Marianne Bachers embodies all of the qualities the Women Defenders award was meant to honor: intellect, achievement, mentoring abilities, and most importantly, commitment to the fight we fight for our clients each and every day.

Marianne’s professional achievements are impressive. In 1995, she won a complete reversal of guilt and penalty judgments in the Ninth Circuit based on a Faretta violation (Moore v. Calderon). In 2002, she struck again in the case of Michael Jennings where she won a reversal of the guilt and penalty judgments in the Ninth Circuit for trial counsel’s failure to investigate guilt phase mental defenses and supporting family background information. (Notably, the United States Supreme Court subsequently decided in an unrelated case, Wiggins v. Smith, that trial counsel must indeed seek out and present this type of information to a jury charged with deciding whether a person should receive the death penalty.)

Her latest capital habeas case, Morris v. Woodford, is pending before the Ninth Circuit in light of newly-discovered evidence of prosecutorial misconduct. The Morris case could be Marianne’s third strike in the Ninth Circuit.