PHYLLIS MANN NAMED TO NATIONAL
LEGAL AID AND DEFENDERS ASSOCIATION POST
Richard Goeman,
Director of
Defender Legal Services
of NLADA has issued a statement announcing that Phyllis
Mann is the new
Director
for the National Defender Leadership Institute. Phyllis
won NLADA's 2006 Arthur von Briesen Award for her contributions
as a private attorney to indigent defense in Louisiana. Richard added the following
biographic information:
Phyllis Mann lives and works out of Texas.
Prior to joining NLADA, she was a consultant in criminal
defense, providing expert testimony in both 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 her home state of Texas, Phyllis practiced exclusively criminal defense –
trial and appeal, state and federal – in
Louisiana. At
various times in her career she 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 court appointed CJA attorney for the Western and
Middle Districts of
Louisiana. In 2005, Phyllis secured the
unanimous opinion from the Louisiana Supreme Court in
State v. Citizen,
establishing the authority for trial court judges to halt
capital prosecutions in
Louisiana where there is no funding for
the defense of the accused. Following Hurricane Katrina, she
established and led an ad hoc group of criminal defense
attorneys in their pro bono efforts to interview, counsel, and
document the approximately 8500 prisoners and detainees
evacuated from south-eastern Louisiana jails and to
represent them where appropriate in habeas corpus and bond
proceedings. 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.