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PANELISTS

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Attorney Hannah Autry

Hannah Autry is a staff attorney at the Center for Death Penalty Litigation (CDPL) in Durham, North Carolina. She represents death-sentenced clients in state and federal post-conviction proceedings and clients charged with first degree murder at the trial level. She regularly attends national and North Carolina conferences focused on issues surrounding the death penalty, death penalty litigation, forensic sciences, and race. She is also the Board Chair of The Decarceration Project, a non-profit in North Carolina aimed to tackle excessive sentences and racial bias in the criminal legal system.

Before joining CDPL, Hannah practiced in the public defender's office in Frankfort, Kentucky, where she represented clients facing charges ranging from misdemeanors to murder. She received her undergraduate degree at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2010 and graduated with honors from North Carolina Central University School of Law in May 2013.

Professor Nina Chernoff

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.

Attorney Emily Coward

Emily Coward serves as Director of the Inclusive Juries Project within the Center for Criminal Justice and Professional Responsibility at Duke University School of Law. From 2012 to 2021, Emily was an attorney with the UNC School of Government’s Public Defense Education group, serving as Director and Project Attorney of the NC Racial Equity Network. She was awarded the UNC School of Government Margaret Taylor Writing Award for co-authoring Raising Issues of Race in North Carolina Criminal Cases and the James E. Williams award from the North Carolina Public Defenders Association. She currently serves as Chair of the Data, Study, and Evaluation Team of the NC Governor's Task Force for Racial Equity in Criminal Justice, and a Commissioner on the NC Commission on Racial and Ethnic Disparities in the Criminal Justice System.

Attorney Miriam Thompson 

Originally from Morehead City, N.C., Miriam Thompson has been serving clients in the Wilmington area since 1995. Before opening her own law firm in 2001, she practiced law for six years at Zimmer and Zimmer, Attorneys at Law, L.L.P. Miriam earned her JD degree from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Law in 1995. She attended St. Mary's College in Raleigh, North Carolina and received her Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1991.

Miriam is a member of the North Carolina Advocates for Justice, The North Carolina Bar Association and the New Hanover County Bar Association. She is also serving on the board of the Coastal Women's Attorney Association.