NATIONAL CRIMINAL DEFENSE COLLEGE FACULTY

Isaiah “Skip” Gant is a 1969 graduate of Loyola University of Chicago and a 1974 graduate of its law school. He is currently an assistant Federal Public Defenders for the Middle District of TN, Nashville, TN. He previously worked as a staff attorney with the New York State Defender Association and as the director of the office’s Innocence Project. He spent over fifteen years in private practice on the Southside of Chicago, did a stint as the Chief of the Chicago Bureau of the Cook County Public Defender’s Office, and an adjunct Professor at DePaul University Law School, thereafter, coming to Nashville as a staff attorney with the Capital Case Resource Center of Tennessee, specializing in capital litigation. He spent four years in Cambodia working for the International Human Rights Law Group’s Cambodian Defender Project (one year as its director), and as a United Nations consultant/mentor to the judges and prosecutors at the Phnom Penh Municipal Court in Cambodia. He is a past president of the Napier-Looby Bar Association and, is a Fellow of both the Napier-Looby and Nashville Bar Foundations

Dumaka Shabazz is a federal public defender based in Nashville, Tennessee, where he represents clients charged with fraud, homicide, and other violent, white-collar or large-scale narcotics crimes. Before joining the Federal Public Defender’s Office in 2010, Professor Shabazz was a criminal defense attorney in private practice for five years. He began his legal career in the Davidson County District Attorney’s Office, where he prosecuted criminal cases through negotiation, motions practice and trials, and participated in numerous jury trials involving crimes from DUI to homicide.

He is a staff teacher at the New Defender College for newly hired federal public defenders, based in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and has been a guest lecturer at Vanderbilt University and Sewanee—The University of the South. At Vanderbilt, he teaches Trial Advocacy.