April serves as President & CEO of NLADA. She has been a champion for equal justice for two decades. A graduate of Howard School of Law, she worked as a public defender in her hometown of Memphis, Tennessee and at the Public Defender Service (PDS) for the District of Columbia before joining NLADA. She has been a part of the NLADA leadership team for the past five years, most recently serving as Vice President for Strategic Alliances & Innovation and prior to that Chief of Lifelong Learning. She is a co-founder of NLADA’s newest section, the Black Public Defender Association (BPDA), which aims to increase diversity, equity and inclusion in public defense and promote racial equity in criminal legal systems. As the 2020 Chair of the American Bar Association’s influential Criminal Justice Section, she led the adoption of important ABA policy on race equity and prosecution, raising the age for juvenile prosecutions, reparations, abolition of private prisons, and other complex criminal legal issues. In addition to her J.D. from Howard University, she holds a B.A. in from Tennessee State University.
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