Board of Directors
Deborah L. Cornwall

Debi Cornwall is a partner at Neufeld Scheck & Brustin, LLP, the firm she joined in 2001. She has litigated civil-rights cases at both the trial and appellate levels around the country on behalf of DNA exonerees and victims of police brutality.

In 2006 and 2007, Ms. Cornwall, along with Peter Neufeld, successfully litigated and then obtained multi-million dollar verdicts from Virginia and California federal juries respectively, on behalf of Earl Washington Jr., a mentally retarded man who falsely confessed to a murder he did not commit and on behalf of Herman Atkins, a black man falsely convicted of raping a white woman. In addition to securing substantial verdicts, the litigation led to reform-oriented broader audits in both states.

Ms. Cornwall has represented civil rights plaintiffs in California, Florida, Kentucky, Louisiana, Massachusetts, New York, North Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia. She has prosecuted successful appeals in the Fourth, Sixth, Ninth Circuits and New York State Courts. In 2008, she received the Thurgood Marshall Award from the Association of the Bar of the City of New York for her pro bono work on capital cases.

Before joining NSB, Ms. Cornwall was a law clerk to the Honorable Robert W. Sweet in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York. She has also worked with the NAACP Legal Defense & Educational Fund, the Southern Center for Human Rights, and the Federal Defender Division of the Legal Aid Society in New York City. She received a J.D. from Harvard Law School, where she was the captain of the winning team in the final round of the Ames Moot Court Competition and represented indigent criminal defendants through the Criminal Justice Institute. Her undergraduate degree is from Brown University, magna cum laude and with honors.

Ms. Cornwall is admitted to practice in New York, the United States District Courts for the Southern and Eastern Districts of New York, and the First, Second, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth and Ninth Circuit Courts of Appeal.

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