Staff/Contact Us

Criminal Justice Clinic
Room 130
600 New Jersey Avenue, NW
Washington, DC 20001-2095
Tel: (202) 662-9575
Email: tr234@law.georgetown.edu

Our clinic staff consists of two faculty members, eight fellows, an investigations supervisor, an executive assistant, and a receptionist.

Clinic Staff & Faculty

John M. Copacino
Professor Copacino is Director of the Criminal Justice Clinic and the E. Barrett Prettyman graduate program in criminal trial practice. Prior to joining the Georgetown faculty, he was the Director of the Juvenile Law Clinic at the Antioch School of Law. He is a graduate of the University of Virginia Law School and received an LL.M. from the Law Center. He serves as trial counsel in numerous criminal and post-conviction cases. In 1997, he received the Law Center's Flegal Award for outstanding teaching. He is active in local criminal justice organizations.

Vida Johnson
Professor Johnson, prior to joining Georgetown University Law Center, was a supervising attorney in the Trial Division at the Public Defender Service for the District of Columbia (PDS), where she worked for eight years. At PDS Ms. Johnson was assigned to the most serious cases at the "Felony One" level, and her experience included numerous trials in D.C. Superior Court representing indigent clients facing charges including homicide, sexual assault, and armed offenses. Ms. Johnson's responsibilities at PDS also included supervising other trial attorneys and serving as one of the agency's two representatives to the D.C. Superior Court Sentencing Guidelines Commission. In 2009, Ms. Johnson was a Visiting Associate Professor in the Juvenile Justice Clinic at Georgetown University Law Center. Before joining PDS, Professor Johnson was an E. Barrett Prettyman fellow at Georgetown University Law Center. As a fellow she represented indigent adults in the D.C. Superior Court and supervised students in the Criminal Justice Clinic. Ms. Johnson earned her law degree from New York University Law School in 2000 and she earned her B.A. in American History from the University of California, Berkeley in 1995.

Sarah E. Young
Sarah is the Investigations Supervisor and Director of the Investigative Internship Program. Sarah received a B.A. degree from the University of North Carolina at Asheville. Prior to joining the clinic staff, Sarah spent three and half years working as a Staff Investigator at the DC Public Defender Service, investigating felony cases on behalf of indigent clients. She also worked as an investigator at the Buncombe County Public Defender Service in North Carolina.

Maile Padilla
Maile Padilla received a B.A. in Sociology and Chicano Studies from the U.C.L.A. in 2007 and a J.D. from U.C. Berkeley School of Law in 2010. While at U.C.L.A., she conducted ethnographic research at the Kenyon Juvenile Justice Center in South Central Los Angeles. There, she studied the influence of race and socially-constructed identities on the assessment of juveniles’ moral character by courts and probation. While in law school, she worked with Uncommon Law, participated in the Death Penalty Clinic, directed the Juvenile Hall Outreach Program, and organized the La Raza Law Student’s Association Worker’s Rights Clinic. During her 1L summer, she developed clients’ life histories as a clerk for the Unrepresented Condemned Inmate Project at the California Appellate Project in San Francisco. She spent her 2L summer as a Trial Division Clerk at the Public Defender Service for the District of Columbia. After earning her J.D., she worked as public defender in California. Maile is a 2006 U.C.L.A. Law Fellow.

Lauren Johnson
Lauren hails from Jonesboro, Georgia. She graduated from New York University School of Law in 2012 and received her B.S. from Georgetown University in 2008.  While at NYU, she participated in the Reentry Clinic where she represented individuals who had been denied employment licenses on the basis of prior criminal convictions. Lauren also spent semesters as a legal intern in the Criminal Division of the Legal Aid Society and the Immigration Group at The Door's Legal Services Center. Lauren spent her summers as a legal intern at the Southern Center for Human Rights and as a law clerk at the Public Defender Service for the District of Columbia.

Corrine Fletcher, Receptionist