| |
|
Michael Laurence
is the Executive Director of the Habeas Corpus
Resource Center, a California Judicial Branch
agency created in 1999 to provide representation
to death-row inmates in state and federal habeas
proceedings. The Center currently employs seventy-three
employees, including thirty attorneys.
Since 1987, Mr. Laurence has provided representation to death row inmates throughout the country in all levels of state and federal courts. He has represented death-row inmates in a dozen evidentiary hearings, argued numerous cases before the California Supreme Court and the federal courts of appeals, and in March 1998, argued before the United States Supreme Court. Mr. Laurence was also counsel of record in class actions challenging lethal gas as a method of execution and the application of various portions of the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996.
Mr. Laurence graduated from U.C. Davis Law School in 1985, where he was Editor-in-Chief of the Law Review and was awarded the Order of the Coif. While in law school, Mr. Laurence edited a 615-page symposium on capital punishment. He clerked for the Honorable Warren J. Ferguson, Judge for the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. Following his clerkship, Mr. Laurence was a Fellow at the Earl Warren Legal Institute at Boalt Hall School of Law, University of California at Berkeley, and a Criminal Justice Research Consultant with the Office of the California Attorney General. Between 1988 and 1995, Mr. Laurence was the Director of the Death Penalty Project of the American Civil Liberties Union Foundation of Northern California. From 1995 until 1999, he was a partner at Sternberg, Sowards & Laurence, a law firm that exclusively represented death row inmates.
|
|
 |
|
