August 13, 1996
Washington, D.C., August 13, 1996 -- Judy Clarke, the Executive Director of Federal
Defenders of Eastern Washington and Idaho, was sworn in as President of the National Association
of Criminal Defense Lawyers at the association's annual meeting in Santa Monica August 11. Ms.
Clarke is the first public defender elected president of NACDL and the second woman to be so
honored.
Ms. Clarke has extensive federal trial and appellate court experience in a wide variety of
areas, including white collar crime, drug defense, immigration offenses, bank robbery and other
violent and nonviolent crimes. She has argued cases before the United States Supreme Court. In
July 1996, she was appointed co-counsel for UNABOM suspect Theodore Kaczynski in federal court
in Sacramento, Cal.
A South Carolina native, in 1995 Ms. Clarke took a leave of absence from her federal
defender work in the Pacific Northwest to serve as co-counsel for Susan Smith, the Union, S.C.,
mother who faced the death penalty for killing her two sons in a case that horrified the nation. She
received her law degree in 1977 from the University of South Carolina Law Center in Columbia and
was awarded her bachelor's degree in psychology from Furman University in Greenville in 1974.
Ms. Clarke is widely acclaimed for her lectures on criminal law and procedure. She has
made presentations on virtually every subject from bail to sentencing in over 30 states, speaking to
lawyers, judges and students. She a member of the faculty of the National Criminal Defense College
in Macon, Ga., and has served on its Board of Regents since 1985.
A widely published author of legal articles, Ms. Clarke is co-author, with Gerald McFadden
and Jeffrey Staniels, of Federal Sentencing Manual, the benchmark treatise on the federal sentencing
guidelines system.
NACDL is the preeminent organization in the United States advancing the mission of the
nation's criminal defense lawyers to ensure justice and due process for persons accused of crime.
A professional bar association formed in 1958, NACDL's 9,000 direct members -- and 76 state and
local affiliates with another 22,000 members -- include private criminal defense lawyers, public
defenders, judges and law professors committed to preserving fairness within America's criminal
justice system.
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National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (NACDL)