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Junk Science: A Texas Injustice
The use of junk science in the courtroom is truly a Texas-sized injustice. With convictions resulting from the use of dog scent lineups, flawed arson science, and other forms of faulty scientific evidence, our organization has organized a campaign to exonerate those who have suffered wrongful convictions at the hands of these practices. Click here to learn more. |
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Timothy Cole
A recent opinion issued by the Attorney General cleared the way for Governor Perry to issue Texas's first posthumous pardon to Timothy Cole, who was exonerated by the Innocence Project of Texas in 2009. Click here to learn more about Tim's case and his pardon. |
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Statewide DNA Case Review
The State of Texas leads the nation with more than 40 DNA exonerations on record. Our organization is currently conducting a statewide review of cases where DNA evidence could prove a defendant's innocence. Click here to learn more about our work on DNA cases. |
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2009-2010 Board of Directors
 Gary Udashen
President
An experienced trial and appellate attorney in Dallas. Udashen has over 25
years experience trying cases in both Federal and State courts. He frequently appears as a
speaker at seminars for groups such as State Bar of Texas, Dallas Bar Association and the Texas
Criminal Defense Lawyers Association. Udashen is Board Certified in Criminal law by the
Texas Board of Legal Specialization. He has been named as a Texas Monthly Super Lawyer
each year since 2003 and is listed in the publication Best Lawyers in America in the areas of
Appellate Law, White-Collar Criminal Defense and Non-White Collar Criminal Defense. In
2008, Udashen was appointed by the Court of Criminal Appeals to serve as a member of the
newly formed Criminal Justice Integrity Unit.
 Walter Reaves
Vice President
Walter Reaves has been a criminal defense lawyer since 1980. During that time he has represented defendants charged with all types of offenses, ranging from minor misdemeanors to death penalty cases. During his career, he obtained an exoneration for Calvin Washington, who had been convicted of capital murder and spent 16 years in prison. Reaves was also able to obtain the exoneration of his co-defendant, Joe Sidney Williams, after successfully winning the reversal of his case on appeal several years earlier.
Recently, Reaves has represented defendants in cases involving forensic issues. Those cases started with his representation of Cameron Todd Willingham, who was executed despite evidence being presented that the fire which killed his children was not intentionally set. As a result of that experience, Reaves is currently involved in the litigation of several arson cases.
Reaves has been board certified in Criminal Law by the Texas Board of Legal Specialization since 1985. He has written numerous articles on various areas of criminal law, and has also written a book – “Understanding Habeas Corpus.” He currently writes a blog, which can be found at www.wacocriminallawblog.com.
 Bill Habern
Vice President
Bill Habern is a 1972 graduate of the Texas Tech School of Law. He served as a member of the Texas Prison public defenders organization until 1974 when he left to start his own practice. Currently he is “of counsel” to the firm of Habern, O’Neil and Pawgan LLP whose primary office is in Huntsville, Texas where the firm specializes in prison, parole and post conviction issues.
Habern has served as executive director of the Texas Criminal Defense Project, and served for 10 years as a member of the Texas Criminal Defense Lawyers Board of Directors. He served two terms as co-chairman of the post conviction committee of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers. He is the author of a number of articles on post conviction topics.
 Jeff Blackburn
Chief Counsel
Jeff Blackburn handles criminal defense and civil rights cases throughout Texas. He also represents the wrongfully convicted. In 2009, he represented the family of Tim Cole, a young man falsely accused of rape who died in prison, and got the first posthumous exoneration in Texas. He also represented 38 people falsely convicted in the infamous Tulia drug bust, eventually obtaining full pardons and civil damages. He is the founder of and chief counsel to the Innocence Project of Texas. He was named criminal defense lawyer of the year by the State Bar of Texas for 2002/2003. He has received the Frank Spurlock award, the Henry B. Gonzales award, and the Maury Maverick award for his civil rights work. He is Board Certified in Criminal Law by the Texas Board of Legal Specialization.
 Nicole Casarez
Secretary
Nicole Cásarez is an attorney and a communication professor at the University of St. Thomas, where she teaches journalism and media law. She has directed an innocence investigations class at UST since 2001, and she and her students have worked on numerous capital and non-capital cases through the Innocence Project of Texas and the Texas Innocence Network. She currently serves on the board of the Texas Defender Service, and is the director of the University of Houston Law Center’s Prelaw Summer Institute. She is a member of the American Law Institute.
 Bruce Anton
A noted criminal defense attorney from Dallas. He has been named as a Texas
Monthly Super Lawyer each year since 2003 and is listed in the publication Best Lawyers in
America. he is also Board Certified in Criminal Law by the Texas Board of Legal Specialization.
Anton formerly served as Legal Director for the Dallas Civil Liberties Union. Anton practices
trial, appellate and post-conviction law throughout the State of Texas.
 Philip Wischkaemper
Philip Wischkaemper is a 1989 parolee from the Texas Tech University School of Law. After graduation, he prosecuted for the Hockley County District Attorney’s Office in Levelland, Texas for one year. He then traded in his white hat for a copy of the constitution and entered the employ of his brother, Bill Wischkaemper, in 1990. After an 18 month stint with Bill, he joined a partnership in Lubbock where he concentrated on criminal practice.
Philip handled his first capital case in 1994 (a federal habeas case) and began to concentrate on capital litigation, both trial and post-conviction in 1998. In 2001, Philip was hired as the Capital Assistance Attorney for the Texas Criminal Defense Project, a position he has held since that time. He is a frequent speaker at events for the Center for American and International Law, Texas Criminal Defense Lawyers Association and occasionally, the Texas State Bar. He is the co-editor for the Texas Criminal Codes books, Texas Punishment Manual, Texas Rules Book, and the Texas Trial Notebook published by the Texas Criminal Defense Lawyers Association. He is also the former Chair of the Region 16A Grievance committee.
Most importantly, he is married to Lois, also an attorney, who concentrates on healthcare law. They have no kids, but cats, one of which is Dakota, a certified therapy cat who visits the Children’s Hospital at University Medical Center in Lubbock weekly.
 Shirley Baccus-Lobel
Shirley Baccus-Lobel’s national practice includes federal criminal trials, appeals and investigations, including internal corporate investigations and regulatory matters, as well as a variety of State crimes. She is named in Best Lawyers in America and is a Texas Monthly Super Lawyer (white collar criminal defense). Ms. Lobel served with the Criminal Division of the U.S. Department of Justice in Washington, D.C. in a supervisory capacity and with the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Texas as Criminal Chief and First Assistant prior to entering private practice.
As a prosecutor and a defense attorney, she has handled a wide variety of criminal cases, from unlawful explosives and arson to complex fraud. She has prosecuted persons involved in organized crime, and persons responsible for serious financial crimes. She has defended persons accused on the basis of questionable forensic evidence (e.g., so-called “dog scent lineups”) and also has handled non-DNA exonerations resulting in the release from prison of young persons wrongfully convicted and sentenced for sexual offenses.
She has written and lectured for numerous professional organizations and has contributed articles to professional journals, including the ABA’s Litigation Magazine. Ms. Lobel is a charter fellow of the Dallas Bar Foundation and a life fellow of the Texas Bar Foundation. Her membership in numerous professional organizations includes service on the board of the Texas Criminal Defense Lawyers’ Legal Education Institute.
 Catherine Greene Burnett
Catherine Greene Burnett is the Associate Dean of Clinical Studies and Director of the Pro Bono Honors Program at South Texas College of Law in Houston, where she teaches courses on criminal procedure, international criminal law, and capital punishment. She also serves as co-Chair of the State Bar of Texas Committee on Legal Services to the Poor in Criminal Matters. Burnett previously worked as an assistant attorney general and practiced criminal defense for 11 years.
 Gianpaolo Macerola
Gianpaolo Macerola is the founder of the Criminal Justice Project at South Texas College of Law. During his time at South Texas, Macerola teamed up with fellow Board member Bob Wicoff to help review the files of several defendants who were convicted in cases where serious errors in serological testing conducted by the Houston Crime Lab were identified. As a result, his Project was able to aid in the release of one such inmate. Gianpaolo is currently an Adjunct Clinical Instructor at South Texas College of Law as well as a member of Brown, Cahill & Macerola in Houston.
 Alexandra Gauthier
Alexandra Gauthier is a trial attorney practicing criminal law in Austin, Texas and the surrounding counties. She is a graduate of San Diego State University. She was an Anti-Death Penalty Intern for Amnesty International in Los Angeles. While awaiting her entrance into law school she was a Student Organizer for their San Francisco offices. She was an elected member of the National Student Board of Amnesty International. She received her J.D. from Ohio State University and was admitted to practice law in 1995 in the State of Texas. She currently serves on the Board of the Austin Criminal Defense Lawyers Association. She was one of the attorneys who obtained the pre-trial release on personal bond, and eventual dismissal of capital murder charges against her client in the infamous “Yogurt Shop” murders. That case involved two of the most critical issues involved in exonerations: false confessions and DNA.
 Peter Lesser
Peter Lesser is an accomplished criminal defense attorney in Dallas, Texas. He is a past president-elect of the Dallas County Criminal Bar Association. Lesser received his J.D. from Southern Methodist University and has been practicing law since 1974. He’s been named as a Texas Monthly “Super Lawyer” since 2003.
 Jani Maselli
Jani Maselli is a practicing appellate attorney and an Adjunct Professor of Law, Legal Research and Writing at the University of Houston Law Center. She has handled direct appeals and writs of habeas corpus to the state courts of appeals, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, and the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. Maselli formerly worked as a staff attorney for Inmate Legal Services in the Texas Department of Criminal Justice and was a staff attorney for the Honorable Charles F. Baird, Texas Court of Criminal Appeals.
 Anthony Robinson
Anthony Robinson was wrongfully convicted of a Harris County rape in 1986 and was exonerated in 2000 thanks to DNA evidence that proved he was innocent of the crime. After his release from prison, Robinson went on to earn his J.D. from the Texas Southern University Thurgood Marshall School of Law. He put his law degree to work in the field of international law, focusing his efforts in Texas and China. Robinson currently works for RCI Consulting International.
 Katherine Scardino
Katherine Scardino is a practicing criminal defense and family law attorney in Houston. She earned her J.D. from the University of Houston law school in 1984. Among several notable cases, Scardino represented Joe Durrett, who was acquitted of capital murder. She is also an attorney for Anthony Graves, who is facing a re-trial following the reversal of his death penalty capital murder conviction. Scardino has been named as a Texas Monthly Super Lawyer since 2006 and has appeared frequently on television including the late Johnny Cochran’s Cochran & Company and MSNBC.
 Gerry Goldstein
Gerry Goldstein is a nationally respected defense lawyer and past president of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers and the Texas Criminal Defense Lawyers Association. Goldstein is listed in The Best Lawyers in America, was a Texas Lawyer Legal Legend and was named to the Texas Criminal Defense Lawyers’ Hall of Fame. He was named to the Top 100 list in Super Lawyers®, recognized as an outstanding criminal defense attorney by the State Bar of Texas and profiled in numerous publications.
He has served as an adjunct professor at the University of Texas and St. Mary’s University schools of law. He is a fellow in the American College of Trial Lawyers and the International Academy of Trial Lawyers.
 Bob Wicoff
Bob Wicoff has worked as a criminal defense attorney in Houston since 1983. He has been board certified in criminal law since 1989. Wicoff served as the co-director of the Houston Police Department Crime Lab Review Panel, which evaluated cases where defendants were convicted, at least in part, on the use of serological testing later identified as error-ridden and inaccurate. He was also chosen as one of three defense attorneys to review all Chapter 64 (DNA) cases in Harris County. His practice is limited to post-conviction writs, direct appeals, and DNA litigation.
 James Woodard
James Woodard is the 17th Dallas County man proven innocent by DNA evidence and one of the longest-serving inmates in America to be set free because of it. During the more than 27 years of wrongful incarceration he endured, Woodard refused parole several times because he declined to take responsibility for a crime he did not commit. Today, James Woodard works with the Innocence Project of Texas to help other innocent men waiting for justice, as he once did. In 2009, Woodard received a full pardon from Texas Governor Rick Perry. He currently resides in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. |
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