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| Director Emily Maw is licensed in
Mississippi , and litigates cases of wrongful conviction
in that state while directing operations for the rest
of the organization. Before she began at IPNO, Emily worked
with the Louisiana Crisis Assistance Center for several
years as an investigator for capital cases in Louisiana
, Mississippi , and Texas. She also worked at the Texas
Defender Service. Emily received her LL.B. from the University
of Edinburgh in 1999 and her J.D. from Tulane Law School
in 2003. |
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David Park is Deputy Director and the staff
attorney responsible for non-DNA cases within the state
of Louisiana. David received his B.A. from Boston University
in 1994 and his J.D. from Tulane Law School in 2001.
He joined IPNO immediately upon graduation.
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| Staff attorney Ava de Montagne
litigates Louisiana cases. She received her J.D. in 2003
from Loyola New Orleans and joined IPNO a few months after
graduation. She initially specialized in DNA-based innocence
claims, but now litigates non-DNA cases as well.
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| Ebony D. Hawkins was
born in St. Louis , Missouri . She began her training
as an advocate at the age of 5 yrs old; defending her
two younger siblings to no end! Ebony received her Bachelor
of Arts in Sociology at Xavier University of Louisiana
in August 2006. During her time at Xavier, Ebony was active
in the Big Brother, Big Sister mentoring program and in
the servicing learning center. She joined IPNO in her
last year of school and upon graduation, accepted a full
time position as a Case Investigator. |
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| Shannon Wight is the
Policy Director, working on all aspects of IPNO's policy
agenda that aims to prevent wrongful convictions from
happening in future. She is currently focusing onThe
Juvenile Initiative, which works to identify and exonerate
wrongfully convicted children within IPNO's service area,
and on better evidence preservation practices in Louisiana.
Shannon worked as a Trial Assistant for the public defender's
office in Portland, Oregon , before moving to the Deep
South in 1994 to investigate death penalty cases in Louisiana
for 3 years. In 1997, she co-founded the Juvenile Justice
Project of Louisiana where she worked as a youth advocate.
She officially joined IPNO in January 2006. |
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Richard Davis is originally
from Digswell in Hertfordshire, England. He earned an
undergraduate law degree from the University of Sheffield
in 2004 before coming to New Orleans for a three-month
internship in January 2005. Richard has remained with
IPNO since, working in a paralegal capacity supporting
all aspects of the organization’s case work, including
legal research, writing and investigation. Richard is
also a soccer fan and passionately supports Manchester
United.
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Sara Koehler is a 2007
graduate in Communication, Peace Studies and Fine Arts
from Loyola University in Chicago. She joined IPNO in
August 2007 as part of the Jesuit Volunteer Corps program
and works as a case review manager and investigator. Sara’s
studies at Loyola involved a social immersion experience
in Greenville, Georgia, work with Chicago-area politicians,
internships with the local PBS affiliate and a public
relations firm, and volunteer service in San Andres Itzapa
in Guatemala. Sara is an accomplished rugby player and
served as the vice president and then president of Loyola
Women’s Rugby in 2005 and 2006 respectively.
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| John Adcock is an IPNO
staff attorney. After graduating from the University of
North Carolina , Chapel Hill , he went north as an AmeriCorps
volunteer to Lawrence , Mass. where he taught reading
to second graders. He then moved to New Orleans to fight
the death penalty as an investigator at the Louisiana
Crisis Assistance Center where he worked for five years.
Motivated by his experiences defending people against
the death penalty, he went to law school at LSU in 2003
and has returned to do civil rights litigation involving
people caught in our criminal justice system in Louisiana
and Mississippi in addition to his regular casework at
IPNO. He hails from North Carolina . |
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Rachael Agnew is a volunteer
law clerk from Dublin, Ireland. She received an undergraduate
law degree from Oxford University in July 2006 and came
to work for IPNO the following February for an initial
three month internship, which she then extended to the
maximum time length of eighteen months to continue her
work here. Rachael’s work is split amongst case investigation,
legal research and evidence policy development.
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Echoing Green Fellow,
John Thompson, is the founder and director of the
fledgling non-profit, Resurrection After Exoneration (RAE).
John is from New Orleans and spent 18 years wrongly imprisoned
(14 on death row) for a crime he did not commit because
the prosecutors in his case deliberately withheld evidence
of his innocence. When he was exonerated in 2003, John
quickly saw that fellow exonerees coming home from prison
were struggling and that they needed a stronger support
network than many had if they were to succeed and be real
advocates for change in the criminal justice system. In
response to this, he founded RAE, the first exoneree run
re-entry initiative in the country. Echoing Green invested
in John’s vision and awarded him a two-year fellowship
as seed money to start RAE. IPNO is supporting RAE as
it becomes an independent organization. Click
here for a profile of John Thompson. For RAE’s website,
see http://www.r-a-e.org/
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Office Manager Carolyn Matthews is responsible
for the administrative side of IPNO, which includes
responding to Summer Internship applicants. She received
her degree in Psychology at Texas Southern University,
in Houston, Texas. Carolyn works with a number of Christian-based
programs and she is happy to be on board at IPNO!
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