R. Mueller ’74 and M. Sabelli ’90 Elected to Board of Directors of NACDL

Norman Mueller ’74 and Martín A. Sabelli ’90 were elected to the Board of Directors of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (NACDL) at the Association's 59th annual meeting in Palm Beach, FL, on August 13.

Mueller began his career as a Deputy State Public Defender in Colorado in 1974. He went on to found Allen, Foreman and Mueller in 1980 before joining Haddon, Morgan and Foreman in 1983. Mueller has been listed in Best Lawyers in America for many years in several categories, including appellate, criminal defense, and commercial litigation, and he was named the Denver appellate lawyer of the year in 2011. He has been named a Colorado Super Lawyer for multiple years in appellate law.

Mueller's commitment to professional activities is long standing. He has served on the Colorado Supreme Court Committee on Appellate Rules since 1986. He is chair of the Judicial Performance Commission for the Second Judicial District, a member of the Criminal Pattern Jury Instruction Committee for the Tenth Circuit, and he served two terms as the Colorado representative of the Tenth Circuit Criminal Justice Act Standing Committee. He is also serving his second term as a member of the Colorado Commission on Criminal and Juvenile Justice. Norm is the Tenth Circuit co-chair for the Amicus Committee of NACDL and was first elected to the NACDL board in 2011. He is a past president of the Colorado Criminal Defense Bar and has served on the Executive Council of the Criminal Law Section of the Colorado Bar Association since 1985.

Sabelli currently has his own practice, the Law Offices of Martín A. Sabelli. Prior to starting his own practice, he served as a Federal Public Defender, a partner at Winston & Strawn, the Director of Training of the Office of the San Francisco Public Defender, and as a law clerk to the late Honorable Robert F. Peckham, United States District Judge. He taught Latin American History at Yale College and has taught for the National Criminal Defense College since 2001 and for the Trial Advocacy Workshop of Harvard Law School, the National Institute for Trial Advocacy, and NACDL, as well as numerous other criminal defense and public defense programs around the country and abroad.

Sabelli has also served as the Director of the Mexico Program for the National Institute of Trial Advocacy. He regularly lectures on comparative criminal justice issues and trains judges, prosecutors, criminal defense lawyers, and public defenders in Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Uruguay, and Peru (all countries that are transitioning from inquisitorial to adversarial systems). He has also trained judges, prosecutors, and lawyers in numerous other countries including Egypt, Liberia, Nicaragua, and Tunisia. He is deeply involved, in particular, in the implementation of jury trials in Argentina.