Jonathan A. Rapping | |
---|---|
Born | Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, U.S. |
Nationality | American |
Education | University of Chicago (A.B.) Princeton University (M.P.A.) George Washington University Law School (J.D.) |
Occupation | President of Gideon's Promise |
Known for | Founding Gideon's Promise |
Spouse | Ilham Askia |
Children | Aaliyah Rapping, Lucas Rapping |
Parent(s) | Elayne Rapping Leonard Rapping |
Website | Gideon's Promise |
Jonathan A. Rapping is an American criminal defense attorney, founder and president of Gideon's Promise, professor of law at Atlanta's John Marshall Law School, and visiting professor of law at Harvard Law School. Rapping received the MacArthur "Genius" Award in 2014.
Rapping regularly writes about issues related to criminal defense and the criminal justice system. He is a contributor for The Nation, [1] TalkPoverty.org, [2] the National Association For Public Defense, [3] and The Huffington Post. [4] He also maintains a blog called Fulfilling the Promise: Insights to Forging a Path to Meaningful Justice Reform. [5]
Rapping grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. At a young age, Rapping went to demonstrations and protests with his mother, Elayne Rapping, a community organizer, activist and professor in Pittsburgh. Rapping's mother was particularly involved in the anti-war and women's movements. [6] The experience of working with his activist mother taught Rapping about social justice, and trying to change things in the world that aren't fair or right. [6] Friends of Rapping's family were arrested and he admired the lawyers who worked to keep them out of jail. [6] After witnessing social justice activism as a young person, Rapping aspired to be a criminal defense attorney at a young age. [6]
Rapping attended Allderdice High School in Squirrel Hill, and graduated in 1984. [7] After high school, Rapping attended the University of Chicago where he earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in economics cum laude . [6] People close to Rapping convinced him that he would incur tremendous debt if he went to law school, so he worked as a research assistant with the Federal Reserve Board in Washington, D.C. for two years, [6] following in the footsteps of his father, Leonard Rapping, a well-known economist. Rapping earned a scholarship to attend the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University where he earned a Master of Public Administration in 1992. [6] Rapping's sister, Alison Rapping has spent her career in the non-profit sector, and is widely considered a leader in that realm. Both siblings attribute their commitment to social justice to the influence of their parents.
Right after graduating from Princeton and still unfulfilled, Rapping decided to attend George Washington University Law School. After his first year of law school at GWU, Rapping interned with the Public Defender Service for the District of Columbia, where he found his calling. [6] He worked at PDS throughout law school. [6]
While living in Washington, Rapping met and married his wife, Ilham Askia, who was teaching at an elementary school and then spent two years at a charter high school for court involved children. [6] [ permanent dead link ] Askia was born in Buffalo, New York and every man in her family has been a subject of the criminal justice system. [6] Askia's father went to Attica Correctional Facility when she was five years old. She helped raise her younger brother who ended up in prison. [6] [ permanent dead link ] Askia became a teacher to break the school-to-prison pipeline, but soon questioned how much of a difference she could make on the front end. [6] [ permanent dead link ] This led to her joining Rapping to start Gideon's Promise and, ultimately, to become the organization's Executive Director, where she advocates for attacking the pipeline on the back end. [8]
After law school, Rapping worked as a staff attorney for The Public Defender Service for the District of Columbia (1995–2004), where he served his final three years as training director. [9] From 2004-2006, Rapping was the training director for the Georgia Public Defender Standards Council. [9]
From 2006-2007, he served as training chief for the New Orleans Office of the Public Defender. [9] In recognition of his work in New Orleans to rebuild the public defender system post-Hurricane Katrina, he was a co-recipient of the Lincoln Leadership Award, given by Kentucky's Department of Public Advocacy to honor leadership in national efforts to improve indigent defense.
In 2007, Rapping created the Southern Public Defender Training Center, subsequently renamed Gideon's Promise, along with his wife, Ilham Askia. Named after the landmark 1963 Supreme Court case Gideon v. Wainwright, Gideon's Promise teaches public defenders to work more effectively within the judicial system by providing coaching, training, and professional development as well as a supportive network of peers and mentors from around the country. Rapping received a grant to help start the center from George Soros' Open Society Foundations. [10]
Since its founding, the organization has grown from a single training program for sixteen attorneys in two offices in Georgia and Louisiana, to a multi-tiered enterprise with over 300 participants in more than 35 offices across 15 mostly Southern states. An initial three-year "Core" program for new public defenders has since expanded into a comprehensive model that includes programs for graduates of the initial Core program as they continue their development, public defender leaders, trainers and supervisors, and law students. Further, the organization is unique in that it intervenes at the trial stage, rather than after conviction, where challenges to criminal injustice often take place. [9]
In 2013, HBO Films produced a documentary called Gideon's Army, based in part on the Gideon's Promise program and highlighting participants in the program.
Gideon's Promise has won numerous awards including Emory University's 2014 Martin Luther King, Jr. Community Service Award, [11] the Southern Center for Human Rights' 2013 Gideon's Promise Award, [12] The National Association of Sentencing Advocates and Mitigation Specialists 2013 Sentencing Project Award, and the American College of Trail Lawyers' 2011 Emil Gumpert Award.
In 2014, Rapping became the Director of Strategic Planning and Organizational Development for the Maryland Office of the Public Defender. In 2014, Rapping earned a MacArthur Foundation "Genius Fellow." [13]
Since 2007, Rapping has also been an associate professor at Atlanta's John Marshall Law School. [9] In 2015 he was promoted to full Professor. Rapping is also a visiting associate professor of law at Harvard Law School. [14] In 2009, Rapping was selected as one of Harvard Law School's Wasserstein Public Interest Fellows in recognition of his contribution to the public interest legal arena. [14] In 2013, Rapping was the Public Interest Scholar in Residence at Touro Law Center. [15]
Rapping has been a leading voice in discussing how culture shapes our criminal justice system. He has written and talked extensively about the culture of criminal justice, has theorized how criminal justice reform can be accomplished through cultural transformation, and through his work with Gideon's Promise, has applied his ideas to build a movement of public defenders to drive criminal justice reform. He is a thought leader in articulating the critical role public defenders must play in any comprehensive criminal justice reform strategy. His work in this area earned him a 2014 MacArthur "Genius" grant.
Rapping first applied organizational culture theory to indigent defense reform in his 2007 article, Directing the Winds of Change. [16] In 2009, he laid out a vision for how to put this theory to practice in describing the work of the Southern Public Defender Training Center (the precursor to Gideon's Promise) in You Can't Build on Shaky Ground. [17] He made the case that supporting public defenders in their quest to drive cultural transformation should be a priority of the United States federal government in National Crisis, National Neglect. [18] And in 2012—applying his work to prosecutors in Who's Guarding the Henhouse—he examined how prosecutors too have been shaped by the existing criminal justice culture and, as a result, help perpetuate injustice. [19]
Believing that well-intentioned professionals are shaped by a criminal justice system that has become unmoored from is foundational values, Rapping's vision involves supporting defenders as they struggle to resist the pressure to adapt to the status quo. This vision is best articulated in his article "Redefining Success as a Public Defender" [20] and in a speech he delivered at Touro Law School. [21]
He has examined how the American story of justice has evolved to a narrative that would be unrecognizable to our founding fathers in "Reviving the Hero Image of the Public Defender." [22] He has analyzed how defenders can combat the pernicious role of race in driving this culture in "Implicitly Unjust." [23] And in "Retuning Gideon's Trumpet," he answers skeptics who believe public defenders are only important to individuals and play no role in driving systemic reform. [24]
Rapping frequently addresses criminal justice issues of the day by promoting a narrative in which a movement of public defenders, serving as the voice for the vast majority of people in the criminal justice system, serve as the catalyst for reform. As the nation grappled with a seeming epidemic of police killings of young black men like Michael Brown, Eric Garner, and Tamir Rice, Rapping urged that we not see that issue as disconnected from "routine injustice" destroying poor communities of color every day. In "It's Not Just the Cops" [25] and "From Ferguson to Staten Island: In Case Anyone Doubted the Public Needs Defending," [26] he argues that public defenders are a necessary component to a comprehensive strategy to realize equal justice that is illusive throughout the criminal justice system. In "The Other Baltimore Story," he makes a similar argument as the nation focused its attention on the killing of Freddy Gray by reminding us of the routine injustice in Baltimore through the story of Ronald Hammond, and the response of public defenders. [27]
In articles like "Continuing the March of Civil Rights Warriors in Selma," [28] "One of the Most Important Civil and Human Rights Battles of Our Time," [29] and "Redefining Success as a Public Defender," [20] Rapping makes the case that criminal justice is the civil rights struggle of this generation and that public defenders are on the front lines of that battle.
He routinely tips his hat to the men and women who represent poor people accused of crimes, particularly in essays like "Reviving the Hero Image of the Public Defender By Changing the Story of Our Clients," [30] "To All the Patriots Out There, and Especially Our Public Defenders," [31] and "Gideon's Orchestra: It's Time For the Encore." [32] And in pieces like "The Special Few" [33] and "Who Will Heal the Public Defenders," [34] he explains the emotional toll that makes this work so difficult.
Rapping's 2015 TEDx Atlanta talk [35] is a powerful articulation of the critical role of culture in shaping our criminal justice system and the importance of a public defender movement to transforming it.
Gideon v. Wainwright, 372 U.S. 335 (1963), was a landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision in which the Court ruled that the Sixth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution requires U.S. states to provide attorneys to criminal defendants who are unable to afford their own. The case extended the right to counsel, which had been found under the Fifth and Sixth Amendments to impose requirements on the federal government, by imposing those requirements upon the states as well.
A public defender is a lawyer appointed to represent people who otherwise cannot reasonably afford to hire a lawyer to defend themselves in a trial. Several countries provide people with public defenders, including the UK, Belgium, Hungary and Singapore, and some states of Australia. Brazil is the only country in which an office of government-paid lawyers with the specific purpose of providing full legal assistance and representation to the needy free of charge is established in the constitution. The Sixth Amendment to the US Constitution, as interpreted by the Supreme Court, requires the US government to provide legal counsel to indigent defendants in criminal cases. Public defenders in the United States are lawyers employed by or under contract with county, state or federal governments.
Bruce Robert Jacob is a former Assistant Attorney General for the State of Florida during the early 1960s. He represented Louie L. Wainwright, the Director of the Florida Division of Corrections, in the Supreme Court case of Gideon v. Wainwright, decided in March 1963, regarding the right to counsel of indigent defendants in non-capital felony cases in state courts. The attorney representing the Petitioner, Clarence Gideon, was Abe Fortas, a Washington, D.C. lawyer who later became a Justice of the Supreme Court. The previous 1942 Supreme Court case of Betts v. Brady required the appointment of counsel for an indigent defendant at state expense if there was a “special circumstance” present in the case which made it necessary for counsel to be provided for the defendant to receive a fair trial. For example, if the defendant was indigent and was extremely young, or lacked education or experience, was unfamiliar with court procedures, or if the charges against him were complex, the trial court was required under the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to appoint counsel. Jacob argued against any extension of the defendant's right to counsel. The Court in Gideon overruled Betts and required state courts to appoint attorneys for defendants in all felony prosecutions.
Touro University Jacob D. Fuchsberg Law Center, commonly known as Touro Law Center, is an ABA accredited law school. It is located on Long Island, New York, in the hamlet of Central Islip. The Law Center is part of Touro University, a private, not-for-profit, coeducational institution based in New York City.
In criminal law, the right to counsel means a defendant has a legal right to have the assistance of counsel and, if the defendant cannot afford a lawyer, requires that the government appoint one or pay the defendant's legal expenses. The right to counsel is generally regarded as a constituent of the right to a fair trial. Historically, however, not all countries have always recognized the right to counsel. The right is often included in national constitutions. Of the 194 constitutions currently in force, 153 have language to this effect.
A criminal defense lawyer is a lawyer specializing in the defense of individuals and companies charged with criminal activity. Some criminal defense lawyers are privately retained, while others are employed by the various jurisdictions with criminal courts for appointment to represent indigent persons; the latter are generally called public defenders. The terminology is imprecise because each jurisdiction may have different practices with various levels of input from country to country. Some jurisdictions use a rotating system of appointments, with judges appointing a private practice attorney or firm for each case.
William Lee Robinson was an American politician who was the Mayor of Macon, Georgia from 1987–1991, and a four-term State Senator of Georgia. At the time of his death, Lee Robinson was serving as the Circuit Public Defender of the Macon (Georgia) Judicial Circuit, which includes Bibb, Peach and Crawford Counties.
Legal aid in the United States is the provision of assistance to people who are unable to afford legal representation and access to the court system in the United States. In the US, legal aid provisions are different for criminal law and civil law. Criminal legal aid with legal representation is guaranteed to defendants under criminal prosecution who cannot afford to hire an attorney. Civil legal aid is not guaranteed under federal law, but is provided by a variety of public interest law firms and community legal clinics for free or at reduced cost. Other forms of civil legal aid are available through federally-funded legal services, pro bono lawyers, and private volunteers.
Jason Scott "Jay" Leiderman was an American criminal defense lawyer based in Ventura, California. The Atlantic Magazine called Leiderman the "Hacktivist's Advocate" for his work defending hacker-activists accused of computer crimes, or so-called "Hacktivism" especially people associated with Anonymous. BuzzFeed called Leiderman "The Maserati-Driving Deadhead Lawyer Who Stands Between Hackers And Prison" and stated he was "A medical marijuana and criminal defense lawyer from Southern California [who] has made himself into the country's leading defender of hackers."
The Bronx Defenders is a public defender office located in the South Bronx neighborhood of New York City. At the Bronx Defenders, criminal defense lawyers work together with civil lawyers, family defense lawyers, immigration lawyers, non-attorney advocates, social workers, and investigators to help their clients address the full range of legal and social issues that can result from criminal charges.
Gideon's Promise, formerly the Southern Public Defender Training Center, is a non-profit organization founded in 2007 with a fellowship from George Soros’ Open Society Foundation. The organization is based in Atlanta, Georgia, and provides ongoing continuing education programs for law school students, new public defenders, senior public defenders, law school clinicians and chief public defenders. The organization partners with public defender offices around the country to implement best practices in public defense. In the fall of 2014, president and founder Jonathan Rapping partnered with the state of Maryland in an attempt to improve statewide public defense. Rapping was honored in 2014 as a MacArthur Fellow for his work with Gideon's Promise.
Abbe Lyn Smith is an American criminal defense attorney and professor of law at Georgetown University Law Center. Smith is Director of the Criminal Defense and Prisoner Advocacy Clinic and Co-Director of the E. Barrett Prettyman Fellowship Program.
The Public Defender Service (PDS) for the District of Columbia provides legal defense to individuals on a court-appointed basis for criminal and delinquency cases indigent adult and juvenile defendants/ respondents. Its Mental Health Division provides representation to persons facing involuntary civil commitment based on allegations that the person is a danger to self or others as a result of mental illness. Its parole division represents parolees charged with violating parole and facing revocation before the United States Parole Commission. PDS also provides other legal-related services in DC.
In the United States, a public defender is a lawyer appointed by the courts and provided by the state or federal governments to represent and advise those who cannot afford to hire a private attorney. Public defenders are full-time attorneys employed by the state or federal governments. The public defender program is one of several types of criminal legal aid in the United States.
Vida B. Johnson is an American criminal defense attorney and associate professor of law at Georgetown University Law Center. Johnson works in the Criminal Defense and Prisoner Advocacy Clinic and Criminal Justice Clinic, and supervises attorneys in the E. Barrett Prettyman Post-Graduate Fellowship Program. Johnson regularly writes in the area of criminal law and procedure.
The Orleans Public Defenders (OPD) office provides legal assistance to individuals charged with a crime in New Orleans, Louisiana state courts who are financially unable to retain private counsel. Courts within the OPD office jurisdiction include the Louisiana District Courts, Juvenile and Family Courts, Louisiana Circuit Courts of Appeal, and the Louisiana Supreme Court. Orleans Parish District Attorney prosecutes alleged felony and misdemeanor violations of Louisiana state law that occur within the jurisdiction of New Orleans. Alleged federal law violations by indigent defendants are prosecuted and defended in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Louisiana.
Alec Karakatsanis is an American civil rights lawyer, social justice advocate, co-founder of Equal Justice Under Law, and founder and Executive Director of Civil Rights Corps, a Washington D.C. impact litigation nonprofit. Karakatsanis' recent work has targeted the American monetary bail system. He also opposes copaganda.
Brendon DeWayne Woods is an American criminal defense attorney and an advocate for criminal justice reform. Woods currently works as the public defender for Alameda County and has served as the president of the California Public Defenders Association.
The International Legal Foundation (ILF) is an international non-governmental organization founded in 2001. It is focused on establishing and strengthening criminal legal aid systems around the world. In addition to its technical assistance work with foreign governments, the ILF provides direct legal aid services through its multiple in-country offices. To date, ILF lawyers have defended more than 60,000 accused individuals worldwide.
Drew Findling is an American criminal defense lawyer known for representing clients who are hip hop musicians as well as other well-known clients, including Donald Trump. Based in Atlanta, he is the founding partner of The Findling Law Firm, P.C., which focuses on criminal defense, ranging from complex white-collar crimes to serious violent felonies, as well as regarding international matters.