Program Directory

City Club of Cleveland - The Death Penalty

City Club of Cleveland

Phyllis L. Crocker, a recognized authority on the death penalty, will talk about issues of fairness and the death penalty in Ohio and share information from the recently published Assessment of Ohio's Death Penalty.

Crocker chaired the American Bar Association's Ohio Death Penalty Assessment Team that published the report EVALUATING FAIRNESS AND ACCURACY IN STATE DEATH PENALTY SYSTEMS: THE OHIO DEATH PENALTY ASSESSMENT REPORT (2007). She is the author of several articles that analyze the constitutional and cultural underpinnings of the death penalty.

Crocker received her undergraduate degree from Yale University and her law degree from Northeastern University School of Law. After graduation from law school, she clerked for the Hon. Warren J. Ferguson of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. She was then an associate in a small Chicago firm specializing in complex federal civil litigation.

From 1989 to 1994, Crocker was a staff attorney at the Texas Resource Center in Austin, a federally funded community defender organization representing death-sentenced inmates in state and federal post-conviction litigation. She served as co-counsel in Herrera v. Collins, 506 U.S. 390 (1993). She joined the Cleveland-Marshall faculty in 1994, and has taught Civil Procedure, Criminal Law, Criminal Procedure I and II, and Capital Punishment and the Law.

May 2, 2008