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Classes

Thursday January 21
2016
 Challenging the Credibility of Children's Statements

This workshop will focus on challenging the credibility of children’s statements both as hearsay statements to other parties and children’s in court testimony.  Challenging the credibility of children’s statements is one of the greatest challenges for defense attorneys.  This workshop will examine cross examination techniques of witnesses, such as case workers, validators and social workers, about children’s statements, including interviewing protocols.  The workshop will also discuss the defendant’s right of confrontation and the right to hearing to determine whether children should be allowed to testify in camera. The workshop will look at the standard for swearability of children and how to voir dire about swearability. We will look at the issue of recantation and how to address recantation in terms of discovery about recantation and cross examination.  We will look at social science research on children’s perceptions and suggestibility and discuss how we can incorporate this information into our cross examination techniques. Finally, we will discuss how to prepare cross examination of a child using a fact pattern.

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  • When
    Thursday, January 21, 2016
    9:30 am - 12:30 pm
  • Location
    Legal Services NYC - Central
    40 Worth St., 6th floor
    New York, NY 10013
  • CLE Credits
    Skills: 2.00
    Areas of Professional Practice: 1.00
  • Format
    Traditional Live Classroom
  • Practice Area(s)
    Practice Skills
    Family
  • Price: $120

About the Faculty

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    Emma Alpert (Panel Member)

    Emma Alpert is a Senior Staff Attorney at Brooklyn Defender Services. She first joined BDS's Family Defense Practice in 2009 as a Yale Law School Public Interest Fellow, focusing on the intersection of housing and child welfare. She has continued to engage in housing advocacy at the individual and policy levels on behalf of families involved in the child welfare system. Since December 2014, Emma has specialized in litigating res ipsa cases. Emma is a graduate of Yale Law School, where she was a managing editor of the Journal of Law and Feminism and participated in the Capital Punishment, Immigration, and Domestic Violence Clinics. While in law school, she also worked with the San Francisco Affirmative Litigation Project and spent summers interning with the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California and the Legal Aid Society of New York's Homeless Rights Project. Prior to Law School, Emma earned her B.A. with High Honors from Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, where she was Phi Beta Kappa, and majored in English, though she wrote her Thesis with the Art History Department. She has worked in Brooklyn and Manhattan as a paralegal, a restaurant server, and a researcher at the Vera Institute of Justice.
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    Charles Budnick (Panel Member)

    Chas has been involved in family defense since 2008. As a law student, he participated in the N.Y.U. Family Defense Clinic, and wrote his student note on incarcerated parents and their children. He has worked at the Brooklyn Family Defense Practice since 2009, advocating for indigent parents in abuse, neglect, termination of parental rights, custody, visitation and family offense proceedings.
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    Juliana Chereji (Panel Member)

    Juliana Chereji is a supervising attorney at Brooklyn Defender Services-Family Defense Practice where she supervises a team of five attorneys in Article 10, TPR and custody and visitation hearings. She has been representing parents in child protective proceedings since 2009. Ms. Chereji is fluent in Spanish and has primarily represented Spanish-speaking respondents in abuse and neglect cases at BFDP. She coordinates the family defense practice's language access advocacy project.
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    Lauren Shapiro (Panel Member)

    Lauren Shapiro is the director and founder of the Brooklyn Family Defense Project, an interdisciplinary and innovative law office dedicated to representing low income families in the child welfare system. BFDP was one of three agencies selected by the City of New York to provide institutional representation to parents facing neglect charges in Family Court. Ms. Shapiro is responsible for managing the office which includes over 30 staff members, including lawyers, social workers, parent advocates and administrative staff. BFDP is an office of Legal Services NYC-the largest provider of civil legal services to low income communities in NYC. Ms. Shapiro has devoted her entire legal career to representing low income communities at Legal Services NYC. She graduated from New York University School of Law in 1986 and worked at South Brooklyn Legal Services for over 20 years. She founded and directed the office's HIV Unit-one of the first in the country- for over seven years and was the director of the Family Law Unit for over 10 years. Ms. Shapiro co-chairs the ASFA Ad hoc Task Force, a collaboration of individuals from different agencies that work in the child protective field. For many years, she co-chaired the Kings County Family Court Domestic Violence Working Group. She taught a civil externship class at Brooklyn Law School for six years and has published extensively on child welfare and family law related topics
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    Chrishana White (Panel Member)

    Chrishana White is a Staff Attorney at Brooklyn Defender Services, Family Defense Practice. She graduated from Boston College in 2010 and Seton Hall University School of Law in 2013. During law school, Chrishana was a Teaching Fellow in the Legal Education Opportunity Program and the Academic Success Program, where she served as a mentor and tutor to underserved and underrepresented law students. She also participated in the Civil Litigation Clinic where she challenged the constitutionality of the New Jersey Child Support Improvement Act and advocated for an ex-offender who, due to collateral consequences of having a conviction, was denied his rights to obtain an electrician's license.
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    Avi Springer (Panel Member)

    Avi Springer has been a staff attorney iat Brooklyn Defender Services since 2014. Before that, he worked as a staff attorney with the Office of the Appellate Defender, where he represented indigent clients convicted of felonies in Manhattan and the Bronx in their appeals and other post-conviction proceedings. He also served as a law clerk for U.S. District Judge William K. Sessions III in Burlington, Vermont. Avi is a graduate of Yale Law School, where, as a member of the Complex Federal Litigation Clinic, he represented prisoners challenging their conditions of confinement. Before going to law school, Avi earned a master's degree in public policy analysis from the University of California, Berkeley. He also investigated police misconduct for the New York City Civilian Complaint Review Board. Avi holds a bachelor's degree from Wesleyan University.