Anne Geraghty, Chicago, Pro Bono Counsel

Annie concentrates her own practice on juvenile and criminal justice issues and, since joining DLA Piper in 2006, she has helped to develop, and has herself worked on, a number of pro bono initiatives in this area. Through the Chicago office’s Signature Project in Juvenile Justice, she successfully defended a fifteen year-old girl who had been charged with attempted murder. Annie also recently helped to secure an evidentiary hearing on behalf of a young man who received a lengthy prison sentence in adult court when he was only fifteen years-old. She coordinates a firmwide project on behalf of the Northwestern University School of Law’s Center on Wrongful Convictions, through which firm attorneys are drafting entries for the soon-to-be-published Encyclopedia of Wrongful Convictions in the United States, and she contributed to, and is helping to implement the findings of, From Juvenile Court to the Classroom: The Need for Effective Child Advocacy, a report which examines the issues children face when they are transferred from detention back into the school system.

For the past two years, Annie has been a leader in a firmwide effort to end the practice of sentencing individuals to life without the possibility of parole for crimes committed while they were juveniles. She serves as a member of the Illinois Coalition for the Fair Sentencing of Children, an organization devoted to ending this practice, and was the principal author of a report released by the Coalition in February 2008, Categorically Less Culpable: Children Sentenced to Life Without Possibility of Parole in Illinois. The report, which received national media attention, has generated significant dialogue in Illinois on the issue of juvenile life without parole.

Although principally focused on juvenile and criminal justice issues, Annie also has worked on a range of other projects since joining the firm. For example, she successfully obtained T-visa relief for a client who forced by her employer into domestic servitude, and she currently is assisting International Justice Mission in its efforts to develop a land registration system in Rwanda.

Annie has been profoundly committed to pro bono work throughout her legal career. She comes to DLA Piper from Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr LLP, where she was a litigation associate in that firm's Washington, DC office. While at WilmerHale, Annie was very active in the firm's pro bono program. In 2004, she helped represent a young Iraq war veteran who was charged in federal court with second-degree murder. Her client, who was suffering from severe Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, was recently profiled on the front page of the New York Times. While at WilmerHale, Annie also was part of a federal trial team that challenged Maryland’s lethal injection procedures as cruel and unusual, and she co-authored a brief for the Maryland Supreme Court which argued that the lethal injection procedures set forth by the Maryland Division of Corrections violated that state’s Administrative Procedures Act – an argument that ultimately was successful in bringing Maryland’s capital punishment system to a halt. 
 
As Pro Bono Counsel, Anne works to ensure widespread participation in the pro bono programs by employees in the firm's Austin, Chicago, Dallas, Houston, Minneapolis, Phoenix, and Seattle offices.  She works with each office’s pro bono leadership to establish, implement, and evaluate pro bono opportunities and programs and liaise with local legal service providers.. She also helps attorneys receive the training, mentoring, and staff support they need to give pro bono clients high-quality legal services.