NATIONAL CRIMINAL DEFENSE COLLEGE FACULTY

After 33 years as a public defender, David has opened his own law office where he will practice criminal defense and advise attorneys on potential professional conduct issues.

David began his public defender career in 1989 as a trial attorney. He has served as a managing attorney, a major crimes/homicide attorney, and an attorney in the program’s appellate office. He has tried approximately forty cases to a jury, including a capital murder case, and has handled over 150 appeals. In his current position, David continues to handle a small number of trials and appeals and is involved year-round in planning and conducting trainings, including a month-long training for the program’s class of new lawyers, and trainings on case analysis and trial skills for new and experienced lawyers.

In addition to his appointment as NCDC faculty, David is a former adjunct professor at the University of New Hampshire School of Law, the (soon to be outgoing) chair of the New Hampshire Supreme Court’s Professional Conduct Committee, and a fellow of the American Academy of Appellate Lawyers. He is a recipient of the New Hampshire Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers’ Champion of Justice Award, and an award for service to the profession from the New Hampshire Bar Association.

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 Dean of the National Criminal Defense College as well as a Managing Director in the Public Defender Division at the Committee for Public Counsel Services in Massachusetts. 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 as 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.

Prior to her appointment as Dean in 2017, 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 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. Karen has served as adjunct faculty at St. John’s School of Law in New York, Seton Hall Law School in New Jersey, and Roger Williams University School of Law in Rhode Island.