CDPL is thrilled to announce that this year’s J. Kirk Osborn Event will honor Adam Stein, a luminary of capital defense and civil rights litigation, and celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of the creation of the Fair Trial Initiative, an innovative organization dedicated to training capital defenders and mitigation investigators whose legacy continues at CDPL.
The Osborn event will be held Wednesday, September 23, from 5:30 to 8:30 p.m. at The Rickhouse in Durham.
Purchase tickets and sponsorships here.
This yearly celebration brings together North Carolina’s capital defense community for food, fellowship and inspiring speakers. This year’s guest speaker is Jonathan Rapping, a nationally renowned criminal justice innovator and the founder of Gideon’s Promise, a nonprofit public defender organization whose mission is to provide equal justice for marginalized communities. Gideon’s promise trains new lawyers and provides support to public defenders at all levels of their careers.
As Rapping says, “Indigent defense is this generation’s civil rights struggle.”
The event honors the legacy of J. Kirk Osborn, a giant of North Carolina’s capital defense community who saved many lives. He inspired and trained other attorneys to follow in his footsteps.
No one better embodies Kirk’s integrity, passion and dogged determination than Adam Stein, who will receive CDPL’s Arc of Justice Award in recognition of a career that shaped North Carolina’s modern movement to end the death penalty and advanced civil rights across the South.
In the 1960s, Adam founded North Carolina’s first integrated law firm alongside the legendary Julius Chambers and James Ferguson II. The firm fought successfully for voting rights, school desegregation, and fair employment practices. He argued and won three cases before the U.S. Supreme Court.
Adam also represented criminal clients, including many facing the death penalty, and his pioneering advocacy set the standard for modern capital defense. In the 1980s, he and others created the North Carolina Resource Center to ensure top-notch legal representation for indigent people on North Carolina’s death row. That organization later became the Center for Death Penalty Litigation.
We will also honor the founding of the Fair Trial Initiative, created 25 years ago to recruit and train lawyers and other professionals in capital defense. Kirk Osborn served on its board. FTI trained dozens of young lawyers and mitigation investigators, many of whom are still practicing or have gone on to other leadership roles in their communities. FTI promoted a culture of rigorous training, collaboration and innovation that lives on today at CDPL.
We hope you will join us September 23 for this very special celebration of the work and people who built North Carolina’s capital defense community. They are the foundation upon which we’ve built one of the most successful coalitions in the nation — and the reason why North Carolina just passed its twentieth year without an execution.