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Contact :
(713)869-4722
FAX (713)880-3811
2307 Union St.
Houston, Texas 77007
email:staff@gracelaw.org |
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Board Members
Jay Burnett President of the Board
Law Office of Jay Burnett
1419 Franklin St
Houston, TX 77002
(713) 227-1770
Jay Burnett graduated from South Texas College of Law in 1973 and subsequently developed an extensive criminal trial and appellate practice as a member of Burnett, Morrow and Burnett. He was appointed in 1984, by Governor Mark White, to serve as judge of the newly created 351st Criminal District Court. In 1986 he was elected to the 183rd Criminal District Court where he served for twelve years until retiring, undefeated, on January 1, 1999. While presiding over the 183rd, Judge Burnett granted relief to Calvin Burdine, reversing his conviction and sentenced after finding that his lawyer at slept through significant portions of his trial. For years, the state of Texas fought Judge Burnett's ruling in the federal court system, but it was finally upheld by the Fifth Circuit and Calvin was returned to Harris County for retrial on June 7th 2002. For his courage and integrity in dispensing true justice to Calvin Burdine, Judge Burnett was the first recipient of GRACE's Fragile Gavel Award, a prize that now carries his name. Jay Burnett is now a practicing criminal defense attorney and serves when needed as a visiting Judge. He recently represented Anthony Graves on retrial after his conviction and death sentence were reversed, and secured Mr. Graves exoneration and release from prison.
Phyllis E. Mann is Director of the National Defender Leadership Institute, within the National Legal Aid & Defender Association. She is located in Texas. Prior to joining NLADA, she was a consultant in criminal defense, providing expert testimony in state and federal courts in capital defense, research and writing in systemic areas of criminal defense, and serving as the curriculum coordinator for NLADA’s Life in the Balance capital defense training. Before returning to Texas, Phyllis practiced exclusively criminal defense -- trial and appeal, state and federal -- in Louisiana. She has previously served as a public defender for Rapides Parish, as an appellate public defender for the Louisiana Appellate Project, as a court appointed capital defender certified by the Louisiana Indigent Defender Assistance Board, and as a CJA panel attorney for the Western & Middle Districts of Louisiana. In 2005, Phyllis secured the unanimous opinion from the Louisiana Supreme Court in State v. Citizen & Tonguis, establishing the authority for trial court judges to halt capital prosecutions where there is no funding for the defense of the accused. Following Hurricane Katrina, she led an ad hoc group of criminal defense attorneys in their pro bono efforts to document and represent the approximately 8500 prisoners and detainees evacuated from south-eastern Louisiana jails. She received the 2006 Arthur von Briesen Award from NLADA for her contributions as a private attorney to indigent defense in Louisiana. Phyllis is a past president of the Louisiana Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers and was the recipient of LACDL’s 2005 Justice Albert Tate Jr. Award for lifetime achievement in criminal defense.
David George Treasurer
Connelly · Baker · Wotring LLP
700 JPMorgan Chase Tower
600 Travis Street
Houston, TX 77002
(713) 980-6513
David George is a partner in the appellate section of Connelly · Baker · Wotring LLP. He is board certified in civil appellate law by the Texas Board of Legal Specialization, and he focuses his practice on appeals and commercial litigation. In his appellate practice, Mr. George has argued before the United States Fifth Circuit and the First, Ninth, and Fourteenth Texas Courts of Appeals, and he recently won a case in the United States Supreme Court. He has tried numerous lawsuits, including breach of contract, fraud, insurance industry professional negligence, breach of fiduciary duty, insurance coverage, personal injury, and employment law cases. Mr. George has been selected by Texas Monthly Magazine as a Super Lawyer and a Rising Star, and H-Texas Magazine named him one of the top 20 commercial litigators in Houston. He is AV rated by Martindale-Hubbell. He is co-editor of The Appellate Lawyer.
Mr. George graduated with honors from Baylor Law School, where he served as Lead Articles Editor of the Baylor Law Review. Mr. George served as a law clerk to Judge Harold R. DeMoss, Jr. of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit and Judge Joe J. Fisher of the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Texas in Beaumont. Mr. George served as President of the American Civil Liberties Union of Houston and was on the board of the American Civil Liberties Union of Texas. Mr. George is licensed to practice law in Texas and Maryland.
Morris Moon Secretary
2109 Decatur St.
Houston, Texas 77007
Morris Moon has been a capital post-conviction attorney since 2001, working in state and federal courts to successfully challenge the convictions and sentences of capital defendants in Texas and elsewhere.
Richard Burr
Attorney at Law
Burr and Welch
2307 Union St.
Houston, TX 77007
Richard “Dick” Burr is in private practice in Houston with the firm of Burr & Welch. He has devoted his practice entirely to death penalty defense work since 1979, first with Southern Prisoners Defense Committee, and then with the Public Defender’s Office in West Palm Beach, Florida, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, the Texas Resource Center , and finally, his private practice with Mandy Welch. He has argued two cases in the United States Supreme Court, Ford v. Wainwright, 477 U.S. 399 (1986), which established the right of incompetent death-sentenced prisoners to be spared from execution, and Selvage v. Lynaugh, 494 U.S. 108 (1990), a case which set the stage for the relaxation of procedural default rules for claims under Penry v. Lynaugh. Dick has testified before U.S. Congressional committees on death penalty legislation on three occasions, has presented CLE programs on capital and appellate litigation in twenty states and in numerous national death penalty training conferences, has taught a death penalty seminar at Yale University’s College of Law, and in 1998 received the Life in the Balance Achievement Award from the National Legal Aid and Defender Association for the work he has done in capital defense over his career. He served as one of the attorneys for Timothy McVeigh in the Oklahoma City bombing trial and was the coordinator of the penalty phase defense for Mr. McVeigh. He has served as a Federal Death Penalty Resource Counsel since October, 1997.
Tanya Greene has worked as a capital defense practitioner for almost 15 years. She began at the Southern Center for Human Rights (SCHR), representing indigent capital clients throughout Alabama and Georgia who might otherwise have gone without counsel. For three years at SCHR, she also served as the Death Penalty Resource Counsel for the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (NACDL), providing capital defense resources and expertise to any of the more than 10,000 NACDL members in the United States, consulting daily with attorneys brainstorming cases, identifying viable trial and appellate challenges, locating experts, and crafting pleadings.
Ms. Greene also worked as a Deputy Capital Defender at the New York Capital Defender Office where she represented capitally-charged clients in the New York City area. The New York Capital Defender Office was instrumental in having the New York death penalty statute declared unconstitutional by the state’s highest court in 2004.
Ms. Greene then served as the Training and Assistance Counsel for the National Consortium for Capital Defense Training where she initiated, developed and implemented a unique and successful program of hands-on training for capital defense practitioners across the country that continues today and after which numerous other trainings have been modeled.
Ms. Greene received her J.D. from Harvard Law School after graduating from Wesleyan University with a double major in Sociology and Afro-American Studies. Ms. Greene is an active member of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers and the National Conference of Black Lawyers.
Tanya Greene currently serves as Advocacy and Policy Counsel at the national ACLU office. She is affiliated with the Center for Justice and with a focus on criminal justice issues, including the death penalty, solitary confinement, indigent defense and juvenile justice.
Capital Defense Training Counsel
Jack has represented capital defendants for over 20 years. Prior to his appointment at the ACLU, Jack was a public defender in Connecticut’s Capital Defense and Trial Services Unit and, before that, he spent 11 years as Director of the Mississippi and Louisiana Capital Trial Assistance Project in New Orleans. In these capacities, Jack has represented numerous clients at trial, on appeal, and in post-conviction proceedings. These clients include Michael Graham and Larry Maxwell, both innocent defendants who faced death by execution and were later freed.
Jack wrote the pleadings and co-argued the seminal case of State v. Peart, in which the Louisiana Supreme Court recognized that indigent defendants have a right to effective counsel and that the overwhelming caseloads of the indigent defender system in New Orleans violated that right. He is a graduate of New York University School of Law and in 2001 received the National Legal Aid & Defender Association’s Life in the Balance Achievement Award.
In 2006, Jack established the ACLU's Capital Punishment Project and led that office through April 2011, supervising lawyers and mitigation specialists conducting direct representation, consulting and training in capital cases around the country, providing co-counsel to GRACE in two cases. He has recently become the Capital Defense Training Counsel for the National Associaiton of Criminal Defense Lawyers.
Joe Margulies
Clinical Associate Professor of Law
Assistant Director, MacArthur Justice Center
Northwestern University School of Law
375 East Chicago Avenue
Chicago, IL 60611
Joe Margulies is an attorney with the Roderick MacArthur Justice Center and an Associate Clinical Professor at Northwestern University Law School in Chicago . He received his B.A., with distinction, from Cornell University in 1982, and his J.D., cum laude, from Northwestern in 1988. After a clerkship with the Hon. William Hart of the Northern District of Illinois, Margulies joined the staff of the Texas Capital Resource Center, where he represented men and women on Texas’ death row. In 1994, Margulies entered private practice in Minneapolis, specializing in civil rights and capital defense. In 2002, he was the Distinguished Practitioner in Residence at Cornell University Law School, and in 2004, he joined the MacArthur Center. Margulies was Counsel of Record in both Rasul v. Bush(2004), involving the detentions at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Station, and Munaf v. Geren & Geren v. Omar (2008), involving detentions at Camp Cropper in Iraq. He continues to play a leading role in coordinating the litigation nationwide challenging the Bush Administration’s post-9/11 detention policy.
In June 2005, at the invitation of Pennsylvania Republican Senator Arlen Specter, Margulies testified at the first Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on detainee issues. He writes and lectures widely on civil liberties in the wake of September 11 and his commentaries have appeared in numerous publications, including the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, the Miami Herald, the Virginia Quarterly Review, the Christian Science Monitor, and the Legal Times. He is also the author of the widely acclaimed book, Guantanamo and the Abuse of Presidential Power (Simon and Schuster 2006). Among other accolades, Guantanamo and the Abuse of Presidential Power was named one of the best books of 2006 by The Economist magazine. It also received the prestigious Silver Gavel Award of 2007, given each year by the American Bar Association to the book that best promotes “the American public’s understanding of the law and the legal system.” It also won the Scribes Award of 2007, given each year by the American Association of Legal Writers for the best work of legal scholarship. Margulies has also won numerous awards for his work since 9/11.
Robert L. McGlasson
Michael Kennedy McIntyre & Associates
965 Virginia Avenue, NE
Atlanta, Georgia 30306-3615
(404) 879-0005
Robert McGlasson received his Juris Doctor from the Yale School of Law in 1981. He became a law clerk to the Honorable Elbert P. Tuttle, Circuit Judge of the United States Court Of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit. Mr. McGlasson worked as a staff attorney at the South Prisoners’ Defense Committee and later founded the Texas Resource Center in Austin, which was the first and only death penalty appeals litigation office in Texas. Mr. McGlasson has served as an adjunct professor of law at the University of Texas Law School and as a staff attorney with the Federal Defender Program, Inc. Mr. McGlasson is a member of the State Bar of Georgia. He practices exclusively in the field of post-conviction representation. Mr. McGlasson has been working with the firm since 2006.
In 1984, Calvin Jerold Burdine was convicted and sentenced to death after a trial in which his attorney slept at counsel table for significant periods of time and the prosecutor urged the jury to kill him because life in prison would not be punishment for a gay man. For almost 20 years, Robert struggled for legal recognition of what should be obvious to anyone: that a sleeping lawyer is no lawyer at all. Finally, on June 7th of 2002 Calvin was returned to Harris County for his hard-won retrial.
Robert sought appointment to represent him at trial. Ironically, the Fair Defense Act, which had been passed in response to the revelation that Calvin’s attorney slept through portions of his capital trial, was invoked to remove Robert from Calvin's case. Calvin was understandably adamant that he would not accept counsel chosen by the court. McGlasson asked Danalynn Recer, a former post-conviction attorney who had switched to capital trial work several years before, to assist him. Danalynn stepped in to represent Calvin on a pro bono basis, securing a life plea for him and founding the Gulf Region Advocacy Center (GRACE) in the process.
Most recently, Robert was part of the team the defended Brian Nichols, the accused Atlanta courthouse shooter, winning a life sentence in a trial held in the very same courthouse where the shooting occured after years of fighting to secure a fair trial for one of the most despised people in Georgia.
Clive Stafford Smith is the founder of Reprieve and has spent 25 years working on behalf of defendants facing the death penalty in the USA. After graduating from Columbia Law School in New York, Clive spent nine years as a lawyer with the Southern Center for Human Rights working on death penalty cases and other civil rights issues. In 1993, Clive moved to New Orleans and launched the Louisiana Crisis Assistance Center, a non-profit law office specializing in representation of poor people in death penalty cases.
In 1999 Clive founded Reprieve and, the following year, he was awarded an OBE for “humanitarian services”. Since 2004, he has focused on achieving due process for the prisoners being held by the US in Guantanamo Bay, as well as continuing his work on death penalty cases. Clive was made a Rowntree Visionary and Echoing Green Fellow in 2005 and was previously a Soros Senior Fellow. As director, Clive is responsible for overseeing Reprieve’s Casework Program, as well as the direct representation of prisoners in Guantanamo Bay and on death row as a Louisiana licensed attorney at law. Clive recently wrote a book about his experiences at Guantanamo, Bad Men (2007), shortlisted for the 2008 Orwell Prize for political writing.
Clive has also written The Eight O'Clock Ferry to the Windward Side: Fighting the Lawless World of Guantanamo Bay
and
Welcome To Hell: Letters and Writings from Death Row by Helen Prejean, Clive Stafford Smith, and Jan Arriens
Liz Vartkessian worked as a mitigation specialist with GRACE from December of 2004 to August 2007. In 2007 Ms. Vartkessian began her PhD in Law at Oxford University. She is also a researcher with the Capital Jury Project - a nationally sponsored program of research on how capital jurors make sentencing decisions. Currently, Ms. Vartkessian’s research investigates the influence of the Texas capital sentencing scheme in jurors’ consideration of mitigating evidence and in their punishment deliberations.
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