BeSustained

Jenny Andrews, (she/her). A child of counterculture, raised off the grid by back-to-the-land hippies on the Lost Coast in Northern California, Jenny Andrews is a graduate of Cornell University and Harvard Law School. She started her career as a public defender in Oakland, California in 1996, but left after seven years, after experiencing burnout and moral injury, and didn’t practice law for three years. She returned to public defense work in 2007, and continued working as a public defender in Sonoma County and Santa Barbara County until 2022, navigating challenges to sustainability in a wide variety of positions, including: Forensic Resource Counsel, Felony Team Leader, Director of Training and Senior Deputy. For 23 years, she worked on the front lines of criminal trial courts and has consistently litigated cases, including misdemeanor, felony, juvenile, civil commitment (mentally disordered offender and sexually violent predator), mental competency, homicide, and multi-jurisdiction (and multi-jury) trials. She has carried specialized caseloads of complex, forensic and capital litigation. In 2022, she became the Director of Training at the Indigent Defense Improvement Division of the Office of the State Public Defender, a new statewide effort to support and train indigent defenders in California. She teaches on the faculty of Gideon’s Promise, the National Association for Public Defense, the National Legal Aid and Defender Association, the National Criminal Defense College, the Trial Advocacy Workshop at Harvard Law School, and the California Public Defenders Association. She has taught in public defense training programs in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nevada, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, South Carolina, Tennessee, and in public defense offices throughout California.

Kathleen Casey-Gamez (she/her) is Corporate Counsel at Sweetwater.  As a Privacy Analyst, she helps design systems that protect customer information and honor their data rights. Before working in Privacy, she spent a decade in public service working first as a criminal defense attorney in Indianapolis, and after that, in policy work in both Indiana and Texas to improve the quality of public defense. She has lead a statewide Task Force with federal judges and state lawmakers, and has spoken at both state and national conferences as a subject matter expert. She serves on the ABA Committee Standing Committee on Legal Aid and Indigent Defense as a volunteer.

Wendy Dean, MD, (she/her) practiced as a psychiatrist for a decade, worked in medical product development for the Department of Defense, and then as an executive for a half-billion dollar non-profit. Moral Injury of Healthcare, a 501(c)3, was founded by Dean and Simon Talbot, MD, to address the distress that occurs when clinicians are repeatedly expected to make choices that transgress their deeply held commitment to healing. Moral injury locates the source of distress not in individual frailty, but in a conflict ridden healthcare system. They intend to realign the goals and incentives of healthcare stakeholders to create a better, sustainable environment of care. Dean’s book, If I Betray These Words, profiles clinicians across the country who are tough, resourceful, and resilient, but feel trapped between the patient-first values of their Hippocratic oath and the business imperatives of a broken healthcare system. An alum of Smith College and the University of Massachusetts Medical School, Dean trained in surgery and psychiatry at Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center. After practicing for a decade, Dean worked for the US Army, where she managed regenerative medicine research funding and guided strategy for a $70M investment in the emerging field of hand and face transplants. In that position, and as a senior executive at a large nonprofit in Washington, D.C., she worked closely with both the civilian and military medical communities, and many government agencies–BARDA, NIH, WHOSTP, NASA, DARPA–to develop novel strategies to restore form, function and appearance to ill and injured service members.

John Lopez (he/him) is still learning. He supports people as a trauma informed boxing coach with ToolShed Boxing. John is also studying to complete his Masters in Social Work with the goal of providing support for people in the criminal legal system. He supports children charged as adults in his position as a staff attorney with the Youth Sentencing & Reentry Project. John’s focus is the healing power of relationship. He’s trying to figure out how to care for his community and himself in tandem.

Meredith Ryan runs a solo practice dedicated to public defense as a bar advocate in Western Massachusetts. She is a graduate of Western Washington University, the Maurice A. Deane School of Law at Hofstra University, and attended National Criminal Defense College. She is passionate about mentoring and educating the next generation of public defenders. She is an adjunct professor at Western New England School of Law, where she teaches sentencing law and a criminal defense trial skills class, guest faculty at the Committee for Public Counsel Services new lawyer training, as well as hosting students at her practice for clinics and externships. She also serves as vice president on the board of Hampden County Lawyers for Justice which manages and recruits contract criminal defense attorneys.

Jeff Sherr is a highly respected public defense veteran with over 25 years of experience training public defense staff nationwide. Known as the “trainer of trainers,” he has mentored countless public defense training directors, presenters, and small group coaches across the country. Jeff’s expertise is sought after, having delivered in-person training in over 40 states and taught for prestigious programs such as the National Criminal Defense College, Gideon’s Promise, and Harvard Trial Advocacy Workshop. He formerly served as the training director for both the National Association for Public Defense and the Kentucky Department of Public Advocacy. 

Bahar Mirhosseni is a criminal defense and human rights attorney. As Distinguished Legal Fellow/Director of Legal Advocacy at the Cornell Center on the Death Penalty Worldwide, her work focuses on narrative construction, intersectional gender justice, and high-quality client representation. She delivers a wide range of trainings, partnerships, and consultations with defense teams. She is the Co-Chair of the Gender Working Group of the World Coalition Against the Death Penalty. She previously taught the Pretrial Justice Clinic at UCLA School of Law in partnership with the Los Angeles County Public Defender’s Office. She began her career as a public defender in 2007, at the Brooklyn trial office of The Legal Aid Society of New York and later became a public defender in California. Prior to her work at the Cornell Center on the Death Penalty Worldwide, she was Interim Program Director of the public defense offices of The International Legal Foundation in the MENA region. She is a Senior Advocate and Board Member of the Color of Excellence, a professional organization dedicated to supporting lawyers and law students of color. She lives in Southern California and has trained hundreds of public defenders, law students, and other justice-oriented advocates in the United States and internationally.

Alisa Smith (she/her) is a Professor at the University of Central Florida. She earned her doctoral degree in criminology and criminal justice and her law degree (JD) at The Florida State University. She practiced criminal trial and appellate law for nearly 29 years and taught undergraduate legal studies for over 25 years. She has published scholarly research on the study of misdemeanor courts and the right to counsel, public defender stress and coping strategies, and the role of discourse in framing and maintaining power inequalities. Dr. Smith has authored more than 25 peer-reviewed and law journal articles, reports, and book chapters, and has written three books. Most recently, she collaborated on research projects with the National Association for Public Defense and the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers. The NAPD collaboration focused on public defender stress and coping strategies. It resulted in two published articles: Stress and Public Criminal Defense: Comparing Male and Female Defender Experiences and Coping Strategies, 61 Idaho L. Rev. 1 (2025), and Moving Beyond Yoga: An Exploratory, Qualitative Study of Public Defenders’ Solutions for Improving Work-Life and Effective Assistance of Counsel. 14 Crim. L. Prac. 27 (2024). The NACDL collaboration involved a three-year mixed-methodological study and uncovered how court operations and procedures constrained misdemeanor defendants’ access to robust and meaningful legal representation and identified the barriers that inhibited them from asserting their constitutional rights. The project’s findings were released in a series of published reports available on the NACDL misdemeanor waivers of counsel landing page: https://www.nacdl.org/Landing/Misdemeanor-Waivers-of-Counsel. The goal of Alisa’s life’s work as a former public defender and academic has been to improve the criminal legal system, particularly for the indigent.