The Project is delighted to welcome Callie Heller as the Project’s newest staff attorney. Callie joins us from the Texas Defender Service and Phillips Black where she spent several years representing death row prisoners in their state and federal proceedings. Her work there included co-authoring the certiorari petition in Ayestas v. Davis, from which the Supreme Court granted review and which ultimately won in a rare unanimous decision that admonished lower courts for their failure to provide reasonably necessary funding to capital habeas teams.
Callie received her bachelor’s degree from SUNY Binghamton and her law degree from the University of Michigan in 2014. During law school, she worked as a student attorney in the Michigan Innocence Clinic, as a Dean’s Public Service Fellow at the California Appellate Project, and at the State Appellate Defender in Detroit. She also completed human rights fellowships in Cambodia and South Africa. Following her graduation, Callie assisted in trial-level capital defense as a fellow at the Northern Virginia Capital Defender Office.