The Yale Club of Oregon & SW Washington and the Yale Alumni Nonprofit Alliance Pacific Northwest Chapter are proud to present

Lisa Hay, Federal Public Defender for Oregon

on

Voices from Within: Learning from the Incarcerated about the Federal Criminal Justice System

In her more than 20 years of working in indigent defense, Federal Public Defender Lisa Hay has represented people charged with everything from terrorism, murder, war crimes, tax fraud, and gun and drug charges, to misdemeanor trespass in a federal building. For those clients who end up serving time, federal prison can be a dehumanizing and life-threatening experience. Especially during the Covid pandemic, the weaknesses of the prison system and the inhumane treatment of incarcerated people have been made vivid.

In this talk for the Yale community, Federal Public Defender Hay will describe the current state of mass incarceration in the United States and then use the stories and voices of incarcerated people that she and her office have represented to provide the human story behind the statistics. The Federal Public Defenders for the District of Oregon successfully won compassionate release for more than 150 federal prisoners during the worst periods of the Covid pandemic. They obtained clemency for prisoners during the Obama Administration, and litigated on behalf of asylum-seekers incarcerated in federal prison by the Trump Administration. By telling the stories of incarcerated people, Ms. Hay hopes to increase the public's knowledge about federal incarceration and to promote reforms.

About the Speaker

Lisa Hay is the Federal Public Defender for the District of Oregon. A graduate of Yale University summa cum laude (‘85) and Harvard Law School magna cum laude (‘91), she started her legal career in 1991 as a civil litigator involved in complex commercial litigation. She began working for the Office of the Federal Public Defender in 1998. As an Assistant Defender, she argued in the Oregon Supreme Court and the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, and she appeared frequently in the federal district court. Among her important litigation victories in the Ninth Circuit are U.S. v. Washington, which pushed the boundaries of Fourth Amendment protections in racially charged police-citizen encounters, and U.S. v. Saechao, which applied Miranda warning requirements in a probation context. Ms. Hay has spoken nationally and at state conferences on the Fourth Amendment, electronic surveillance, the Ferguson Grand Jury, and other criminal law issues. She became Oregon’s Federal Public Defender in 2015 and was reappointed for a second term in 2019. Ms. Hay co-chairs the Committee on Bias in the Justice System in Oregon with Justice Nelson of the Oregon Supreme Court, and she serves on the National Advisory Committee on Criminal Rules after being appointed in 2020 by U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Roberts.

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Zoom information will be provided immediately upon Eventbrite registration.

Any questions? Please email: club@yaleclubor.org