Federal Criminal Defender:
In 1995, I became the first Spanish-speaking lawyer on the Federal Criminal Justice Act panel on the Southern Oregon panel, representing indigent defendants in the Oregon US District Courts. I saw a lot of prisons, and was able to apply my Spanish extensively. I can only say good things about Steve Wax, the Federal Public Defender for Oregon – truly a gentleman of the highest water. While working as one of his CJA Panel attorneys, he always supported doing the suppression motions – suppressing statements and confessions, suppressing stops, arrests, and searches incident to arrest, moving to controvert search warrants, and trying a couple of drug-conspiracy cases. I remained on the panel until February 2001.