Kentucky Department of Public Advocacy & Louisville Metro Public Defender’s Office
are presented with NCADP 2010 Outstanding Legal Service Award

Ed Monahan and Dan Goyette receive the Outstanding Legal Service Award
from Stephen Bright. The award was presented January 16 during the National
Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty's annual conference banquet.

At the 2010 Annual Awards Dinner of the National Coalition Against the Death Penalty (NCADP) held at The Seelbach Hotel in Louisville, KY on Saturday evening, January 16, 2010, the Louisville Metro Public Defender’s Office and the Kentucky Department of Public Advocacy were presented the Outstanding Legal Service Award for over 30 years of dedicated representation of indigent clients in capital offense cases at trial and on appeal.

The Award was presented to Public Advocate Ed Monahan and Louisville Metro Chief Public Defender Dan Goyette by one of the nation’s leading capital litigators, Stephen B. Bright, president and senior counsel of the Southern Center for Human Rights and teacher at Yale and Georgetown Law School. Bright noted the extraordinary results achieved by the Louisville Metro Public Defender’s office over the past decade in cases involving capital offense indictments in the trial courts, and the extremely high appellate reversal rate of death penalty verdicts across the state in appeals handled by the Department of Public Advocacy before the Kentucky Supreme Court and the Sixth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals.

In his acceptance remarks, Dan Goyette thanked the National and Kentucky Coalitions for their increasingly successful efforts to halt the inhumane practice of state executions, and commended the Capital Defense Team in his office for its vigorous, principled advocacy against the imposition of the death penalty on behalf of poor and needy clients facing capital charges.  Goyette said he is optimistic about growing public recognition of the senselessness and futility of the death penalty in our criminal justice system, and expressed hope that it would soon lead to abolition in Kentucky, just as it recently has in New Jersey and New Mexico.

In accepting the Award for DPA, Ed Monahan stated:

Because of what has been done by public defenders over the last 3+ decades, Kentucky is a better place. There is less injustice. Today there are 36 persons on Kentucky ’s death row. Since 1976 (when the Kentucky General Assembly in a special session reenacted Kentucky’s death penalty scheme), there have been 92 death sentence verdicts. Of the 50 Kentucky capital cases that have exhausted review by the Kentucky Supreme Court and the Sixth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals, 42 of them have been reversed. That enormous error rate is remarkable beyond words …but we Kentucky defenders have work to do…significant work …and my resolve as Kentucky Public Advocate, and the resolve of Kentucky public defenders across this Commonwealth, is to do that work, as Kentucky’s Abraham Lincoln said on March 4, 1865, “With high hope for the future.”

The following honorees also were recognized and received awards at the dinner:

Governor Bill Richardson and Rep. Gail Chasey of the State of New Mexico;

Prof. Anthony G. Amsterdam, New York University School of Law;

Carl Wedekind, Kentucky Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty;

Sister Helen Prejean and musician Steve Earle.

For further information contact:

Diann Rust Tierney (Executive Director, NCADP), 202-331-4090