Denny LeBoeuf is the director of the ACLU’s John Adams Project, assisting in the defense of the capitally charged Guantánamo detainees. Previously, she served as the director of the ACLU Capital Punishment Project, which works toward the end of the death penalty by supporting repeal and reform with public education, advocacy and targeted litigation. She has been a capital defender for over 30 years, representing persons facing death at trial and in post-conviction in state and federal courts, and she teaches and consults with capital defense teams nationally. LeBoeuf holds a J.D. from Tulane University and a B.A. from Hunter College.
(above bio taken from the ACLU website, at https://wp.api.aclu.org/bio/denny-leboeuf#work )
Denny LeBoeuf's featured work focused on the death penalty includes the following:
https://secure.in.gov/ipdc/files/Death_penalty_stories-LeBoeuf.pdf
https://www.aclu.org/news/smart-justice/lady-justice-rolls-dice-death-penalty-random-horror
https://www.aclu.org/news/smart-justice/time-confess-error-death-penalty
https://www.aclu.org/news/capital-punishment/too-crazy-kill
https://wp.api.aclu.org/news/capital-punishment/remembering-damon-thibodeaux-who-survived-death-row
Denny LeBoeuf is featured in the above video link about the death penalty case of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. At the time of the 2015 recording, a federal jury had sentenced 21-year-old Dzhokhar Tsarnaev to death by lethal injection for setting off bombs at the 2013 Boston Marathon that killed three and injured more than 260. The sentence was issued in Massachusetts, a state which has banned the death penalty since 1987 and has not carried out an execution since 1947. This Democracy Now episode includes a roundtable with three guests: James Rooney, president of Massachusetts Citizens Against the Death Penalty; Eric Freedman, professor of constitutional law at Hofstra Law School, who has worked on many death penalty cases; and Denny LeBoeuf, director of the ACLU’s John Adams Project, who had 26 years of experience as a capital defense attorney at that time.
On January 29th, I sat down with Denny LeBoeuf at her home in New Orleans to talk about her death penalty work and the trauma she endured from witnessing the execution of her client John Brown in 1997 in Louisiana.