Staff/Contact Us
Criminal Defense & Prisoner Advocacy 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 a faculty member, fellows, an investigations supervisor, an executive assistant, and a receptionist.
Clinic Staff & Faculty
Abbe Smith
Director of the Clinic, Co-Director of the E. Barrett Prettyman Fellowship Program, and Professor of Law. She joined the Georgetown faculty in 1996. Prior to coming to Georgetown, Professor Smith was the Deputy Director of the Criminal Justice Institute at Harvard Law School, where she was also a Clinical Instructor, and Lecturer on Law. In addition to Georgetown and Harvard, Professor Smith has also taught at City University New York Law School, Temple University School of Law, American University Washington College of Law, and the University of Melbourne Law School (Ausralia), where she was a Senior Fulbright Scholar in 2005-06. Professor Smith teaches and writes on in the areas of criminal and juvenile defense, legal ethics, juvenile justice, and clinical legal education. In addition to law journal articles, she is the author of Case of a Lifetime: A Criminal Defense Lawyer's Story (Palgrave MacMillan, 2008), co-author with Monroe Freedman of Understanding Lawyers' Ethics (4th ed., Lexis-Nexis, 2010), and co-editor with Monroe Freedman of How Can You Represent Those People (forthcoming, 2013). a contributing author of We Dissent (Michael Avery, ed., NYU Press, 2008) and Law Stories (Gary Bellow & Martha Minow, eds., University of Michigan Press, 1996). Professor Smith began her legal career at the Defender Association of Philadelphia, where she was a trial lawyer from 1982 to 1990.n Assistant Defender, a member of the Special Defense Unit, and a Senior Trial Attorney. She continues to be actively engaged in indigent defense practice and frequently presents at public defender and legal aid training programs in the United States and abroad. Professor Smith is on the Board of Directors of The Bronx Defenders and the National Juvenile Defender Center, and is a longtime . She is a member of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, the American Civil Liberties Union, and the National Lawyers Guild. In 2010, she was elected to the American Board of Criminal Lawyers, an exclusive national society for outstanding criminal trial lawyers. She is also a published cartoonist. A collection of her cartoons, Carried Away: The Chronicles of a Feminist Cartoonist, was published in 1984.
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.
Teruko Richardson
Teruko Richardson is the Executive Assistant for the Criminal Defense & Prisoner Advocacy Clinic. She handles all administrative matters necessary to ensure an efficient work flow. Prior to joining our staff in March, 1982, Teruko worked with the Law Offices of Mitchell, Shorter & Gartrell.
CDPAC's E. Barrett Prettyman Fellows
Camilla Hsu
Camilla received a B.A. in Literature from Yale University in 2006 and a J.D. from Harvard Law School in 2011. Prior to law school, she worked on prisoners' rights and death penalty cases as part of the Community Services Team at Holland and Knight LLP. While in law school, she represented indigent clients in the Boston criminal courts as a student-attorney with the Criminal Justice Institute, and served as student-attorney for the Prison Legal Assistance Project, and training director/student-attorney for the Harvard Defenders. During her law school summers, she interned with the Federal Defenders of New York for the Southern District and the Southern Center for Human Rights in Atlanta, Georgia.
Joseph Goldstein-Breyer
Joseph received a B.A. in Individualized Study from NYU in 2006, and a JD from the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law in 2011. Since graduating from law school, he has been a post-bar law clerk at the Alameda County Public Defender's Office in Oakland, CA. Prior to law school, he was a legal assistant at the Legal Aid Society, Prisoners' Rights Project, in New York City. While in law school, he represented prisoners on death row in Berkeley's Death Penalty Clinic. During his law school summers, and into the year, he worked at public defender offices in DC and San Franscisco, and was a judicial extern for a federal trial judge in San Francisco. While in law school, he co-founded a student run organization that worked with inmates at San Quentin Prison.
