Website made possible with the generous support of the Pennsylvania Commission on Crime and Delinquency and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

Northeast Regional Defender Center

In order to increase the capacity of the grassroots juvenile defense bar across the country, the National Center incorporated into its design the development of nine Regional Defender Centers. The Northeast Region includes the following four states: Delaware, New Jersey, New York and Pennsylvania.

Helpful Links

State and Local Defender Sites

Delaware

New Jersey

New York

Pennsylvania

2007 JCJC Faculty Bios

Elton Anglada
Elton Anglada, J.D., has been an attorney with the Defender Association of Philadelphia since his graduation from Temple Law School in 1993. During his tenure as a public defender, Mr. Anglada has represented countless juveniles and adults in all phases of criminal proceedings. He has extensive trial and teaching experience, including several years in the Major Crimes Unit trying jury trials of a complex and/or serious nature, and four years teaching the Criminal Defense Clinical Program at University of Pennsylvania Law School. For the last five years, Mr. Anglada has been permanently assigned to the Juvenile Unit where he focuses on juveniles charged with sex crimes. His current duties include running trial lists in Juvenile Court, handling specially assigned juvenile sex cases, and supervising newer attorneys in the Juvenile Unit.

David DeMatteo, JD, PhD
David DeMatteo, JD, PhD, is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology at Drexel University, and Co-Director of the JD/PhD Program in Law and Psychology offered by Drexel University and Villanova Law School. He is also an adjunct Lecturer in Law at Villanova Law School. Prior to joining the Drexel faculty, Dr. DeMatteo was a Research Scientist at the Treatment Research Institute at the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. DeMatteo holds a BA in psychology from Rutgers University, MA and PhD in clinical psychology from MCP Hahnemann University, and JD from Villanova Law School. Dr. DeMatteo is licensed as a psychologist in Pennsylvania, where he conducts forensic mental health assessments of juveniles and adults. His research interests include psychopathy, forensic mental health assessment, and drug policy research, and he has been funded the National Institute on Drug Abuse, Pennsylvania Department of Health, and American Psychology-Law Society. He has published more than 30 articles and book chapters, and co-authored two books. Dr. DeMatteo is a reviewer for numerous scientific journals, and he is on the Editorial Boards of several journals.

President Judge Thomas J. Doerr, Court of Common Pleas Butler County, Pennsylvania
Born in 1955, in Butler, son of the late J. Paul and Alice Doerr; University of Pittsburgh (B.A.), 1978; Capital University Law School (J.D), 1981; former assistant public defender, Butler County; district justice, District Court 50-1-01; elected judge, Court of Common Pleas 1991, retained 2001, president judge August 2000, married 4 children.

President Judge Arthur Grim, Court of Common Pleas Berks County
President Judge Arthur Grim has been a Judge of the Court of Common Pleas of Berks County and Administrative Head of the Juvenile Court since 1987. He has served as President Judge of the Court of Common Pleas 23rd Judicial District since his election in 2004, and is currently the Chairman of Pennsylvania’s Juvenile Court Judges’ Commission, and a member of the Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Committee to the Pennsylvania Commission on Crime and Delinquency. Judge Grim has been an Adjunct Professor at Alvernia College since 1993, and at St. Joseph University since 1995. He served as President of the Pennsylvania State Trial Judges Association Juvenile Justice Section from 2003-2005, on Governor Rendell’s Cabinet on Children and Families since 2005, as Chairman of the Board of the United Way of Berks County from 2000-2002, and on the Wyomissing Foundation Board of Trustees since 2005. Judge Grim has gathered and led a broad and committed group of community leaders for the Berks County DMC Reduction Steering Committee. He has also been active and received awards for his work raising awareness of the problems associated with domestic violence and the impact it has on children. Prior to his service on the bench, he was engaged in private law practice in Reading from 1972 until 1987. Judge Grim received his J.D. from Duquesne University in 1972, and his B.A. from Moravian College in 1964.

Judge Kevin A. Hess, Juvenile Court Judge Cumberland County
Judge Kevin A. Hess is a graduate of Dickinson College and of the Dickinson School of Law. His professional life includes fourteen years as a partner in a Carlisle law firm involved in the general practice of law. At the same time, he was employed on a part time basis with the Cumberland County District Attorney’s Office, becoming First Assistant District Attorney in 1980. In addition, Judge Hess served for eleven years as the primary criminal law instructor for both the certifying and continuing education courses of the Pennsylvania Minor Judiciary. He was elected a Cumberland County Common Pleas Judge in 1985 and was retained in 1995 and again in 2005. He is an adjunct professor at Dickinson School of Law teaching the Pennsylvania Practice course. He is a member of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court Civil Procedural Rules Committee and is also author of a text book entitled Pennsylvania Civil Practice.

Sara Jacobson
Sara Jacobson has been the Assistant Chief of the Juvenile Unit at the Defender Association since 2006. She has worked as a public defender for over nine years in both Philadelphia and Berks Counties, trying thousands of criminal and delinquent cases. At the Defender Association, she supervised attorneys in both the Municipal Court and Juvenile units and worked as a trial advocacy trainer for new lawyers in the office. Miss Jacobson completed her Juris Doctorate from Temple in 1997 and went on to earn an L.L.M. in Trial Advocacy from Temple in 2002. She attended the National Criminal Defense College’s Trial Practice Institute in 2004. Miss Jacobson has conducted training and has frequently served as a judge for the L.L.M. program in trial advocacy at Temple and for the National Institute of Trial Advocacy. Between 2004 and 2006 she served as adjunct faculty for the University of Pennsylvania Law School, teaching their Criminal Defense Clinic. Recently, she served as faculty for the Pennsylvania Public Defender Association’s 2007 Defender Trial Skills Training.

Barbara Lee Krier
Barbara Lee Krier has served as the Senior Assistant Public Defender for the York County Public Defender’s Office since November 1988. She is the supervisor of the Juvenile Unit in the Public Defender’s Office. Previously, she was the First Assistant Public Defender for 2 ½ years, a Judicial Law Clerk for 1 year, and an Assistant Court Administrator to the Court of Common Pleas, all in York County.

She received her Bachelor’s Degree at Elizabethtown College in Political Science, and her law degree from Claude W. Pettit College of Law at Ohio Northern University. Barbara was elected to the York City School Board in November 2005. Her professional organizations and committees have included York County Bar Association, PA Association of Court Management-Emeritus Member, York County Juvenile Drug Court Team, American Inns of Court-Herbert B. Cohen Chapter, York Victim’s Services Task Force, York County Female Offenders Intermediate Sanctions Project, County Systems Assessments for Intermediate Punishments, and York-Adams Constable Association. Barbara is currently serving on two MacArthur Models for Change statewide committees. In addition, she is a school board director for the School District of the City of York.

Robert Listenbee
Robert Listenbee serves as Chief of the Juvenile Unit of the Defender Association of Philadelphia and co-director of the Northeast Juvenile Defender Center. During the past five years, he has overseen significant enhancements to the unit, which handles between 6,000 and 6,500 delinquency cases each year. During the last five years, the Juvenile Unit has been reconfigured to include a pre-trial attorney, a mental health/complex disposition attorney, a drug court attorney, a special education attorney, and a juvenile justice policy analyst, Robert Listenbee has served on and co-chaired numerous governmental committees, including the Subcommittee for Juvenile Justice for the Pennsylvania Supreme Court Committee on Racial and Gender in the Justice System, the Disproportionate Minority Contact Committee of the Pennsylvania Commission on Crime and Delinquency, and the Philadelphia Juvenile Treatment Court Team Planning Committee. He is also a Board Member of Philadelphia Citizens for Children and Youth (PCCY). He is an active member of the West Oak Lane Church of God where he serves on the Board of its Christian Academy.

Laval Miller-Wilson
Laval S. Miller-Wilson is a senior attorney at Juvenile Law Center (JLC), one of the oldest children’s rights organizations in the United States. At JLC Laval advocates on behalf of children who have come within the purview of public agencies—for example, abused or neglected children placed in foster homes, delinquent youth sent to residential treatment facilities or adult prisons, or children in placement with specialized service needs. He is the lead author of Pennsylvania: An Assessment of Access to Counsel and Quality of Representation in Delinquency Proceedings which examined juvenile defense practices in Pennsylvania. He is also an adjunct professor at the law schools of Temple University and the University of Pennsylvania teaching classes about juvenile justice. Laval graduated from Harvard College and from the University of Pennsylvania Law School. Both his parents are professional educators, and Laval and his wife, Cathryn, have two young children.

Riya S. Shah
Riya S. Shah joined JLC in September 2005 as the fourth Sol and Helen Zubrow Fellow in Children’s Law. While at JLC, Riya has represented youth in dependency court, researched and written amicus briefs and conducted trainings for child-serving professionals. Riya also coauthored several JLC publications, including a manual on child abuse reporting, a manual on minor’s health care rights, a monograph on minors’ rights against self incrimination, and guides to juvenile records and expungement for attorneys and youth.

Prior to being awarded the Zubrow fellowship, Riya graduated cum laude from Loyola University Chicago School of Law in May 2005, where she was a Civitas ChildLaw Fellow. At Loyola, Riya was an active member of the Public Interest Law Society, the president of the ChildLaw Society, and Editor-in-Chief of The Children’s Legal Rights Journal, a legal journal published with the ABA Center on Children and the Law and the National Association of Counsel for Children. Riya is a graduate of University of Michigan Ann Arbor where she earned her B.A. in Psychology and American Culture. While at University of Michigan, Riya received a W.K. Kellogg Community Based Research Fellowship based on an original research proposal to develop quality of life indicators for Detroit-area children affected by and infected with HIV and AIDS. After college, she was a Teach for America Corps member in Jersey City, New Jersey where she taught second grade, and a bilingual third grade teacher in Detroit, Michigan.

Georgene Siroky
Georgene Siroky is currently an Assistant Public Defender for the Allegheny County Public Defender’s Office and has been 2000. Before coming to the Public Defender’s Office she was a staff attorney for Neighborhood Legal Services from 1981-1983, worked at the Legal Aid for Children from 1983-2000 as the Deputy Director, Acting Executive Director and Senior Staff Attorney, and in 2000 was with Welch Gold & Siegel. She has given presentations at the Association of Family and Conciliation Courts annual conference on HIV Status and its Effects on Family Law Issues and at the National Symposium on Child Victimization on “Salt in the Wounds: Publicity and Victimized Children.”

Ron Turo
Ron Turo, Esquire is the owner of Turo Law Offices, a general practice law firm located in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. He has served as a trial assistant in the Cumberland County Public Defender’s Office since 1989 and is now the Juvenile Defender for the County. He is an active member of the Cumberland County Bar Association, Pennsylvania Bar Association, National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, Pennsylvania Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers. In addition to his criminal defense work and civil plaintiff’s work, he serves as Municipal Solicitor to municipalities in Cumberland, Adams and York counties. He has been a guest lecturer at the Dickinson School of Law in both Pennsylvania practice and Juvenile Law and as an Adjunct Professor of Law at Widener University School of Law, Harrisburg, teaching Juvenile Law. He serves the Public Defender Association of Pennsylvania and the Pennsylvania Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers as Chair of their Juvenile Law Committees. Mr. Turo has handled literally thousands of criminal defense matters ranging from summary offenses to capital homicide cases. He received his J.D. from the Dickinson School of Law and his B.A. from the Pennsylvania State University.