Criminal Justice Advocacy Clinic

This is a year-long clinic. Students are enrolled for four credits in the first semester and three credits in the second semester. Students may choose to enroll for additional semesters with permission of the instructor. Students meet twice weekly for scheduled seminars in addition to weekly team supervisions with the clinical professor and/or staff attorney to discuss their case work. Students also engage in intensive fieldwork outside of class time. A large portion of this time includes visiting incarcerated clients at prisons in Western and Upstate New York.  Clinic work also involves interviews with clients, clients’ family members, witnesses, attorneys, and community organizations; researching legal issues that arise in the client’s case; drafting correspondence; conducting investigations and discovery; reviewing case records; writing legal briefs or other advocacy documents; and—depending on the stage of the case—arguing the client’s case in court.

Students work in teams of two or more, and some projects may allow for collaboration with students from other law schools’ clinics. Student attorneys are expected to take the lead on their cases, under the supervision of the clinical professor and staff attorney. Student attorneys learn to build client relationships; interview witnesses; conduct investigation; develop mitigation evidence; work with experts; and engage in oral and written advocacy before the courts, parole boards, and legislature.

Clinic students represent individuals seeking resentencing under the Domestic Violence Survivors Justice Act (DVSJA). This 2019 law allows survivors of domestic violence to seek a reduced sentence if the abuse they suffered was a significant contributing factor to the crime for which they are convicted.  Student attorneys work closely with their clients to develop evidence and draft resentencing applications, prepare for DVSJA hearings, and litigate appeals from denials of resentencing. Where other relief is not possible, students have also helped clients submit petitions for executive clemency to the governor.

With aid from an initial two-year grant from the American College of Trial Lawyers Foundation, the clinic has seen early successes in its DVSJA cases. The clinic has represented two of the small number of people who have been resentenced under the DVSJA. In the clinic’s first DVSJA case, People v. S.M., the client, who had already served her full term of incarceration, was seeking to reduce her period of post-release supervision, something that might not have been encompassed by an unduly narrow reading of the statute. The court’s decision, which adopts the clinic’s reasoning for a broader interpretation of the DVSJA, offers a powerful analysis of the burdens of post-release supervision and the ways in which it can mimic the coercion of abusive relationships. The decision recognizes the importance to domestic violence survivors in being free not only from unduly harsh periods of incarceration, but also from lengthy—and sometimes lifetime—periods of supervision, with all the attendant challenges and risks for incarceration. The decision has been cited by the appellate courts multiple times in analyzing the parameters of the DVSJA. In another case, People v. K.B., the court granted resentencing to a client who had served six years of a ten-year sentence for manslaughter. Despite opposition from the prosecution to reliance on family’s and friends’ corroboration of abuse and despite claims that the abuse was not substantial, the court recognized the role of domestic violence in the client’s actions against her abuser and granted resentencing. The client was released from prison shortly after the court’s decision and has been reunited with her young daughter.