CRIMINAL AND JUVENILE DEFENSE CLINIC
Law student Eduardo Salgado Diaz conducts a mock witness examination as part of the Criminal and Juvenile Defense Clinic.
The woman, a mother of two young children, was worried about what this was doing to them. The law student team successfully had her case expunged last fall. “She [the client] cried and was hugging the students outside the courtroom. It was pretty moving,” Moran said. “[In our profession] a lot of people go in thinking that they want to help folks, but sometimes that’s actually hard to achieve. When you see it happen right in front of you, it’s so rewarding and even overwhelming.” TO THE MINNESOTA SUPREME COURT One post-conviction case handled by the clinic is with the Minnesota Supreme Court (as of when this article went to press). The clinic took on the case, which involves an incarcerated man, at the district court level. Joseph Cavello 3L is one of the students working on the case. “This was one of the most transformative cases [for me] because I had worked in a prison ministry writing letters to more than 100 incarcerated individuals
for a year, so I had developed relationships with men in prison before,” he said. “To actually go and visit our client in person was quite a new experience for me.” At first, Cavello was nervous, because he had never visited a prison. “It was really good to see what a nice individual he was. We had normal conversations about ordinary things,” Cavello said. “To be able to encounter someone who was in a position like his, to see that he had a story behind how he got to where he was, that having somebody listen to his story – give him an ear – and be a real friend to him, was powerful.” CLIENT-CENTERED Moran called client-centeredness one of the key components of the clinic’s model of representation. “It’s not us coming in and deciding what is best for the client,” she said. “It’s us working with the clients to help them think through what they want to achieve in their case and then doing our best to achieve what the client has decided.”
Page 14 St. Thomas Lawyer
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