Please join Dorsey & Whitney LLP and
Minnesota Advocates for Human Rights’ Death Penalty Project
for our bi-monthly lunchtime speaker series:

Putting The Criminal Justice System On Trial: The Habeas Corpus Challenge

presented by

Eric Jorstad

Wednesday, July 12, 2006
12:00-1:00 P.M.

at

Dorsey & Whitney
Seattle Room, 15th Floor
50 South 6th Street
 Minneapolis, MN 55402

The habeas corpus process puts the entire criminal justice system under the lens of constitutional standards.  From police tactics to forensic experts, from jury selection to witness veracity, from trial attorney competence to appellate court review, virtually every aspect of the criminal justice process is investigated and subjected to scrutiny under the standards imposed by the U.S. Constitution.  Eric Jorstad will share his thoughts about the role of habeas corpus, including the investigation and claim development process, with a particular focus on lessons gleaned from his habeas case in California, recently the subject of a decision by the U.S. Supreme Court, Brown v. Sanders, 126 S.Ct. 884 (Jan. 11, 2006). Application will be made for one CLE credit. This presentation is a brown bag lunch. Beverages will be provided.

Speaker biography

Eric Jorstad is a partner in the Intellectual Property Group of the Minneapolis office of Faegre & Benson LLP.  He practices in the area of constitutional litigation, particularly First Amendment matters for media and religiously-affiliated entities.  He also litigates IP cases in the copyright, trademark and privacy fields.  He represented MPR when the State Attorney General challenged its data privacy practices; Augsburg College when its infamous "hate-letter" writing alumnus Elroy Stock sued to get his donation returned; and the Star Tribune newspaper seeking access to court documents in the State v. Donald Blom (Katie Poirer murder) trial.  He has been appointed by the federal court in E.D.Cal. to represent Mr. Ronald Lee Sanders for his habeas corpus proceedings since March 1993, and appointed by the California Supreme Court to represent Mr. Sanders in all state post-conviction proceedings since 1994.  The case is currently being prepared for an evidentiary hearing in federal district court on Mr. Sanders' claim of ineffective assistance of counsel for failing to investigate available penalty phase evidence. Eric is a graduate of St. Olaf College (B.A. 1978), Yale Divinity School (M.Div. 1982), Luther Seminary (M.Th. 1983) and Yale Law School (J.D. 1990). He was Articles Editor at the Yale Law Journal, where his Note was published. He clerked for the Honorable Diana Murphy, D.Minn., for two years, and joined Faegre & Benson in 1992.  During the 1980s, Eric was an ordained Lutheran pastor serving congregations in Chicago and Detroit; he was chair of Michigan Religious Leaders Against the Death Penalty during a ballot initiative seeking to institute the death penalty in Michigan; he also wrote "The Capital Punishment Debate" for the Lutheran Office of Church in Society and spoke widely in political and religious fora.

Please R.S.V.P. to Rosalyn Park at Minnesota Advocates for Human Rights
by Tuesday, July 11, 2006.
Phone: (612) 341-3302 ext. 106 • Email: [email protected]