By Martín A. Sabelli, NACDL President January-February 2022 issue of The Champion Last December, Rogel Aguilera-Mederos — a 23-year-old truck driver with no criminal record — received a 110-year sentence for accidentally killing four people because his brakes failed as he approached stalled traffic on a Colorado highway. This absurd…

For 50 years, no client or lawyer could have a better advocate or friend than John Zwerling. It is with the deepest sorrow and profound sadness that I share with you that John Kenneth Zwerling, our JZ, one of our dearest and best, passed away in the early morning hours…

By Martín A. Sabelli, NACDL President December 2021 issue of The Champion Frank Carson knew how to try a defense case and win and, for three decades, Frank tried and won case after case in Modesto, a small city in California’s Central Valley celebrated in George Lucas’ “American Graffiti.” Trying…

By Martín A. Sabelli, NACDL President November 2021 issue of The Champion Last month’s column focused on the painful reality that the trial penalty punishes people of color and the poor much more harshly than others caught in the machinery of the criminal legal system. This month’s column explores the…

By Martín A. Sabelli, NACDL President September-October 2021 issue of The Champion In my first column, I touched on NACDL’s commitment to eliminate the trial penalty — the profoundly and unconscionably coercive difference between a pretrial settlement offer and a post-trial sentence. In this column, I explore a painful reality…

By Chris Adams, NACDL Immediate Past President July 2021 issue of The Champion I’m going to leave, baby, Ain’t gonna say goodbye. — Bessie Smith “Lost Your Head Blues” When the time came for me to write my final presidential column, my thoughts turned to the 61 presidents who came…

By Norman L. Reimer, Former NACDL Executive Director May 2021 issue of The Champion Overcriminalization, and its inevitable consequence, mass incarceration, are the hallmark of America’s failed criminal legal system. Mindless resort to the assertion of the state’s prosecutorial power to address every real or imagined problem is a phenomenon…

By Chris Adams, NACDL Immediate Past President May 2021 issue of The Champion Three weeks ago, I was awakened by a shrill alarm at 4:00 a.m. I needed to make the morning’s first flight out of Charleston for a suppression hearing three states away. …

By Norman L. Reimer, NACDL Executive Director April 2021 issue of The Champion Robert Rose was a teenager charged with killing his mother’s abusive boyfriend after a late-night confrontation on the stoop outside his mother’s home. In the course of a struggle over a gun, Robert shot him. Robert had…