Description

About the Event:
In this webinar, speakers will discuss the mechanisms in place across different US states that protect the rights of PWID within the criminal justice system. They will address prosecutorial discretion, the procedural rights of PWID to a fair hearing, and sentencing options.

About the speakers:

Mary Pat Treuthart
Professor, Gonzaga University School of Law

With her expertise in comparative mental disability law, and international human rights, Professor Treuthart has published on the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, and international human rights and mental disability law. Professor Treuthart has worked at Warren County Legal Services in New Jersey as a staff attorney and the program director, where she represented clients with mental disabilities in their civil commitment hearings and other legal matters. She was a professor at Gonzaga University School of Law and taught courses in the areas of constitutional law, criminal procedure, comparative women’s rights, family law, international human rights, and mental disability law. She was awarded professor of law emerita status by the University in 2024.

For more than three decades, Treuthart was a volunteer for Disability Rights Washington, serving as the Chair of its Board of Directors for six years. She has authored law review articles about mental disability, co-authored a textbook on Comparative Mental Disability Law, and a book chapter on the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD).

Stephen Rosenbaum

Visiting Researcher Scholar, Othering & Belonging Institute (Disability Studies Cluster), California Berkeley Law

Stephen Rosenbaum, JD, MPP, is an Othering & Belonging Institute Visiting Researcher Scholar (Disability Studies Cluster) at UC, Berkeley (UCB). He has taught professional skills courses on social justice, mental health, civil rights and Spanish language and cultural competency at Berkeley Law, where he was awarded the title of Frank C. Newman Lecturer. He has also taught law and policy at the UCB Goldman School of Public Policy, as well as disability rights and justice courses at Stanford Law and University of Washington (UW), where he is an Affiliate in the Disability Studies Program and periodic Lecturer-Part Time. His standard UW course is entitled “Comparative Human Rights Law & Policy for People with Disability.”

In 2024, Rosenbaum was a Senior Researcher Fellow at Udayana University, Indonesia, where he convened a workshop with law students to investigate the feasibility, development and sustainability of a disability law clinic. In 2023, he co-piloted a course at recently established Jigme Singye Wangchuck Law School in Bhutan on procedural access to justice for disabled persons. From 1996 to 2010, he was a senior litigation attorney with Disability Rights Education & Defense Fund and later associate managing attorney with Disability Rights California. Rosenbaum’s scholarship is on disability, special education, lay advocacy, international human rights and legal education.