The Criminal Justice Department hosted the Second Annual Para La Defensa conference yesterday on campus in the Faculty Development Center. The conference featured two guest speakers, Cristina Borde and Matt Gonzalez, who are the current Chief Attorney of the San Francisco Public Defender’s Office. They were invited to talk about their experiences as defense attorneys.
Borde has many years of experience as a defense attorney, including working in the Habeas Corpus Resource Center in San Francisco, and is now working for the Wisconsin Innocence Project. When speaking about being invited to Stan State she said, “It’s very kind to get invited here and I appreciate it.”
Para La Defensa was coordinated by Dr. M. Blake Wilson, a Criminal Justice Professor and the Pre Law Adviser and Coordinator for the campus’ Pre-Law Resource Center. Wilson spoke highly of the guest speakers. “They are distinguished professionals working within a small but vital part of our criminal justice community, and without them, the system simply could not function,” said Wilson.
Wilson hoped that the event would highlight the work of the people on the defense bar. “More than any other actor in the system, criminal defense attorneys deal directly with marginalized and underrepresented populations, and in doing so, they reinforce their commitment to the rule of law, social justice, and equality,” said Wilson.
Gonzalez was the first to speak. He had experience as a public defender as well as a politician, including being the former president of the board of supervisors in San Francisco and a former candidate for District Attorney and Mayor of San Francisco.
One of the main themes of Gonzalez’s speech was the concept of stepping up to wrongdoings by establishments. “You could live your life a lot of different ways. You can kinda think to yourself, ‘well you know, I’m not really into politics or that’s too big, I don’t want to get involved in that. I’m just gonna do my thing, I’m gonna have my job, I’m gonna have my house, I’m gonna have my family.’ No matter what you do, there’s gonna come a time when the state encroaches on your life,” said Gonzalez.
He encouraged the younger generation at the conference to be vigilant of these times throughout their own lives. “These are the moments that you have to decide what kind of choices you’re gonna make and how you are gonna live,” Gonzalez added.
Borde spoke after Gonzalez. She used a PowerPoint to illustrate her passion for helping the wrongfully convicted and her strong opposition to the death penalty. In her PowerPoint, she supplied statistics on the death penalty and showed the damages of it, like racial motives behind the sentencing.
Both Borde and Gonzalez talked about well-known cases that they were a part of. For Gonzalez, it was the case of Jose Garcia Zarate, who was accused of the murder of Kathryn Steinle, in which Gonzalez served as Zarate’s public defender. The verdict for this case was the acquittal of Zarate.
For Borde, it was her work on the cases of Vicente Figueroa Benavides and Mario Vasquez in which both men were wrongfully convicted of crimes that they did not commit. Both cases ended with the acquittal of both men.
In Borde’s speech, she told the backstory behind Vicente Figueroa Benavides and Mario Vasquez. She humanized them and showed who they were as people before they were accused of their crimes. She also emphasized the fact that Benavides and Vasquez lost many years of their lives because they were wrongfully convicted.
Dr. James Tuedio, the Dean for the College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Science, was in attendance for the conference. Tuedio said, “The whole picture just blows me away and their capacity to share that experience with us is really very special gift, but then to have produced the results over years and years of work is almost unbelievable you know.”
Tuedio added that he was “impressed” and stricken “by the importance of the work.” 
The title of the conference, “Para La Defensa,” translated into English is “for the defense.” This was the main idea behind the conference, which was created to showcase the work of two people, who have dedicated their careers to being defense attorneys.