Georgia Criminal Law Symposium

Holly Lynde
Fiscal Analyst
Carl Vinson Institute of Government

Holly Lynde has 25 years of experience working in policy and fiscal analysis. Based in Atlanta, Holly joined the University of Georgia’s Carl Vinson Institute of Government in 2014. Holly’s clients at the Institute of Government have included the Council of Accountability Court Judges, the Criminal Justice Coordinating Council, the Georgia General Assembly, Public Welfare Foundation, the Superior Court of Fulton County, the Vera Institute of Justice, and many others. Prior to joining the Institute of Government, Holly worked at the Southern Regional Education Board, the Washington State House of Representatives, and management consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton. She has a BA from Bucknell University and an MSc from the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Holly is passionate about helping Georgia’s local governments and state agencies address their most pressing criminal justice challenges, particularly the involvement of individuals with a mental health disorder. Holly leads a team of 14 facilitators across state government who provide Sequential Intercept Model (SIM) workshops that bring together the criminal justice and mental health systems in a local community to identify ways to divert people with mental health disorders away from the justice system and into treatment.

Her planning work with the Fulton County Justice and Mental Health Task Force led to improved reentry services at the Fulton County Jail and a recently announced Center for Diversion and Services. Holly is also a go-to resource for national organizations seeking to better understand Georgia’s criminal justice system and reform efforts. She recently completed the Georgia Criminal Justice Data Landscape Report, which provides context, historical trends, and insights into the state’s criminal justice system.

Hon. Catherine M. Salinas
United States Magistrate Judge
Northern District of Georgia

Catherine Salinas has been a United States Magistrate Judge in the Northern District of Georgia since 2015.  A graduate of Emory University and the University of Texas School of Law, she began her legal career in 1994 at Texas Rural Legal Aid on the Mexican border.  Judge Salinas returned to Atlanta in 1999 and worked as a staff attorney at the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals, then as a Fulton County Public Defender, and then as a law clerk to Senior United States District Judge Willis B. Hunt, Jr.. Immediately prior to joining the judiciary, Judge Salinas was a shareholder at the national law firm Carlton Fields, where she worked for ten years as a commercial litigator.  
 
Judge Salinas is a past president of the Atlanta Legal Aid Society and currently serves as the chair of the Access to Justice committee of the State Bar of Georgia.

Hon. Stephen Bradley
Superior Court Judge
Ocmulgee Judicial Circuit

Stephen Bradley is Superior Court Judge for the Ocmulgee Judicial Circuit.  Bradley was a Hayward Pearce scholar and graduated cum laude from Emory University.  While obtaining his law degree at the Cumberland School of Law, Bradley was the lead oralist for the Moot Court Team and simultaneously presided on the Mock Trial and Moot Court Boards.  Bradley clerked for the late Hon. Edward S. Smith of the Federal Circuit Court.

Bradley has been a public servant in the Ocmulgee Judicial Circuit for over twenty-seven (27) years.  As an Assistant District Attorney, Bradley personally handled more than twelve thousand (12,000) felony cases.  After becoming District Attorney in 2015, he oversaw the expansion of victims services, including starting a circuit-wide Domestic Violence Task Force, and opening the Circuit’s first child advocacy center.  In 2020, Bradley was elected to the Superior Court Bench, where he serves today.  Bradley has been happily married to the former Lisa Rowe for twenty-seven (27) years.  They have two beautiful daughters.  He is active in his local church and community.

Hon. Jason Deal
Superior Court Judge
Northeastern Judicial Circuit

Judge Jason J. Deal has served as a Superior Court Judge for the Northeastern Judicial Circuit since June 2005. He is the presiding judge of the Hall County Drug Court and the Dawson County Treatment Court. Previously, Deal served as the District Attorney for the Northeastern Judicial Circuit, Magistrate Judge of the Hall County Magistrate Court, Assistant District Attorney for the Northeastern Judicial Circuit, County Attorney for Dawson County, and as an associate with the law firm of Thompson, Fox, Chandler, Homans, Hicks & McKennon. He received his law degree from the University of Georgia School of Law and his bachelor's of science degree from Furman University. He is a veteran of the U.S. Army.

Judge Deal is the former chairman of the Edmonson Telford Center for Children. He is also active with the Council of Superior Court Judges serving on several committees.

Deal was raised in Hall County and graduated from North Hall High School. Deal is married to Denise Fallin Deal, and they have 3 children. They live in northern Hall County and attend First Baptist Church.

Hon. Currie M. Mingledorff II  
Superior Court Judge
Piedmont Judicial Circuit

Currie Mingledorff was born and raised in Athens, Georgia.  After obtaining his undergraduate and law degrees from UGA (1984 & 1987), he moved to Winder where he was engaged in the general practice of law for the next twenty-two years. During that time he was active, and served in leadership capacities in church and numerous civic organizations, including service on the inaugural Board of Directors and as a past president of the Treehouse, Barrow County Children’s Advocacy Center.
 
In 2008, Judge Mingledorff was elected Superior Court Judge in the Piedmont Judicial Circuit, comprising Barrow, Jackson and Banks Counties.  Soon after taking the bench, he presided over the creation of the Circuit’s first Felony Drug Courts and Mental Health Courts. The Barrow County Drug Court and Piedmont Judicial Circuit Mental Health Court are each currently designated “Model Courts” by the Council of Accountability Court Judges of Georgia (CACJ). In 2020, Judge Mingledorff became a member of the faculty of the National Drug Court Institute, headquartered in Alexandria, Virginia. Judge Mingledorff also served on the Advisory Board for the creation of the UGA School of Law Veterans Clinic.
 
He and his wife ViAnn are the parents of 10 children (8 daughters, 2 sons) and 27 grandchildren.

Randee Waldman
Clinical Professor of Law & Director,
Barton Juvenile Defender Clinic
Emory University School of Law

Randee J. Waldman serves as the Director of the Barton Juvenile Defender Clinic at Emory University School of Law.  In this role, she supervises law students in holistic representation of young people charged with delinquent offenses.  In addition to representing these clients in their juvenile court cases, she and her students also represent them in special education proceedings, school suspension proceedings, and other forums according to the clients’ needs.  Professor Waldman also engages in policy work related to juvenile justice and education issues and teaches courses in juvenile justice, criminal procedure and education law.
 
Professor Waldman is a widely respected trainer, speaker and writer.  She is a NITA certified trial skills trainer, and is a certified trainer for the National Juvenile Defender Center’s Juvenile Training Immersion Program.  She has presented on trial skills, delinquency representation and education advocacy at numerous local, regional and national conferences. Professor Waldman is the co-director of the Southern Juvenile Defender Center and Chair of the Juvenile Justice Committee of the Georgia Association of Criminal Defense Attorneys. She also serves as Treasurer for the Executive Committee of the Child Protection and Advocacy Section of the State Bar of Georgia and on the Advisory Board for PARTNERS for Equity in Child and Adolescent Health.

Emily Boness  
Strategic Projects Director
Clarke County School District

Emily Boness, currently serves as the Strategic Projects Director for the Clarke County School District. Prior to that, she was public service faculty at the University of Georgia's J..W. Fanning Institute for Leadership Development. In that role, she founded and directed the Athens Peer Court, an award winning diversion program in which middle and high school students serve as the lawyers, judge, and jurors in sentencing hearings for youth who have been charged with first-time offenses. Ms. Boness earned her J.D. from the University of Georgia’s School of Law and her BA in Political Science from Brown University.

Kaitlyn Barnes  
Public Policy Counsel
Southern Center for
Human Rights

Kaitlyn Barnes has served as the Public Policy Counsel for the Southern Center for Human Rights since August 2020. In this role, Kaitlyn supports state-level legislative advocacy efforts in Georgia to end mass incarceration, the death penalty, the criminalization of poverty, and racial injustice. Before joining SCHR, Kaitlyn worked as a postgraduate policy fellow for the Barton Child Law & Policy Center at Emory University School of Law, advocating for evidence-based policy reforms to Georgia’s juvenile justice and child welfare systems and supervising law students in public policy and legislative advocacy clinics.
 
Kaitlyn earned her J.D. from Emory University School of Law in 2017. As a law student, she spent her summers and semesters interning with civil rights organizations across the South, including SCHR and the Mississippi Center for Justice, supporting litigation and public policy efforts to promote juvenile and criminal justice reform. Prior to attending law school, Kaitlyn engaged in racial reconciliation work in Mississippi and received her B.A. in Classics from the University of Mississippi.

Aakeem Woodard  
Executive Assistant
Fulton County District
Attorney’s Office

Aakeem Woodard has been considered by many in the professional world and the legal society to be a unicorn. The great speaker, coach and trainer John Maxwell stated that "Mr Woodard is what transformation is all about." Mr. Woodard was tried as an adult and sentenced to life in prison at the age of 15. After creating the first mentor program within the Georgia prison system and being shipped around to multiple facilities per request of the Wardens in order to help curb the violence, he was paroled by a Warden's request after serving 25 years.

Mr. Woodard went on to do consultant work for the Barton Juvenile Justice Law Clinic in Emory University and was a sentencing consultant for the Georgia Public Defenders Office. Mr. Woodard also worked as a Youth Transition Coordinator with the Department of Juvenile Justice. Now currently working as an Executive Assistant for the Fulton County District Attorney’s Office, Mr. Woodard is also a certified speaker, coach and trainer with John Maxwell, a certified behavioral consultant for Personality Insights. Mr. Woodard is an Amazon best selling author, a father of two young boys, and married to Pamela Woodard.

Bobby Christine  
District Attorney
Columbia Judicial Circuit

Bobby graduated with his Juris Doctor from Samford University’s Cumberland School of Law in Birmingham after earning his undergraduate degree from the University of Georgia. He earned his commission as an Army Combat Engineer officer from Georgia Military College in Milledgeville where he was co-valedictorian and Distinguished Military Graduate and Student. Following law school Bobby worked for a decade in the District Attorney’s Office in Augusta, where he prosecuted all manner of crime including violent felonies and complex thefts. Appointed Judge of Magistrate Court for Columbia County in 2005, Bobby held that post continuously until November 2017, serving as Chief Magistrate from 2009-2012. From 2005 to 2017, Bobby also maintained a private practice concentrating in domestic, probate, personal injury, and criminal litigation.

In 2017 Bobby was sworn in as United States Attorney for the Southern District of Georgia, following his nomination by President Trump and confirmation by the U.S. Senate. On January 4, 2021, Bobby was named Acting U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Georgia as an additional duty, becoming the only United States Attorney in history to lead two districts at once. The Christine family resides in Evans, Georgia where Bobby maintained a private law practice concentrating in litigation and cyber security, when appointed by Governor Brian Kemp on July 23, 2021 to serve as the first District Attorney of the newly created Columbia Judicial Circuit.

Sarah Shannon  
Associate Professor of Sociology
University of Georgia

Sarah K.S. Shannon joined the UGA Sociology Department in 2013 after receiving her PhD (and MSW) from the University of Minnesota.  Sarah's research focuses on systems of criminal punishment and their effects on social life. Her interdisciplinary research has been published in top journals in several fields including sociology, criminology, public health, social work, and geography.

Sarah is also an award-winning teacher, having received recognition for excellence in undergraduate instruction, research mentoring, creative teaching, and service-learning. She proudly facilitate UGA's first-ever Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program course in partnership with the Clarke County Jail (SOCI 4470S). As a publicly engaged scholar, Sarah’s research has been cited in several high profile media outlets including The New York Times, The Economist,  and the Washington Post. Prior to her graduate work, Sarah worked in the non-profit sector. As a result, she cares about doing research that matters for academics, policy makers, and ordinary citizens.

Brenda J. Smeeton  
Legal Director
Georgia Justice Project

Brenda Smeeton is Georgia Justice Project's Legal Director, leading the legal representation and policy teams. She has worked on criminal justice reform for over 20 years.  Brenda is a graduate of Bucknell University and Georgia State University College of Law.  She started at GJP over 20 years ago as a volunteer and played several different roles with the organization before moving to California where she worked on anti-death penalty advocacy and drug policy reform.  She returned to GJP following her graduation from law school in 2010.  

As an attorney at GJP Brenda has represented hundreds of clients who have been denied employment, housing, or benefits as a result of their criminal history. She has provided training around Georgia to people with a criminal history, service providers, attorneys, and judges about barriers to reentry and criminal records; she has worked with stakeholders to plan and manage expungement summits all over Georgia; she is the co-author of A Guide to Understanding and Correcting Criminal Records in Georgia; and was the primary drafter of the 2020 amendments to Georgia's record clearing law.  Brenda has filed numerous appeals related to criminal records issues and successfully argued a case challenging the constitutionality of Georgia’s expungement law in front of the Georgia Supreme Court.

Patrick Rodiguez  
Co-Executive Director
The Georgia Coalition for Higher
Education in Prison

Patrick Rodriguez has served over 5 years in the GA Department of Corrections. While he was incarcerated, he represented himself pro-se to bring forth a motion to modify his sentence to expedite his release. When the motion was denied, that fueled him to want to attend law school and help those who are going through similar struggles. When he was released from prison in December of 2019, Patrick came across a variety of stakeholders who are vested in the expansion of prison education. Patrick’s drive and dedication led him to be nominated to serve as the Co-Executive Director of The Georgia Coalition for Higher Education in Prison (GACHEP), where he leads the development of the organization, co-authoring and winning a million dollars in grant funding for GACHEP to expand educational opportunities throughout the GA prison system. In 2021, Patrick was selected out of 432 applicants to be a Justice Policy Fellow with the Education Trust, he graduated as part of the Georgia Association of Latino Elected Officials’ 2021 leadership cohort, was selected to be an undergraduate research fellow at Kennesaw State Universities Bagwell Center for the Study of Markets and Economic opportunity and he was nominated for the GA Department of Corrections’ success story award. Patrick additionally leads the statewide coalition, Beyond the Box, which seeks to remove the question that asks about a college applicant’s criminal conviction history. Patrick has appeared on multiple podcasts and has spoken at Morehouse, Emory, Savannah State University and GA State University on the issues of mass incarceration. Most recently Patrick has been featured on Telemundo to raise awareness of prison issues as they relate to the Latin-X community.
 
Patrick is currently studying at Kennesaw State University, majoring in Organizational Communication and plans on attending law school in the fall of 2022.

Deborah Gonzalez  
District Attorney
Western Judicial Circuit

District Attorney Deborah Gonzalez was elected by the people of Athens-Clarke and Oconee Counties in 2020. Her election proved historic as it made her the first female DA in her circuit, the first minority DA in her circuit, the first Latina DA in the history of GA, and the first female Puerto Rican DA in the country.  DA Gonzalez is committed to building a strong and healthy community by implementing evidence-based reform that promotes public safety. She and her team are dedicated to listening to and supporting victims of crime. She is working to end the school-to-prison pipeline.

DA Gonzalez is a former Georgia State Representative for HD-117 (Athens).

Sherry Boston  
District Attorney
Stone Mountain Judicial Circuit

Sherry Boston stands among the elite in the world of prosecution as one of the rare one-percent of African-American females currently serving as District Attorney nationwide.

Ms. Boston assumed the role of District Attorney for the Stone Mountain Judicial Circuit in January 2017. In her capacity, DA Boston oversees the prosecution of felony offenses filed in the Superior Court of DeKalb County and supervises a staff of more than 200 individuals, including attorneys, investigators, paralegals, victim-witness advocates, and administrative professionals assigned to various divisions.
Since taking the helm as District Attorney, Ms. Boston has assembled a diverse and highly experienced leadership team to assist with restructuring and redefining prosecution processes to include the development of new units and the consolidation of others. The Office has also increased its capacity to serve victims with an expanded victim services unit.

Observers have taken notice of DA Boston’s efforts. She was recently lauded by Atlanta Magazine as one of metro Atlanta’s 500 Most Influential People, earning the coveted front cover of the publication. Through her work with the Institute for Innovation in Prosecution and the Fair and Just Prosecution initiative, DA Boston has also become an integral part of the national dialogue on criminal justice reform and innovative prosecution strategies specific to juvenile justice, reentry, and accountability initiatives. DA Boston is one of four top prosecutors recently named to the GRACE Commission, a statewide task force created by Georgia’s First Lady to combat human trafficking.

Prior to her role as District Attorney, Ms. Boston served as DeKalb County Solicitor-General, the elected prosecutor overseeing misdemeanor crimes. During her tenure as Solicitor-General, Ms. Boston was instrumental in the development of DeKalb’s revamped Traffic Division and also implemented a wide variety of innovative programming and strategies aimed at community outreach and crime prevention.
In addition to her elected positions, DA Boston has received numerous legal appointments and wide recognition for her innovative prevention/intervention initiatives and impassioned commitment to domestic violence awareness. In 2018, she received the Champion for Change Award from the Women’s Resource Center to End Domestic Violence for her leadership in the DV arena, including the development of two signature community awareness campaigns.
 
Among her varied involvement in community and legal organizations, District Attorney Boston is an active member of the State Bar of Georgia where she serves on the Disciplinary Board, which has the power to investigate and discipline members of the State Bar for violations of Standards of Conduct. District Attorney Boston also serves on the Board of Governors, the State Bar’s policy-making arm.
 
District Attorney Boston is a graduate of Villanova University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and Emory University School of Law.  She resides in DeKalb County with her husband and two daughters.

Rachel Foran
Organizing Director
Community Justice Exchange

Rachel Foran is an abolitionist organizer based in New York. As the Organizing Director at Community Justice Exchange, Rachel creates resources and supports local organizers in their campaigns to dismantle the criminal punishment system. Before joining CJE, Rachel was the Managing Director of the Brooklyn Community Bail Fund, where she oversaw staff, programs, and advocacy projects, including community partnerships and coalitions. She is a founding member of Court Watch NYC, a community court monitoring and prosecutor accountability project, and organizes with Survived and Punished NY, a grassroots abolitionist organization dedicated to ending the criminalization and incarceration of survivors of domestic and gender-based violence. She holds a masters degree in theological studies from Harvard Divinity School and a BA in religion from Carleton College.