Maddie is currently a nursing student at Mercer County Community College. Additionally, Maddie supports our Development Department, assisting in administrative duties related to fundraising and donor communications. Since joining, she has transitioned into the role of Administrative Support, where she works closely with Director of Case Development and provides support to the entire Case Development Team. Madison (Maddie) joined the team in 2019 as our part-time Intake Coordinator. In 1980, he went into private practice in Hoboken, New Jersey specializing in criminal trial, appellate work, and wrongful convictions. Paul spent three years as a trial attorney in the Jersey City Office of the Public Defender, where he was infuriated to see juveniles charged with minor crimes that had been considered pranks in his old neighborhood. Stavis brought Paul on to assist in the Chicago 8 Contempt Trial. At Rutgers Newark Law School, Paul worked for Morton Stavis, a pioneer in wrongful conviction and civil rights cases. Paul grew up in Washington Heights, attended New York City public schools, and graduated from NYU where he had been recruited to play baseball. In State v Behn, independent of Centurion, Paul established the unreliability of the FBI’s bullet lead composition analysis, leading the FBI to disband the unit that provided such testimony throughout the United States. Along with Centurion’s team, he got the Supreme Court of New Jersey in Prince Moore’s case (State v Moore) to ban the use of hypnotically enhanced testimony in criminal trials. Representing David Shepard who proved his own innocence based on DNA evidence, Paul initiated the New Jersey law that compensates people who are ‘mistakenly imprisoned.’ Paul has been a leading advocate for removing junk science from the courtroom. In People v Kogut, Paul won the first case in New York State history to admit expert testimony on the psychology of police interrogations and false confessions, which shined a light on false confessions as law enforcement’s go-to tactic to imprison innocent people. Leblanc was in for 28 years.ĭuring his career, Paul has fought for changes in the judicial system to benefit innocent people in their fight for justice. Both innocent of murder as charged, Mr Santillan spent 25 years in jail, Mr. Most recently Paul worked with Conviction Integrity Units in Dallas, Texas and New Orleans, Louisiana to free clients Martin Santillan and Dwayne Leblanc respectively. Kogut’s acquittal led the Nassau County District Attorney to drop charges against the wrongfully charged John Restivo and Dennis Halstead. Court TV’s gavel-to-gavel coverage of James Landano’s retrial brought national awareness to wrongful convictions. Paul won acquittals for murder for both clients James Landano in New Jersey in 1998 and John Kogut in New York in 2005. Two of Centurion’s cases that Paul handled were retrials because prosecutors couldn’t admit they were wrong. In 2018 Paul represented Ralph Lee alongside the New York Innocence project representing codefendant Eric Kelley they proved the Paterson New Jersey police fabricated and forced their confessions to a brutal murder neither had anything to do with. When Jules Letemps won his freedom after 27 years based on his trial attorney’s incompetence, it took two more years to free him from the custody of the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services, which tried to deport him. Three years later Paul secured Bryant’s release and exoneration by winning a writ of habeas corpus in federal court. David Bryant was granted new a trial after spending 38 years in prison on false murder charges but got sent back to prison when the New York State Appellate Division reversed the decision. The police pressured the developmentally disabled Lapointe to confess to a murder he did not commit and plainly lacked the capacity to commit. Richard Lapointe’s exoneration in Connecticut took Paul 15 years and three trips up and down the Connecticut Court System. Most exonerations result from years traversing arcane court procedures, hostile prosecutors, and biased judges, often in partnership with poor or patently corrupt police work. In 2014 Paul became the organization’s first legal director. Forty years later, Paul has been involved in freeing 30 people convicted of crimes they did not commit most of the cases were in collaboration with Centurion. Shortly after Kate Germond joined anchoring the first innocence organization in the United States. Paul Casteleiro’s association with Jim McCloskey and what was to become Centurion began with its first client and exoneree Jorge “Chiefy” Del Los Santos.
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