the winning team in the Ames Moot Court competition. After law school, Michael served as a law clerk to the Honorable Chief Judge Helen Ginger Berrigan on the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Louisiana and subsequently to the Honorable Diane P. Wood on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit.

Michael graduated cum laude from Wesleyan University with a B.A. in Government. Before law school, he worked as a criminal defense investigator with the Public Defender Service in Washington, D.C.

Michael has been a member of the New York City Bar Association’s Criminal Justice Operations Committee and Mass Incarceration Task Force. His writings have appeared in the New York Times, USA Today, New York Daily News, Bloomberg Law, Law360, National Law Journal, The Champion and The Forward.

Amelia Blyth is a supervising attorney working in the Pueblo office of the Colorado State Public Defender. She started her career in Colorado Springs office where she tried over one hundred cases in her tenure. She was a finalist for Public Justice’s Trial Lawyer of the Year (2017), recipient of the Colorado Springs Public Defender Attorney of the Year Award (2017), the El Paso County Criminal Defense Bar Attorney of the Year Award (2019), the 2023 Olom Award – the highest honor bestowed upon a defense attorney by the Colorado Criminal Defense Bar – and finally, Colorado Public Defender Attorney of the Year (2025).

Carmen Brooks is a trial attorney working in the Federal Death Penalty Unit at the District of Nevada Federal Defender Office. Carmen earned her BA and MA at Washington University in St. Louis. Carmen found her professional passion in indigent defense during her time in the Criminal Defense and Prisoner Advocacy Clinic at Georgetown University Law Center; she graduated with her JD in 2012. Carmen spent a year at the Nashville Public Defender’s Office before moving home to Denver, CO where she landed at a small firm committed to indigent criminal defense and indigent representation in dependency and neglect cases. In 2019, Carmen returned to full-time indigent defense as a Deputy Public Defender in the Colorado Springs office of the COSPD. Carmen joined the Middle District of Georgia Federal Defender Organization in 2021, and earned her MPP from Duke University 2023 while she was a fellow with the Federal Death Penalty Resource Counsel Project; she joined the District of Nevada in 2024. She lives in Atlanta, GA and enjoys training and lecturing for criminal defense attorneys and trial advocacy programs at both the local and national levels.

Yasmin Cader is a Deputy Legal Director at the ACLU and the Director of the Trone Center for Justice and Equality, which encompasses the National Prison Project, the Criminal Law Reform Project, the Racial Justice Program, the Capital Punishment Project, as well as the John Adams project.

In her 30-year career as a civil rights lawyer and public defender in Washington, D.C., New York, and Los Angeles, Yasmin has been at the front lines of the fight for racial justice and brings a unique perspective and creative vision to addressing the most important issues facing our country. She has represented juveniles and adults facing misdemeanor and felony charges, including clients charged with capital offenses as well as domestic and international terrorism. Notably, Yasmin’s time with the Public Defender Service aligned with the height of the “war on drugs” and with a soaring juvenile murder rate in DC. Her time at the Federal Defenders of New York aligned with NYPD’s Stop and Frisk policy, the 9/11 attacks, subsequent passage of the Patriot Act, and escalated monitoring, enforcement and prosecutions targeting Muslims. And, her time at FPD Los Angeles coincided with the rise of nativism and the accompanying scapegoating and targeting of immigrant communities. As a public defender, Yasmin witnessed these attacks on people of color across the country first hand. While fighting for justice for her clients, she also developed a sharp analysis of inequities within our criminal legal system.

Prior to joining the ACLU, Yasmin was the co-founder of Cader Adams Trial Lawyers, a women-owned litigation boutique in Los Angeles. At Cader Adams, Yasmin litigated high-stakes civil and criminal matters and counseled higher education, non-profit, and for-profit institutions seeking to transform organizational culture and enact systems to advance intersectional racial justice.

Yasmin currently lives in Los Angeles and is deeply involved with her community. Through the Los Angeles Board of Police Commission’s Advisory Committee on Building Trust and Equity and the Los Angeles Unified School District Superintendent’s Reimagining School Safety Task Force, she is centrally involved in coalitions dedicated to examining the role and footprint of police in Los Angeles’ Public Schools. Yasmin is also a leader in several programs devoted to racial justice work on a national level. She is a member of the Opportunity Agenda’s Steering Committee, amplifying voices and narratives that change how the public perceives and understands systemic inequities and oppression in the criminal legal system.

Passionate about mentoring and training law students and public interest lawyers, Yasmin is involved in Gideon’s Promise, the National Criminal Defense College, and Harvard Law School’s Trial Advocacy Workshop. She also served as the Director of Training for Federal Public Defenders in Los Angeles, a position in which she developed and executed substantive legal and trial skills training programs for attorneys across the country. Yasmin is a Vice President of the Yale Law School Association Executive Committee and is a member of the Leadership Advisory Council for The Tsai Leadership Program at Yale Law School.

Yasmin began her career as a judicial law clerk to the Honorable Damon J. Keith of the U.S. Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals. Afterwards, she served as an Honors Program Trial Lawyer with the Employment Litigation Section of the U.S. Department of Justice Civil Rights Division, where she litigated individual and class-action claims of sexual and racial harassment and discrimination. She is a graduate of Howard University and Yale Law School.