Tanya Greene

Tanya Greene currently serves as Advocacy and Policy Counsel at the national ACLU office. She is affiliated with the Center for Justice and her work focuses on criminal justice issues, including the death penalty, indigent defense, solitary confinement and juvenile justice.

Ms. Greene has worked as a capital defense practitioner for almost 15 years. She began at the Southern Center for Human Rights (SCHR), representing indigent capital clients throughout Alabama and Georgia who might otherwise have gone without counsel. For three years at SCHR, she also served as the Death Penalty Resource Counsel for the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (NACDL), providing capital defense resources and expertise to any of the more than 10,000 NACDL members in the United States, consulting daily with attorneys brainstorming cases, identifying viable trial and appellate challenges, locating experts, and crafting pleadings.

Ms. Greene also worked as a Deputy Capital Defender at the New York Capital Defender Office where she represented capitally-charged clients in the New York City area. The New York Capital Defender Office was instrumental in having the New York death penalty statute declared unconstitutional by the state’s highest court in 2004.

Ms. Greene then served as the Training and Assistance Counsel for the National Consortium for Capital Defense Training where she initiated, developed and implemented a unique and successful program of hands-on training for capital defense practitioners across the country that continues today and after which numerous other trainings have been modeled.

Ms. Greene received her J.D. from Harvard Law School after graduating from Wesleyan University with a double major in Sociology and Afro-American Studies. Ms. Greene is an active member of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers and the National Conference of Black Lawyers.