Tony Joe / Cochran Fellow

Tony joined NSB as a Cochran Fellow in 2021.

Prior to joining NSB, Tony was an associate at Paul Weiss in New York, where he was a member of the team that secured Pablo Fernandez’s release from prison after twenty-four years of wrongful imprisonment.  During his time at Paul Weiss, Tony also assisted former Attorney General Loretta Lynch in mediating a litigation between the Federal Defenders of New York and the Federal Bureau of Prisons in the Eastern District of New York.  The litigation concerned Sixth Amendment right-to-counsel claims arising from conditions of confinement at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn.  As an associate at Paul Weiss, Tony helped brief civil and criminal matters in state and federal courts across the country.  He also represented companies in internal and governmental investigations into allegations of securities fraud, employment discrimination, money laundering, and other forms of misconduct.

As a law student in the Equal Justice Initiative’s capital defense clinic at NYU, Tony conducted a post-conviction mitigation investigation on behalf of a capital defendant in Alabama.  As a legal intern with Fair Share Housing Center in New Jersey, Tony helped draft an amicus brief whose arguments were ultimately accepted by the New Jersey Appellate Division in MEPT J. Square Urban Renewal, LLC v. City of Jersey City, 190 A.3d 1113 (N.J. Super. Ct. App. Div. 2018).  The Appellate Division’s ruling ultimately preserved $700,000 in governmental funding for affordable housing in Jersey City.  In law school, Tony interned at other criminal defense and civil liberties organizations including the Capital Habeas Unit of the Federal Community Defender Office for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania and Education Law Center in New Jersey.  Prior to law school, Tony was a paralegal at Juvenile Law Center in Philadelphia where he supported the litigation campaign that culminated in Montgomery v. Louisiana, which held that Miller v. Alabama’s bar to mandatory life without parole sentences for juveniles applies retroactively.