NATIONAL CRIMINAL DEFENSE COLLEGE FACULTY

Jon M. Sands has devoted his career to the defense of indigent federal criminal defendants at the Office of the Federal Public Defender for the District of Arizona. As an Assistant Federal Defender since 1987, and as the Federal Public Defender since 2004, Jon has handled cases at trial, on appeal, and in post-conviction habeas corpus litigation. Jon is a graduate of Yale College (1979, magna cum laude), and received his law degree from the University of California, Davis (1984, high honors), where he was editor-in-chief of the Law Review.

After graduation, Jon clerked for the Honorable Mary M. Schroeder, United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit (which brought him to Arizona). Before joining the Federal Public Defender’s Office, Jon was an Associate at Meyer, Hendricks, Victor, Osborn, Maledon (presently Osborn Maledon). Jon served as Chair of the State Bar’s Committee on Professional Responsibility. He has also served as Chair of the State Bar’s Criminal Justice Section and as Chair of the State Bar’s Criminal Jury Instructions Committee.

Jon is presently the Chair of the Defender Services Advisory Group, which represents all Federal Defender and Community Defender offices in advising the Judicial Conference’s Defender Services Committee and the Administrative Office of the United States Courts on federal indigent defense matters. He has also been Chair of the Federal Defender Committee on the United States Sentencing Guidelines, which is congressionally charged with advising and testifying before the United States Sentencing Commission. Jon has been President of the Arizona Attorneys for Criminal Justice and President of the National Association of Federal Defenders. In addition to his public defender duties, Jon is an adjunct faculty at the Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law at Arizona State University, and is a faculty member of the National Criminal Defense College. He has published numerous legal articles, law reviews, essays, and book reviews, and has contributed chapters to several legal treatises. Jon has lectured and taught on a wide array of legal topics.”

Jennifer Sellitti is Director of Training & Communications for the New Jersey Office of the Public Defender (OPD), where she is responsible for teaching trial advocacy and substantive law to public defenders in all of the agency’s practice areas. She works at the direction of the public defender on special projects that impact OPD clients such as police accountability, juvenile resentencings, and pretrial justice/bail reform. In addition, she represents clients charged with serious felonies at trials.

Prior to her appointment to director, she was the managing attorney for the Middlesex Trial Region and an assistant deputy public defender in the Essex County Adult Region. She worked as a staff attorney for the Committee for Public Counsel Services in Massachusetts before joining the OPD. Jennifer began her legal career at Massachusetts Correctional Legal Services, where she worked on the organization’s Prison Brutality Project investigating claims of prison violence and representing inmates housed in solitary confinement at super maximum security prisons in civil rights lawsuits against correctional facilities and individual officers.

Jennifer is a faculty member at trial advocacy programs across the country including the National Criminal Defense College and the National Forensic College. She speaks nationally at professional conferences about issues surrounding legal representation for the accused. She a trustee of the Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers of New Jersey and serves on the Advisory Boards of the New Jersey Institute of Technology’s Forensic Science Major and the State of New Jersey’s newly formed Conviction Review Unit. A graduate of Suffolk University Law School, Jennifer obtained a B.S. degree in public relations from Boston University. When she is not training lawyers or advocating for clients, Jennifer and her partner operate D/V Tenacious, a dive vessel that discovers, explores, and salvages shipwrecks in the North Atlantic. Jennifer is both a diver and a United States Coast Guard licensed ship captain.

Jeff Sherr is the Training Director for the National Association for Public Defense producing hundreds of webinars for public defense professionals across the nation. Prior to that he was the Manager of the Education and Strategic Planning Branch of the Kentucky Department of Public Advocacy. Jeff started with the DPA since 1994, starting first as a law clerk, then working with the Juvenile Post Dispositional Unit, then in the trial division with the Stanford Field Office, and now in Frankfort with the education staff. Jeff graduated from the University of Kentucky College of Law in 1995. Jeff has been a faculty member for Gideon’s Promise, the National Criminal Defense College, Clarence Darrow Death Penalty College, Harvard Trial Advocacy Workshop, Bronx Defender Academy, and other state litigation institutes.

In addition to regularly training public defender litigators and trainers, Jeff trains public defender leaders nationally and for many individual defender states and offices. Jeff also has an extensive background in theatre having studied with the National Shakespeare Conservatory and the University of Kansas. Jeff performs regularly with Central Kentucky Improv in Lexington, Kentucky and at Improv Festivals across the country.

Where hasn’t Fredi worked? She’s been an Assistant Federal Defender in Omaha, Nebraska; Boise, Idaho; Reno, Nevada and Asheville, North Carolina, with side stops in Washington, DC as visiting counsel at the Defender Training Branch and at the U.S. Sentencing Commission. She’s in such “high demand” that she recently received a recruiting email asking her if she would like to be a legal assistant in an up and coming workers’ comp firm. She wrote back thanking them but she was having too much fun being an advocate for poor people and had to decline their lovely offer. Then she killed her LinkedIn account.

An honors grad of Cornell University and New York University School of Law, Fredi has served on the faculty for numerous programs around the country. Her favorite tag line during her teaching sessions is, “You understand this is interactive, right?” To date, no one has successfully slunk down low enough for her to not make eye contact and ask for a volunteer.

Fredi co-authored Trial in Action: The Persuasive Power of Psychodrama and expects to be an answer to a trivia question one day because of it. She’s written article/chapters on various topics: child pornography, voir dire, cross examination and the effects of incarceration on families. Her two passions are psychodrama (where she’s certified as a practitioner, not to be confused with being certified period) and Improv. She will play improv games all day if allowed, and you’ll often hear her muttering, “Whoosh, Bang, Pow!”

Karen Smolar is the Legal Training Director of the Criminal Practice at the Committee
for Public Counsel Services in Massachusetts, where she develops and conducts
innovative trial training programs for every public defender and court-appointed attorney
representing the indigent accused statewide. At CPCS, Karen also lends her expertise
to other practice areas in the Training Department to help conceptualize curriculum
across the agency. In addition, Karen is a member of the agency’s Anti-Racism Team,
and she serves as lead on its DEI Recruitment Sub-Committee.

Karen spent her three previous decades representing the indigent accused in New York
City, including twenty years of dedicated work at The Bronx Defenders. Karen spent a
decade their Trial Chief, deservedly earning the informal title of Persuasion Guru.
Karen’s time at The Bronx Defenders was marked by formal and informal brainstorming
of a countless number of cases, as she mentored, trained, and supervised dozens and
dozens of younger public defenders representing clients charged with nearly every
crime imaginable.

Karen’s trial training legacy lives on at The Bronx Defenders, embodied in the
Defenders' Academy, the annual, intensive five-day program that Karen created from
scratch in 2007. The Academy was the first training program in the country to focus on
the intersection between trial skills and performance work, and it continues to attract
and welcome interested attorneys in criminal, family, and civil practices from across the
United States. Many Academy graduates from over the years would acknowledge the
debt they owe to Karen when they speak of having been “Smolarized” in their approach
to trial work.

Since 2017, Karen has also been the co-Dean at the National Criminal Defense
College, America’s preeminent trial training school for criminal defense practitioners.
Prior to her appointment as Dean, Karen had served for a decade on the College’s
faculty as a presenter, lecturer, and small-group leader. Her work at the College allows
her to develop and implement creative programming and pedagogy to train lawyers
from around the country and beyond. Since her Deanship began, Karen has been
especially proud of both the College’s successful efforts to diversify its faculty, staff, and
participants as well as the College curriculum’s new emphasis on racial and social
justice.

Karen is herself a renowned lecturer and guest trainer on everything from storytelling to
closing argument, cross-examining expert witnesses to voir dire, having presented at
trainings for the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, the New York State
Defenders Association, and many other state-wide public defender offices around the
country. Karen also has more than a decade of experience teaching in law school
classrooms. She is currently an Adjunct Professor of Law at Roger Williams University
School of Law in Rhode Island, where she is a sought-after Trial Advocacy Instructor
and where she coaches the school’s Trial Team. Before moving to Rhode Island, Karen
served in similar positions at St. John’s School of Law in New York and at Seton Hall
Law School in New Jersey.

Dr. SunWolf was Training Director for Colorado’s Public Defender Office when she left to get her Master’s and Ph.D. at the University of California, studying juries and persuasion. Two decades of trial work as a criminal defense attorney included a three-year stint in the appellate division. Now a professor studying social behavior, her research has won numerous national awards, including her book, “Practical Jury Dynamics2: From One Juror’s Trial Perception to the Group’s Decision-Making Processes,” translating academic concepts into practical trial tools. She published a new theory (Decisional Regret Theory), which explains how deliberating jurors use counterfactual thinking to avoid anxiety about unwanted verdict outcomes. Her newest book is: “God-Thinking: Every Juror’s Moral Brain” (LexisNexis). As a trial attorney, she survived angry judges, misguided prosecutors, strange juries, and the most creative of clients.