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Litigating Fair Cross Section Challenges in Nebraska
What can you do to make sure your jury pool is actually diverse? We have all experienced white jury pools that do not reflect the demographics of our community. In this course, you will learn the steps that you can take to file a successful 6th Amendment challenge based on the constitutional right to a jury of peers. This on-demand, virtual program covers how to craft discovery demands to get the information you need, what you can expect at a motion hearing, and the relevant legal arguments.
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Faculty:
Nina Chernoff, Professor, CUNY School of Law
Nina Chernoff is a Professor at the CUNY School of Law. Professor Chernoff’s research focuses on the jury, primarily the right to a jury selected from a fair cross-section of the community.
• Her article, No Records, No Right: Discovery and the Fair Cross-Section Guarantee, was cited by the Iowa Supreme Court’s decision in State v. Plain in support of a Constitutional right to discovery of jury selection records, and was also featured on Last Week Tonight with John Oliver.
• Her article Wrong About the Right: How Courts Undermine the Fair Cross-Section Guarantee by Confusing it With Equal Protection was featured by the Getting Scholarship Into Courts Project of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (May 2015).
Her article Black to the Future: The State Action Doctrine & The White Jury is a tribute to the scholarship of Charles Black and a critique of courts’ use of state action doctrine to analyze fair cross-section cases.
Professor Chernoff also works with courts committed to assembling diverse jury pools. For example, she gave the keynote presentation at the Washington State Supreme Court’s symposium on Jury Diversity in Washington: A Hollow Promise or Hopeful Future?, and is currently a consultant to the New Jersey Judiciary. Professor Chernoff also works with attorneys and communities seeking to diversify their jury pools through advocacy or litigation. For example, she recently helped draft a letter recommending improvements to the jury plan of the United States District Court for the Southern District of California.
Prior to joining CUNY’s faculty, Professor Chernoff was an Acting Assistant Professor of Lawyering at New York University Law School. Before entering academia, she was a staff attorney in the Special Litigation Division of the Public Defender Service for the District of Columbia (PDS). In that capacity she litigated systemic criminal justice issues, including prosecutorial misconduct, jury representation, and the reliability of forensic evidence. Prior to PDS, she was a staff attorney and Zubrow Fellow at Juvenile Law Center and served as a law clerk for the Honorable Thomas L. Ambro, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit. Professor Chernoff graduated from Georgetown University Law Center, magna cum laude, in 2003; she received her M.S. with distinction in Justice, Law & Society from the School of Public Affairs at American University in 2000, and her B.A. in Sociology from Bryn Mawr College in 1997.
Thomas Riley, Public Defender, Douglas County Public Defender
Thomas Riley earned an undergraduate degree in American Studies from St. Michael's College in Winooski, Vermont, in 1972, and subsequently obtained his law degree from Creighton University in Omaha, Nebraska, in 1975. Commencing a notable legal career, Thomas served as an Assistant Public Defender in Douglas County from 1975 to 1983. Rising through the ranks, Thomas held the position of Chief Deputy Public Defender in Douglas County, Nebraska, from 1983 to 1997 and since 1997, has served as the Public Defender for Douglas County, Nebraska.
Russell Lovell, Professor, Drake University School of Law
Drake University Law Professor Emeritus Russell Lovell taught constitutional law, employment discrimination and civil rights law, and remedies from 1976-2014, and served ten years as Associate Dean (collaborating with co-honoree Dean David Walker) and directed Drake’s Clinical Programs from 1995-1999. Russ mentored more than eighty Public Service Scholars as founder/director of Drake’s Public Service Scholarship Program. Drake University honored him as its Outstanding Professor for Experiential Learning for his creation of a practice observation experience of an actual Iowa jury trial for the entire 1L class—and Bloomberg Law, in 2023, recognized it as 1 of the 10 most innovative Law School programs. It was during Russ’s clerkship for Federal Appeals Judge Floyd Gibson that he first helped break down racial barriers in an Arkansas school desegregation case.
Thereafter Russ served as Director of Litigation for the Legal Services Organization of Indianapolis, specializing in Federal Court civil right litigation. His prison reform advocacy secured a Federal Court injunction closing a 48-cell “dungeon-like” solitary confinement unit in Indiana’s maximum-security prison and played a major role in the 1972 landmark Supreme Court due process ruling in Morrissey v. Brewer that guaranteed parolees a fair hearing before their paroles could be revoked.
2023 is Russ’s fiftieth year as an NAACP pro bono civil rights lawyer! His proudest accomplishments were his service as lead counsel on not one, but two, NAACP pattern and practice employment discrimination cases that were resolved by comprehensive Consent Decrees that integrated the Indiana State Police Department in the 1970’s and the Des Moines Fire Department in the 1980’s and 1990’s. Russ served as NAACP co-counsel on key remedies stages of the Indianapolis and Kansas City school desegregation cases, including successful advocacy before the Supreme Court in Jenkins v. Missouri in 1989.
Since 2014 Lovell and Walker have filed nine NAACP Amicus Briefs in the Iowa and Nebraska Supreme Courts. Their advocacy has reinvigorated Iowa’s jury trial jurisprudence, expanded jury service eligibility to more than 160,000 former prisoners who had their citizenship rights restored, and resulted in enactment of the Des Moines Unbiased Policing Ordinance. To use the words of former Drake Law Dean Alan Vestal, “the NAACP has repeatedly honored Russ Lovell for his unwavering civil rights commitment at every level of the NAACP”—Local (Des Moines), State (both Indiana and Iowa), 10-state central US Region (50th anniversary of Brown v. Board in Topeka, Kansas), and the Foot Soldier in the Sand Award at the 2005 National Convention. The Notre Dame Alumni Association awarded him the Fr. Louis Putz social justice advocacy award in 2023.
In 2022 he was elected an American Bar Foundation Fellow. In 2020 Russ received the Iowa National Bar Association’s Journey Award for “demonstrated commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion.” https://www.naacpdesmoines.org/post/meeting-at-the-monument-a-celebration-of-diversity-within-the-iowa-legal-community. In 2018 the ACLU of Iowa honored Russ with its Louise Noun Award from for “having displayed uncommon courage on behalf of civil liberties in the state,” https://www.aclu-ia.org/en/news/betty-andrews-russell-lovell-and-david-walker-naacp-win-aclu-iowa-louise-noun-award. In 2013 the Iowa Juneteenth Celebration honored Russ as its “Iowa Citizen of the Year.”
David Walker, Professor Emeritus of Law, Drake University School of Law
David S. Walker is the retired, Dwight D. Opperman Distinguished Professor of Law, Emeritus, at Drake Law School, where he twice served as Dean of the Law School, from 1987-1996 and again from 2003-2008. He is a member of the Board of Directors of the ACLU of Iowa and also the Executive Committee of the NAACP Des Moines Branch. With his colleague Russell E. Lovell, II, Walker is Co-Chair of the Legal Redress Committee for the Des Moines Branch as well as the State NAACP in Iowa.
He has worked with Professor Lovell and NAACP State Conference President Betty Andrews on many initiatives, including anti-racial and ethnic profiling bills introduced in the Legislature; on Unbiased Policing Ordinances adopted by the cities of Des Moines, Coralville, and Iowa City; on fair chance for employment (“Ban the Box”) bills; on jury selection and management legislation; and on the Governor’s Executive Order Number 7 restoring the right to vote for persons previously convicted of a felony. Recently they have worked successfully to secure changes by the Secretary of State to the Secretary of State website necessary and helpful in light of Executive Order Number 7.
On behalf of the NAACP Walker has co-authored with Mr. Lovell seven Amicus Curiae Briefs addressing issues in cases before the Iowa Supreme Court. The issues in these cases have included a challenge to the constitutionality of pretextual traffic stops (written in conjunction with counsel for the ACLU of Iowa), the constitutional right to an Impartial Jury drawn from a fair cross-section of the community served by the trial court, the authority of the Iowa Civil Rights Commission (which a private corporation claimed had been ousted by an employee’s arbitration agreement), and the validity of “Ban the Box” ordinances passed at the local level.
Walker is also the Chair of the Iowa State Bar Association’s Corporate Laws Committee and has been since 2010. Since 1992 he has been appointed by successive Iowa Governors to be one of Iowa’s three Commissioners on Uniform State Laws, and he has served as Chair of the Iowa Commission since the year 2000. On its behalf, he has sought introduction of and appeared before Iowa House and Senate Subcommittees on more than thirty Uniform Acts, or amendments to them, that Iowa has enacted into law.