Miriam Gohara

Visiting Assistant Professor (Spring 2013)

Office:
Email: miriam.gohara@law.columbia.edu

Areas of Teaching and Research
  • Habeas corpus litigation
  • Capital punishment
  • Complex federal litigation
  • Civil law
  • Criminal law

Education

  • Harvard Law School, J.D. (cum laude), 1997
  • Columbia University, B.A., History, 1994

Biography

Miriam Gohara is senior counsel with the Federal Capital Habeas Project, where she works on habeas corpus litigation on behalf of prisoners who have been sentenced to death by the United States. From 2009 to 2012, she was a visiting lecturer-in-law at Yale Law School, where she co-taught the Capital Punishment and Complex Federal Litigation clinics. From 2000 to 2006, Gohara was a part of the Criminal Justice Project at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund (LDF), where her areas of concentration included capital habeas litigation, indigent defense reform litigation, and policy work.

She co-counseled two successful capital habeas cases before the U.S. Supreme Court: Banks v. Dretke (2004) and House v. Bell (2006). She also won federal habeas death-sentencing relief in Williams v. Allen, 532 F.3d 1326 (11th Cir. 2008). Gohara received her B.A. in 1994 from Columbia University and her J.D. in 1997 from Harvard Law School. After law school, she clerked for Judge R. Guy Cole Jr. at the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals. From 1998 to 2000, she represented indigent clients in civil and criminal cases at the Neighborhood Defender Service of Harlem (NDS). She now serves on the board of NDS. In 2003, Gohara was awarded a Wasserstein Fellowship from Harvard Law School. 

Selected Publications

  • "Commentary: Sounding the Echoes of Racial Injustice Beyond the Death Chamber: Strategies for Moving Past McCleskey" in 39 Columbia Human Rights Law Review 124 (2007)
  • "A Lie for a Lie: False Confessions and the Case for Reconsidering the Legality of Deceptive Interrogation Techniques" in 33 Fordham Urban Law Journal 791 (2006)
  • With James S. Hardy and Damon Todd Hewitt, "The Disparate Impact of an Underfunded, Patchwork Indigent Defense System on Mississippi’s African Americans: The Civil Rights Case for Establishing a Statewide, Fully Funded Public Defender System" in Howard Law Journal 81 (2005)
  • "Indigent Defense: When the Accused Faces Loss of Family and Property, as Well as Liberty" in The Champion, September/October 2003
  • With Sarah Geraghty, "In Mississippi, Scales of Justice are Tilted" in Memphis Commercial Appeal, March 14, 2003
  • With Sarah Geraghty, "Assembly Line Justice: Mississippi’s Indigent Defense Crisis" in Report of NAACP Legal Defense Fund, Inc., March 2003
  • "The Jogger Case and False Confessions" in The Final Call, January 8, 2003
  • With Elaine R. Jones, "National Security Concerns Must Not Trample Our Constitutional Rights" in The Crisis, January/February 2002