NLADA will inform the criminal justice community about the Smart Defense Initiative at conferences and training events hosted by BJA, NLADA, and other stakeholders.
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The Smart Defense Initiative was promoted at NLADA's November 2016 Annual Conference at a meeting of the American Council of Chief Defenders.
Smart Defense was also promoted at the Defender Research Consortium kickoff meeting, hosted by NLADA in December 2016. This meeting was attended by defenders, researchers, and policymakers who are interested in expanding data an research capacity among indigent defense systems.
NLADA has recommended defender-focused content and presenters for the upcoming Smart Suite Winter Fellows Academy, and has promoted the Academy to the Smart Defense grantees.
During site visits to New York City (January), Alameda County (February), Texas (April), and Kentucky (June), NLADA explained to local stakeholders the national context for the Smart Defense sites’ work. NLADA highlighted the site visits in short articles and pictures in its Defender Update e-newsletter.
In February, the Smart Defense sites and NLADA attended the Smart Suite Fellows Academy. NLADA. In preparation for this event, NLADA assisted the sites – Alameda, Wisconsin, and Texas – in registering and coordinating travel for the Academy. NLADA also consulted with the Academy’s planners about how to include defender-focused content; NLADA recommended two experts in defender research issues who presented at the Academy. NLADA consulted with the Smart Defense sites at the Academy during breakout sessions. NLADA shared materials from the Academy with the sites and the criminal justice community on SmartDefenseInitiative.org.
In April, NLADA attended a Texas Large Urban County Criminal Justice Planners Meeting in Houston with the researcher-practitioner partners from the Smart Defense Texas team. The project team previewed the project’s goals and status and explained the national context and importance to this important Texas constituency.
In April, Smart Defense project partner NCJA introduced the Smart Defense Initiative to attendees of the Community Justice 2016 International Summit in Chicago, a conference jointly presented by the Center for Court Innovation and the U.S. Department of Justice's Bureau of Justice Assistance.
In June, NLADA showcased leaders of Smart Defense Initiative sites (Alameda County, Wisconsin, and Texas) at NLADA’s American Council of Chief Defenders summer meeting, where they encouraged their peers to use data and research to improve their agencies and criminal justice systems. Also in June, the chief defender from Alameda County shared the successes of his project during a member updates report-out at NLADA’s Community-Oriented Defender Network annual conference.
NLADA recommended defenders as presenters for the July Fellows Academy and September Smart Suite Summit, and consulted on workshop proposals that were submitted.
Smart Defense TTA project partner NCJA consulted with the Smart Suite Fellows Academy organizers about defender-focused content to include in the Summer Fellows Academy in attended the July Academy, providing support to Smart Defense participants. NLADA continued to promote the Academy to Smart Defense grantees who have not yet attended.
During a site visit Wisconsin in July, NLADA explained to local stakeholders the national context for the Smart Defense sites’ work. NLADA highlighted the site visit in its Defender Update e-newsletter.
The Smart Defense Initiative was promoted to diverse criminal justice system representatives and researchers at the National Criminal Justice Association’s National Forum on Criminal Justice in August 2016.
Two Smart Defense sites (Alameda County, CA and Wisconsin) were featured in workshops at the September 2016 Smart Suite Summit in Arlington, VA. NLADA helped Alameda County prepare its presentation. The TTA team attended the Summit and NLADA CEO & President Jo-Ann Wallace addressed the full audience about gains made in indigent defense research during a “lightning round” showcase.
The Texas Smart Defense Initiative was selected as a featured panel at the NLADA 2016 Annual Conference. Smart Defense Wisconsin was featured in a plenary session for defenders at the same conference.
The TTA team debuted a monthly Smart Defense Newsletter and prepared two issues that were distributed to 91 subscribers. The inaugural edition was distributed to wider listservs.
NLADA promoted the Smart Defense Initiative at the 2017 Holistic Defense and Leadership Conference in Baltimore, MD on June 7-9, 2017. During the three day conference, we discussed the SD Initiative during the following two workshops (1) Research and Public Defense, and (2) Federal Funding Opportunities for Holistic Defense. The Smart Defense projects were also discussed at the MacArthur Spring Meeting on April 30 – May 2 in Denver, Colorado.
NLADA updated SmartDefenseIntiaitive.org to include the newest Smart Defense site, Contra Costa; refreshed the five other sites’ pages to include up-to-date information and additional graphics; highlighted the Ten Principles with new graphics; and added the newsletters which have been published to date.
We also updated nlada.org/smart-defense to add information about contra costa and other expansion work.
NLADA encouraged all Smart Defense teams to submit proposals to present at a special “conference within a conference” at the November 2017 annual meeting of the American Society of Criminologists that focuses on indigent defense research. Two teams (Kentucky and Contra Costa) applied and were selected, and NLADA will moderate the panel featuring these projects.
During this reporting period, NLADA continued on the success built from our first two newsletters and continued to issue monthly newsletters distributed to 102 subscribers.
For BCJI, NLADA sent emails to the Community Oriented Defender Network (COD) in January to promote BCJI Federal Funding Webinar and encourage defender participation.
We also sent an email announcing the SD expansion in February to all of our defender lists (NASAMS, ACCD, NAIDE, COD, and Municipal Defense. We created a fact sheet about our portfolio of expanded TTA activities and sent it to our Smart Defense mailing list and defender research mailing list, in addition to the groups April mentions. We also promoted it on NLADA’s website (and possibly over social media).
Our expansion work has been featured in two Defender Update e-newsletters (we have stats on their research in Constant Contact).For the Smart Defense Summit, we created a fact sheet about the six sites’ projects, which was distributed at a BJA juvenile defense event and is available on our website.
NLADA promoted the Innovative Solutions in Public Defense Initiative at the 2017 Defender Research Consortium in Las Vegas, NV on September 11-12, 2017. During the two-day conference, partners from multiple Innovative Solutions sites spoke about their projects. Presentations were made by Katherine Dellenbach and Chandru Solraj of the Wisconsin Office of the State Public Defender, and Jim Bethke of the Texas Indigent Defense Commission and Dottie Carmichael of the Public Policy Research Institute at Texas A&M University. Their presentations focused on the use of data to improve the work of defender offices.
Additionally, Ellen McDonnell of the Contra Costa County Public Defender spoke about her office’s Innovative Solutions work at the Right to Counsel Campaign roundtables at the U.S. Department of Justice in Washington, DC on November 2, 2017.
Partners from the Contra Costa County Public Defender and the Kentucky Department of Public Advocacy presented on a panel moderated by Marea Beeman of NLADA at the Indigent Defense Research Association’s “conference within a conference” program on Research and Data in Legal Services for the Indigent at the American Society of Criminology’s 2017 Annual Conference on November 15, 2017.
Additionally, NLADA promoted the Innovative Solutions in Public Defense Initiative at the 2017 NLADA Annual Conference in Washington DC from December 6-9, 2017 through general discussion and through the Initiative during the following two workshops (1) An Innovative Approach to Quality Representation, and (2) Looking Back and Moving Forward: Stories and Action Steps from Federally Funded TTA Providers. Brendon Woods of the Alameda County Public Defender’s Office and Katherine Dellenbach of the Wisconsin Office of the State Public Defender presented on their Innovative Solutions projects during the former while representatives from BJA, the Sixth Amendment Center, the Center for Court Innovation, Gideon’s Promise, and NLADA discussed the value of BJA’s investment in public defense during the later.
NLADA updated SmartDefenseIntiative.org to include the latest editions of the Smart Defense/Innovative Solutions newsletters. The list of subscribers to the Innovative Solutions newsletter grew to 139 during the reporting period. NLADA also continued to promote Innovative Solutions projects through its website and through the bimonthly Defender Update newsletter.
NLADA researched costs associated with updating its SmartDefenseIntiative.org website with the Innovative Solutions Public Defense Initiative name. It also reached out to Innovative Solutions grantees to collect information to include on their individual project pages.
During this reporting period, NLADA launched the new web portal for the BJA Sixth Amendment Initiative, Strengthen the Sixth (www.strengthenthesixth.org). The site features the Right to Counsel Campaign’s messaging toolkit, Communications with Justice System Stakeholders about the Right to Counsel. The web portal is directed toward a broad audience, including judges and court staff, prosecutors, defenders, law enforcement, corrections, policymakers, government agencies, and the general public. On the website we also talk about Innovative Solutions in Public Defense, TTA projects and publications.
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