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.

Brook Antonio, II is currently a Senior Counsel with the Officer for Access to Justice as the Criminal Policy Team. Brook comes as an experience public defender from the Western District of North Carolina as a First Assistant, Federal Public Defender. Prior to his experience in North Carolina, Brook served as a Deputy Chief and Assistant Federal Public Defender for the Federal Public Defender in the Northern District of Texas, Fort Worth Division. Brook also practiced criminal defense in Washington, D.C., as a Staff Attorney at the Public Defender Service for the District of Columbia (PDS). Prior to working at PDS, Brook was a Staff Attorney at the Fulton County Public Defender’s Office in Atlanta, Georgia. Brook received his Juris Doctor from North Carolina Central University School of Law and his Bachelor of Science from the University of South Carolina, where he participated on both the football and track and field teams.

Marcos Beaton, Jr, the firm’s founding member, has a decorated background as a trial lawyer and advocate. He has consistently been recognized by his peers, including recognition as a Top 40 Lawyers Under 40 by the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation, recognition as a “Best Lawyers in America” by Best Lawyers Magazine, recognition as a “Best Lawyers in South Florida” as published in the Wall Street Journal, recognition as a “Top 10 Attorneys in Florida” by SuperLawyers magazine in 2021.

Marcos doesn’t just practice law as a trial lawyer and advocate — he teaches it. Marcos has been an adjunct professor at the University of Miami School of Law since 2011, where he co-teaches a trial intensive class with his former law partner, Roy Black. Marcos has also taught trial skills at the National Criminal Defense College, which runs perhaps the nations most prestigious and intensive trial skills programs for criminal defense lawyers. Marcos has also served as the President of the Florida Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers — Miami Chapter.

Marcos has dozens of jury trials and thousands of courtroom hours in both state and federal courts. He has handled complex criminal cases in both federal and state courts.  His clients have included doctors, lawyers and successful business professionals.  His cases have included misdemeanor cases where professional licenses are on the line all the way up to highly complex securities fraud cases, complex tax cases, racketeering cases, and even first degree murder.  He has tried multi-week and multi-month cases in both federal and state court and has participated in many exhaustive, internal, pre-indictment and pre-arraignment investigations. Marcos has experience in matters involving highly regulated industries, and is able to assist clients in regulatory investigations. Marcos also has experience in university disciplinary proceedings, and is also able to assist clients in matters where university students face discipline over allegations of misconduct.

With experience in more than 100 jury trials, David Beller specializes in criminal defense litigation, attorney and judicial discipline, and the collateral consequences that accompany a criminal allegation. He represents individuals and organizations involved as targets, subjects, or witnesses in state and federal criminal investigations and related grand jury and pretrial proceedings.

David brings a depth of experience in managing crisis level regulatory and criminal matters, as well as in advising clients on how to structure compliance programs so as to help avoid such problems. David’s experience includes the most thorough and sophisticated representation in all state level misdemeanor and felony allegations from DUIs to homicide.

He has defended actions throughout Colorado and worked opposite both municipal and state prosecutors, Colorado Attorney General, Colorado Department of Regulatory Agencies, Department of Human & Health Services (TRAILS), Office of Attorney Regulation, Judicial discipline, university disciplinary boards, SEC, Department of Justice, and United States Attorney’s Offices for the Districts of Colorado and the Eastern District of California. His litigation skills have also been called on to assist in the representation and support of firm clients in complex civil and regulatory actions.

Prior to joining Recht Kornfeld, P.C., David was a Colorado State Public Defender. He is a Colorado native and attended school in Fort Collins, earning a Bachelor of Science in Biomedical Science in 1999, and his Juris Doctor in Ohio in 2004. In 2007 David joined Recht Kornfeld, PC and was made a Partner in 2012.

David served as President of the Colorado Criminal Defense Bar, proudly serving 1000 criminal defense lawyers, paralegals and investigators. He is a frequent guest lecturer at the University of Denver College of Law and at Metropolitan State University. He is a faculty member of Colorado Alternate Defense Counsel, teaching trial skills to Colorado criminal defense lawyers. He serves by appointment of the Denver Presiding Judge as a Commissioner of the Office of Municipal Public Defender and was appointed by the Colorado Supreme Court to serve on the Committee for Character and Fitness. As a legal analyst, David has been consulted and quoted by The New York Times, CNN, Fox News, The Boston Globe, The Denver Post and local news affiliates, amongst others. David is also a published author, coauthoring 2015’s Colorado DUI Defense Manual, published by Circuit Media.

Since starting his legal career, David has consistently been recognized as one of Denver’s premier attorneys. In 2007, he was named by Law Week Magazine as one of Denver’s Top 20 Up and Coming Lawyers. He has been named one of Denver’s best criminal defense lawyers in each of the 2009-2020 editions of Super Lawyers Magazine and 5280 Magazine named him a Denver Top Lawyer every year since 2017. David has been named by The National Trial Lawyers as one of Colorado’s top 40 trial lawyers under the age of 40. In 2014, they named him as one of the 100 best trial lawyers in the nation. In March 2015, the Denver Business Journal named David amongst Denver’s Top 40 business leaders under the age of 40.

Cathleen L. Bennett recently moved to Anchorage, Alaska from Boston, Massachusetts where she was a public defender with the Committee for Public Counsel Services (the Massachusetts Statewide Public Defender) for 30 years. She was the Criminal Defense Training Director at CPCS for 17 years. As a trial lawyer in the CPCS Public Defender Division, she defended clients charged with murder and other serious felonies. She now works as a training consultant for the National Association for Public Defense and for Gideon’s Promise, and she intends to accept appointments to represent criminally accused people in the Alaska Courts soon.

Cathy is on the faculty and the Board of Trustees of the National Criminal Defense College. She is a Core Faculty member of Gideon’s Promise (formerly the Southern Public Defender Training Center), which was the subject of the award winning HBO documentary “Gideon’s Army,” and she has taught for the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers  and criminal defense training programs across the country.

She received the Thurgood Marshall Award from the Committee for Public Counsel Services in 2007, the Scholar-Mentor Award from Massachusetts Continuing Legal Education, Inc. (MCLE) in 2008, the Outstanding Faculty Award in 2011 and the Stephen B. Bright Award in 2018 from Gideon’s Promise, and the Gideon Award from the Massachusetts Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers in 2017.

Alison Bloomquist has been trying public defense cases in New England since 2005. She served for over ten years as a staff public defender in greater Boston, two of them as Attorney‐in‐Charge of the Norfolk Superior Court office at the Committee for Public Counsel Services. She served for six years as the Director of Training for the Connecticut Division of Public Defender Services, where she coordinated training for attorneys, investigators, social workers, and clerks in all aspects of criminal defense. In 2021, Alison became Vice President of Strategic Alliances and Innovation for the National Legal Aid and Defender Association (NLADA). She has been invited to teach federal and state public defenders all across the country, including as faculty at the National Criminal Defense College (NCDC), and has authored several trial skills publications. She is a graduate of Northeastern University School of Law, and Boston University College of Arts and Sciences. She is an executive committee member of the National Alliance of Indigent Defense Educators (NAIDE) and a Black Public Defender Association (BPDA) Certified Anti-Racism Trainer. Alison lives in West Hartford with her wife, three children and their silver lab, Cooper.

Carmen earned her BA and MA at Washington University in St. Louis. She fell in love with indigent defense during her criminal law clinic at Georgetown University Law Center. A member of the Gideon’s Promise class of 2012, after graduating from law school, Carmen worked in the Nashville Public Defender’s Office for a year before moving home to Denver, CO. Following two years as a paralegal in death penalty post-conviction matters, Carmen landed at a three-attorney firm committed to indigent clients. While at this firm, Carmen carried adult and juvenile conflict contracts with the Office of Alternate Defense Counsel and Office of Respondent Parents’ Counsel. In May 2019, she returned to full time indigent defense as a Deputy Public Defender for the Colorado Springs Office of the Colorado Office of the State Public Defender. During her time at the COSPD, in addition to her caseload, Carmen was a faculty member for the state-wide mandatory public defender trial advocacy program. Before joining the Federal Death Penalty Resource Counsel, Carmen served as an Assistant Federal Defender with the Federal Defender Program, Inc. in Atlanta, GA. She is Alumni Faculty with Gideon’s Promise and has taught for other systems such as the Kentucky Office of Public Advocacy, Georgia Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, and the Colorado Office of Alternate Defense Counsel.

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.

Michael E. Carter is the Executive Director of the Federal Community Defender Office of the Eastern District of Michigan (FCDO). FCDO provides indigent defense for individuals charged with violating federal criminal law, both felony and misdemeanor offenses.

Michael earned his Bachelor of Arts in English from the University of Michigan in 2002, and his law degree from Wayne State University in 2007. After graduating from law school, Michael served as an associate attorney for the Law Offices of John A. Shea in Ann Arbor, Michigan. While there, he represented criminal defendants charged in state and federal court. Wanting to devote his practice to representing indigent clients, Michael left private practice in 2011 to join the Public Defender Service of the District of Columbia. Michael spent four years at that office representing adult and juvenile clients charged with felonies in D.C. Superior Court. In January 2016, Michael returned to Michigan to serve as a Deputy Defender with the Federal Defender Office of the Eastern District of Michigan (FDO, the forerunner of the FCDO). He worked at the FDO until August 2019 when he became a supervising attorney with the Neighborhood Defender Service of Detroit representing adult clients in felony cases prosecuted in the Circuit Court of Wayne County while also helping to administer the Wayne County Criminal Advocacy Program. Michael returned to FCDO as the Executive Director in December 2020.

Michael is licensed to practice in both Michigan and Washington, D.C. He currently serves on the boards of the ACLU of Michigan Board of Directors, the Criminal Defense Attorneys of Michigan (CDAM), the Detroit Justice Center, the National Association of Federal Defenders, and the Federal Bar Association Eastern District of Michigan. Michael also serves on the faculty of the National Criminal Defense College and is a fellow of the American Board of Criminal Lawyers as well as the Michigan State Bar Foundation.