NATIONAL CRIMINAL DEFENSE COLLEGE FACULTY

Jodie represented her first capital client in 1979 and her last in 2023. She has worked as lead trial counsel, a mentor or expert witness in post-conviction proceedings and as a capital mitigation specialist and jury consultant. She has never had a client executed. She has successfully defended or mitigated death cases in North Carolina, Colorado, Indiana, Kentucky,
and Missouri, as well as juvenile LWOP cases in Michigan. In Indiana, she served as lead counsel in a penalty phase retrial and got her client, who had spent 21 years on death row, a sentence of 110 years; she was the mitigation specialist for a client who spent 20 years on death row and is now serving two life sentences; and a client who spent 14 years on death row is now free. Her testimony as an expert witness on ineffective assistance of counsel resulted in the Seventh Circuit’s grant of a penalty phase retrial. Jodie’s Princeton BA in Biochemistry has made forensic science a specialty.

Jodie has served on the Indiana Supreme Court Rules Committee, the Executive Board and part-time Training Director for the Indiana Public Defender Council, as a faculty member for NACDL on race and voir dire; NCDC’s Trial Practice Institutes since 1981, for NCDC’s advanced programs in Cross Examination, Theories and Themes of Persuasion, Voir Dire and Closing Argument; and capital trial advocacy programs including Life in the Balance, the Darrow/Baldus Death Penalty College (at the University of Michigan, Depaul and Iowa Law), and the Bryan Schechmeister Death Penalty College in San Jose, California. Jodie has taught thousands of criminal defense lawyers, social workers and mitigation specialists in twenty-seven states and was part of a team of American defenders invited to Moscow to facilitate the Russians’ transition from three judge panels to juries. Prior to devoting her practice to capital mitigation, Jodie was a “Super Lawyer” for seven years.

Writing and storytelling are special passions. After seven years of night classes, In 2014 Jodie earned an MFA in Creative Writing from Butler University. She is a published author of both poems and narrative nonfiction. After 45 years, she is retiring from death penalty defense to pursue her writing, as well as traveling to Colorado to hike with her daughter Cady and to Cambodia to visit her son Ben and his wife Peery who are working to save what is left of the Bokor rain forest, and to play with her grandson Sovann, who was born on the Fall Equinox five years ago.