Texas Lawyer has recognized 30 female lawyers in Texas for extraordinary accomplishment. Two of those honored play leading roles in indigent criminal defense work in the state, Maruie Levin, Senior Staff Attorney at Texas Defender Service, and; Andrea Marsh, Executive Director of Texas Fair Defense Project. The Texas Lawyer special supplement is here.
This is from Editor Collen Bridget McGushin's introduction:
Hortense Sparks Ward, Sarah T. Hughes, Barbara Jordan -- these and countless other storied women have pioneered the legal profession in the Lone Star State and mentored others in the ways of justice, ethics and advocacy. They also helped pave the way for the 30 women profiled in Extraordinary Women in Texas Law, a special magazine from Texas Lawyer.
With 22,783 women practicing law in the state, according to the State Bar of Texas, the Texas Lawyer editorial department knew this project wouldn't be easy. We started the six-month process by posting a nomination form on the Texas Lawyer Web site. We asked readers to nominate women licensed to practice law in Texas who have had an impact in the state on firms, government, nonprofits, academia and/or the corporate world within the past five years (judges were not eligible).
More on Levin is here:
A defense attorney who works on death-sentence cases, Maurie Levin says she loves and hates her work.
"You're railing against a system that's stacked against you every step of the way," Levin says. She fights for her clients and assists lawyers with their cases -- hundreds of them over her career. And it's usually a losing battle in Texas. "And then your client gets executed. It's not a lot of fun."
That's what had just happened when we talked with Levin. Carlton Turner was executed in July, following his conviction 10 years ago for capital murder in the deaths of his adoptive parents. Levin and others were filing motions until the end, and she talked with Turner on the phone shortly before he was put to death.
A higher point for Levin came early this year, when LaRoyce Smith was taken off of death row with a plea deal that gave him life in prison. His sentence -- but not the murder conviction -- had twice been overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court, in large part because the trial jury was not allowed to consider his IQ of 78. Levin represented Smith for many years and raised claims that were litigated before the high court. But she's quick to note that many lawyers chipped in on the defense side of that case.
Levin, a 1992 graduate of Northeastern University School of Law in Boston, has represented inmates sentenced to die since 1993. She is also an adjunct professor at the University of Texas School of Law, co-teaching the Capital Punishment Clinic with fellow defense lawyers Jim Marcus and Rod Owen. They have a dozen students working on whatever "is on our respective plates," she says.
More on Marsh is here:
Andrea Marsh fights to help the poor get good legal help.
Marsh started the Texas Fair Defense Project, which helps protect the rights of indigent defendants in Texas, at the offices of the Texas ACLU in 2004 and spun it off as a stand-alone nonprofit in September 2005.
As executive director of TFDP, Marsh presses for stronger implementation of the state's Fair Defense Act. Passed by the Texas Legislature in 2001, it requires counties to have written policies for indigent defense and to set standards for the appointment of criminal-defense lawyers.
She also helped develop performance guidelines for defense lawyers in capital cases as part of the State Bar of Texas' Committee for Legal Services to the Poor in Criminal Matters. She currently leads a subcommittee working on similar guidelines for noncapital cases.
Marsh successfully pushed for passage of a 2007 bill, H.B. 1178, in the Texas Legislature that aims to protect the rights of indigent defendants who appear in court without counsel. It went into effect in September 2007.
In a June 23 opinion stemming from the first case ever filed by Marsh at the TFDP, Rothgery v. Gillespie County, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 8-1 in favor of her client Walter Rothgery. The high court ruled that a defendant's Sixth Amendment right to counsel attaches at his first appearance before a magistrate, whether or not the prosecutor is also on hand. As a result, indigent defendants released from custody in Texas can get court-appointed attorneys much sooner than in the past.
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