Emily C. Paavola is the Executive Director of the South Carolina Death Penalty Resource & Defense Center. After graduating from Cornell Law School, she served as a Project Fellow for the Cornell Death Penalty Project, and later worked as an associate in the business litigation practice group at Baker & Daniels LLP in Indianapolis, Indiana.
Kristen Stanley graduated from Cornell Law School in 2007, and presently works as an attorney with the Capital Habeas Unit of the Office of the Federal Public Defender for the Middle District of Tennessee.
Deborah Anne Czuba is the Deputy Director for Investigation and Mitigation and a Senior Staff Attorney with the Georgia Capital Defender Office. Prior to this, Deborah worked with the New York Capital Defender Office from the reinstatement of capital punishment in New York in 1995, to the defunding of the Capital Defender in 2005, shortly after the New York Court of Appeals found the New York death penalty statute to be unconstitutional. Deborah graduated from Wellesley College in 1992 and from Cornell Law School in 1995. During law school, Deborah worked as an intern with the South Carolina Death Penalty Resource Center, and as a research and teaching assistant for death penalty courses at Cornell Law School. Deborah has spoken at numerous national conferences on the death penalty (including NLADA’s Life in the Balance and for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund), specifically on the topics of mental retardation and the death penalty, and mitigation investigation.
Keisha Hudson worked as an Assistant Defender at the Defender Association of Philadelphia, where she represented indigent clients charged with crimes ranging from simple misdeanors, to serious felonies. While at the Defender's, she also worked in the mental health unit to gain a better understanding of the myriad mental health concerns of clients. She was also a supervisor in the Municipal Court Unit, training new attorneys on trial strategy. In 2006, she moved to the Capital Habeas Unit of the Federal Community Defender Office. As an Assistant Federal Defender, she works with clients on death row, on their state and federal appeals, which includes litigating on their behalf in those courts. Much of her work involves research and writing. However, as a trial lawyer, she takes the opportunity to go into the field as much as possible, to interview family members, witnesses, and jurors. She also spends time consulting, and working with a variety of experts. Death row is in Pittsburgh, and with fourteen active cases, she tries to maintain communication with clients. This entails travelling quite often to see them on the row. She is currently on the training committee, in charge of constructing and conducting internal trainings in the office, and external trainings throughout Pennsylvania, and the Third Circuit Court of Appeals.
Patricia "Tricia" Russell is currently the Research & Writing Specialist for the Capital Habeas Unit of the Federal Public Defender Office in Pittsburgh. In 2000, she earned her J.D. from Cornell University, where she received the CALI Excellence for the Future Award (Capital Punishment Clinic). Following law school, she was a Staff Attorney in the Habeas Corpus Resource Center in San Francisco, and an Assistant Public Defender in the Louisville-Jefferson County Public Defender Corporation in Louisville, KY.
Christopher Seeds is currently Visiting Fellow to the Cornell Death Penalty Project at Cornell Law School. Christopher was a Judy Clarke Fellow and a staff attorney at the Center for Capital Litigation in Columbia, South Carolina and, more recently, served for five years as a Deputy Capital Defender in the New York State Capital Defender Office. He is a former Death Penalty Clerk for the New Jersey Supreme Court and law clerk for Associate Justice Alan B. Handler of the New Jersey Supreme Court.
Naomi Terr received a Doctorate in Jurisprudence from Cornell Law School in 2001. She graduated from the University of Texas at Austin with a Master of Social Work in 1993 She is currently in private practice. A major focus of her practice is developing mitigating evidence in capital cases. She has also worked extensively in cases with evidence of mental retardation. In addition, Ms. Terr is a program attorney with the Mexican Capital Legal Assistance Program, a program funded by the foreign ministry of Mexico to assist Mexican nationals facing the death penalty in the U.S. In 2001, Ms. Terr received a two-year fellowship from Equal Justice Works. Her host organization was Texas Defender Service. As an Equal Justice Works Fellow, she developed and implemented a project to incorporate social work students into capital defense teams.
