Abbe Smith facts for kids

Abbe Lyn Smith (born September 22, 1956) 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.

Before joining the faculty at Georgetown Law, Smith worked as a public defender in Philadelphia for many years and she was also on the faculty at Harvard Law School. Professor Smith regularly writes and comments on criminal defense, the criminal justice system, criminal prosecution, legal ethics, and juvenile justice. Smith wrote a memoir about her experience of helping Patsy Kelly Jarrett earn her freedom from a conviction for which Jarrett maintained her innocence.

Education

Smith earned a B.A.degree from Yale College in 1978 and a J.D. degree from the New York University School of Law in 1982. During her second year of law school at NYU—while working in the Prison Law Clinic with Professor Claudia Angelos—Smith began working on Patsy Kelly Jarrett's federal habeas corpus petition. In March 1977, a jury found Jarrett guilty of two counts of murder and two counts of robbery, but Jarrett maintained her innocence. Smith worked on Jarrett's case for the next 25 years. From 2005–2006, Smith was a Fulbright Program scholar at the University of Melbourne School of Law in Melbourne, Australia.

Legal career

Public defender

After law school, Ms. Smith began work as an assistant public defender with the Defender Association of Philadelphia. She would later work as a member of the Special Defense Unit, and a Senior Trial Attorney. While working as a public defender in Philadelphia, Smith began working as a law professor, teaching criminal law at City University of New York Law School.

Law professor

In 1990, Smith moved to Harvard Law School where she was Deputy Director of the Criminal Justice Institute, a clinical instructor in HLS' criminal defense clinic, and a lecturer on law in Harvard's Trial Advocacy Workshop. The Criminal Justice Institute is the curriculum-based criminal law clinical program of Harvard Law School.

Smith joined the Georgetown University Law Center faculty in 1996. Professor Smith is the Director of the Criminal Defense and Prisoner Advocacy (CDPAC) Clinic.

From 1994–2005, Smith was the attorney for Patsy Kelly Jarrett. Over the years, Smith contacted journalists, public relations firms and wrote about Kelly in law journals. In 2003, Smith convinced documentarian Ofra Bikel—who was working on a film about guilty pleas for the PBS television show Frontline—to include Jarrett in the documentary. The documentary aired in 2004. During a March 2005 review of the case, the members of the New York Parole Board watched Bikel's account of Jarrett's story, and she was released. Case of a Lifetime was a finalist in the 21st Lambda Literary Awards for best lesbian memoir/biography.

In 2010, she was elected to the American Board of Criminal Lawyers. She is also on the board at the Bronx defenders and the National Juvenile Defender Center. In 2012, she was the recipient of the Legal Teaching Award from New York University School of Law. In 2015, Smith eulogized her friend and colleague Monroe Freedman.

Books

• How Can You Represent Those People? (Abbe Smith & Monroe Freedman eds., New York: Palgrave Macmillan 2013).
• Abbe Smith & Monroe Freedman, Understanding Lawyers' Ethics (New Providence, N.J.: LexisNexis 4th ed. 2010).
• Case of a Lifetime: A Criminal Defense Lawyer's Story (New York: Palgrave MacMillan 2008).