NATIONAL CRIMINAL DEFENSE COLLEGE FACULTY

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.