The American Criminal Law Review (ACLR) is hosting the 2024 Symposium on Disability and the Criminal Legal System, co-hosted by the Disabled Law Students Association (DLSA), on November 1, 2024. The premise of the symposium is disability accommodations across the criminal legal system, specifically using disability law and its expansive definition of disability to create better protections for disabled persons. Scholars and practitioners will speak to this topic across the spectrum of the criminal legal system, addressing the role of disability law in policing, trial, parole/probation, and incarceration. 

The Symposium will be hosted from 10:00 AM to 5:00 PM on November 1, 2024 on the 12th Floor of Gewirz Student Center on the Georgetown University Law Center campus.

The event is open to all who are interested. Please RSVP using our RSVP Google Form or by navigating to the link below: 

https://tinyurl.com/52cj6rsd

ACLR and DLSA are committed to making this event accessible to everyone. The event will have a hybrid Zoom option, live captioning, ASL interpretation, and food provided with gluten-free and vegetarian options. If you require accommodation or service to fully participate, please contact our Senior Symposium Editor, Sophie Gelber, at srg90@georgetown.edu by 10/28.

Symposium: Disability & the Criminal Legal System Schedule

Hosted by the American Criminal Law Review and the Disabled Law Student Association

November 1, 2024 | Gewirz Student Center, 12th Floor

10:00 AM: Welcome/Coffee

10:20 AM: ACLR & DLSA welcome remarks

10:45 AM: Police Response Panel

12:15 PM: Lunch (provided)

1:00 PM: Pre-trial/Post-release Panel

2:30 PM: Case Presentation

3:15 PM: Research Presentation

3:45pm: Break (light snacks)

4:00 PM: Prison Panel

5:00 PM: End

Panels and Biographies 

Policing Panel

• Jamelia Morgan, Center for Racial and Disability Justice at Northwestern University
  • Professor Jamelia Morgan is an award-winning and acclaimed scholar and teacher focusing on issues at the intersections of race, gender, disability, and criminal law and punishment. Her scholarship and teaching examine the development of disability as a legal category in American law, disability and policing, overcriminalization and the regulation of physical and social disorder, and the constitutional dimensions of the criminalization of status.
  • Prof. Morgan received a B.A. in Political Science and a Master of Arts in Sociology from Stanford University, and her J.D. from Yale Law School.
  • Prior to law school, she served as associate director of the African American Policy Forum, a social justice think tank that works to bridge the gap between scholarly research and public discourse related to affirmative action, structural racism, and gender inequality.
• Neel Lalchandani, Brown, Goldstein & Levy
  • ​​Neel Lalchandani is a partner at the Baltimore-based firm Brown, Goldstein & Levy. At BGL, he represents individuals, nonprofits, and companies in a diverse array of civil rights and commercial matters. Among other victories for his clients, Neel has helped secure several of the largest payments in Maryland history for victims of police misconduct. Neel is a graduate of Stanford Law School and clerked for the Honorable Roger L. Gregory, Chief Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, and for the Honorable David O. Carter on the United States District Court for the Central District of California.
• Jean Zachariasiewicz, DOJ Special Litigation
  • Jean Zachariasiewicz is a Trial Attorney in the Police Practice Group within the U.S. Department of Justice Civil Rights Division’s Special Litigation Section.  Jean graduated from Columbia Law School in 2010 and then clerked for federal trial and appellate courts.  Prior to joining the Civil Rights Division, she was a partner at Brown, Goldstein & Levy, where she litigated disability rights, police misconduct, and fair housing cases.  At the DOJ, Jean is a member of the team that investigated the Phoenix Police Department and the team investigating the Louisiana State Police, and she is helping to oversee the consent decree with the Albuquerque Police Department.
• Cory Bernstein, NDRN
  • Cory Bernstein (he/him) is a Staff Attorney at National Disability Rights Network (NDRN), the network membership organization for the federally mandated Protection and Advocacy (P&A) System. In this role, Cory provides the 57 P&As with training and technical assistance on P&A access authority, conditions in adult institutional settings, and organizes coalitional work on these issues across the P&A network. He has a B.S. from Tulane University in Legal Studies in Business, and a J.D. from Brooklyn Law School.
• Jamie Strawbridge, Brown, Goldstein & Levy (Moderating)
  • Jamie Strawbridge is an attorney at the Baltimore-based firm Brown, Goldstein & Levy. Jamie represents individuals in lawsuits under the Americans with Disabilities Act; tenants in class actions concerning unlawful landlord actions; and companies in high-stakes commercial litigation. Jamie also serves as a principal at Inclusivity Strategic Consulting, which supports businesses and government agencies that want to achieve real inclusion of people with disabilities. Jamie graduated from Georgetown University Law Center and clerked for the Honorable Diana G. Motz of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, and for the Honorable Catherine C. Blake of the United States District Court for the District of Maryland.

Pre-trial/Post-release Panel 

• Joseph Longley, ACLU
  • Joey Longley is a staff attorney at the ACLU Disability Rights Program. Joey’s work focuses on substance use disorder and the ADA. Joey was previously a Senior Advisor at the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, a Project Director at the O’Neill Institute for Global and National Health Law at Georgetown Law, and clerked for Judge Roy McLeese on the D.C. Court of Appeals. Joey was also an Equal Justice Works Fellow at the ACLU National Prison Project. He is a graduate of Harvard Law School and The Ohio State University.
•  Rebecca Shaeffer, NDRN 
  • Rebecca Shaeffer currently works as Staff Attorney for Criminal Systems and Institutions at the National Disability Rights Network, where she provides technical support and training for 57 state and territorial protection and advocacy agencies in their federal mandate to monitor, investigate and litigate rights abuses against people with disabilities in carceral and forensic facilities. She is also a professorial lecturer in law at the George Washington University Law School Access to Justice (Prisoner Advocacy) clinic.
  • Ms. Shaeffer has also been Legal Director of Fair Trials International, where she led criminal justice reform advocacy in Europe, the US, and Latin America, a fellow in the Health and Human Rights Division of Human Rights Watch, and a federal death penalty defense investigator. She served on the American Bar Association Criminal Justice Section’s Task Force on Plea Bargaining, and on the international steering committee, led by former UN Special Rapporteur on Torture Juan Méndez, that led to the first international legal guidance on police interrogation – the Méndez Principles. She currently serves on the steering committee for the biennial Prison Law and Advocacy Conference and sits on the advisory board of the Plea Bargaining Institute.
  • Ms. Shaeffer has a JD from Georgetown University Law Center with a certificate in Refugees and Humanitarian Emergencies, where she helped to found the Human Rights Institute and served as its first Student Director, and won the Bettina Pruckmayr Award for Human Rights, and a BA in Comparative Literature from Smith College.
• Brian Dimmick, ACLU
  • Brian Dimmick is a senior staff attorney with the Disability Rights Program at the American Civil Liberties Union, where he focuses on impact litigation work in a number of areas of disability rights including criminal legal reform and voting.  Prior to joining the ACLU in June 2020, Brian worked for over five years as an attorney with the U. S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights on policy issues related to the rights of students with disabilities under section 504 and the ADA in elementary and postsecondary institutions.   Before that, he was a staff attorney and director of litigation at the American Diabetes Association, where he focused on protecting the rights of people with diabetes in education, employment, prisons and other areas, and a Skadden Fellow at Disability Rights Advocates.  He is a graduate of Stanford Law School and Wake Forest University and lives in Washington, D.C.
• West Resendes, ACLU
  • West Resendes is a staff attorney at the ACLU Disability Rights Program, where he uses disability rights litigation and community-centered advocacy tools to advance the ACLU’s affirmative vision for reducing the role, power, presence, and responsibilities of police in communities and schools. West’s work also focuses on the rights of people with disabilities within the criminal legal system. West first began his work at the ACLU as a Legal Intern and rejoined as a Skadden Fellow. West is the first culturally deaf person to work at the ACLU since its co-founder, Helen Keller. West is a graduate of Yale Law School, where he was a member of the Veterans Legal Services Clinic (VLSC), and Harvard College. West has also worked on the Senate Judiciary Committee and was a Henry Russell Shaw Fellow.
•  Professor Tahir Duckett, Georgetown Law (Moderating)

Case Presentation

• Ashika Verriest, ACLU
  • Ashika Verriest is a senior staff attorney with the ACLU’s Criminal Law Reform Project. Her work focuses on bail reform, pre-trial justice, and challenging police practices.
  • Ashika began her career at Brooklyn Defender Services, where she was a Special Litigation attorney working with public defenders to identify systemic constitutional issues in order to vindicate defendants’ constitutional rights within criminal cases. Prior to joining the ACLU, she litigated prisoners’ rights and police reform cases at the Washington Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights and Urban Affairs. She is a graduate of the University of Michigan and New York University School of Law.

Research Presentation

• Heather Swadley, Georgetown Center for Global Health Science & Security
  • Dr. Heather Swadley is a Senior Legal Researcher & Policy Attorney at the Center for Global Health Science & Security, Georgetown University. Swadley brings nearly a decade of experience working in the health and disability policy spaces, both domestically and internationally. Currently, she manages projects relating to disaster medicine and pandemic law.
  • Swadley’s in-progress book manuscript, entitled Governing Disability: The Politics of Classification and Dis/Abled Citizenship, problematizes narratives about disability as a “privileged” social position and in so doing questions the basis for fear of the “disability con.” Specifically, she argues that the benefits conferred by disability legal classifications, including “leniency” in the criminal penal system, such as mental health courts and criminal psychiatric detention in lieu of prison, represent a Faustian bargain wherein people must bargain away their autonomy, privacy, and other markers of citizenship in order to receive resources and supports they desperately need. 
  • Swadley’s previous experience includes work for public health consultancies; legislative bodies; non-profit organizations, including the Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law; government agencies; and universities. Her scholarly work has been featured in the Journal of Women, Politics & Policy, Nebraska Law Review, Oklahoma Law Review, and Temple Law Review, among others. Swadley holds a Ph.D. in Political Science and a J.D., magna cum laude, from Temple Beasley School of Law. 

Prison Panel

• D Dangaran, Rights Behind Bars
  • D Dangaran is the Director of Gender Justice at Rights Behind Bars, where they have argued federal appeals and litigated in federal district courts on behalf of people incarcerated in prisons and jails. They specialize in using litigation and other forms of advocacy to help trans incarcerated people access necessary gender-affirming care.
  • D is a Filipino-Black non-binary trans femme / fairy hailing from and rooted in Wahiawā, Hawai`i. They are a first-generation college graduate of Yale University and received their J.D. from Harvard Law School, where they were an articles editor on the Harvard Law Review. After law school, they clerked on the District of Columbia Court of Appeals and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. They have published two pieces on trans rights in prison since graduation, including an essay published this year in the Harvard Law Review Forum that makes a normative argument for Americans with Disabilities Act claims for gender dysphoria. Apart from their contribution to this Symposium, they have forthcoming articles in the NYU Review of Law and Social Change and the Harvard Journal of Law & Gender that also discuss trans rights in prison. 
  • D currently serves as the co-chair of the National Trans Bar Association.
• Samuel Weiss, Rights Behind Bars
  • Samuel Weiss is the founder and Executive Director of Rights Behind Bars. Before starting Rights Behind Bars, Sam litigated prison conditions cases and other civil rights cases across the country at the ACLU’s National Prison Project, the Southern Poverty Law Center, and the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. He has published writing on the criminal justice system and other issues of civil and constitutional rights in academic and popular settings. He has served as a visiting professor or lecturer on Law at Harvard Law School and Georgetown University Law Center where he teaches the doctrinal course Prison Law.