Madeline Smith

Madeline Smith joined ILS as a Statewide Implementation Attorney for Caseload Standards in September of 2022 after spending five years working in public defense, first at The Legal Aid Society of Nassau County and later at the Warren County Public Defender’s Office. She represented clients charged with every level of crime at every level of criminal proceedings, from arraignment through trial. Her firsthand experience in two vastly different areas of New York State gave her a unique perspective on the tribulations that indigent individuals and public defenders face every day statewide.

Madeline is a Capital Region transplant but identifies as a native New Yorker. She grew up in a military family, moving several times before her family settled in the Hudson Valley. Madeline attended Elizabethtown College in Elizabethtown, Pennsylvania, where she earned a Bachelor of Arts in English Literature in 2014. She went on to attend the Maurice A. Deane School of Law at Hofstra University in Hempstead, New York, where she earned a JD with a concentration in Criminal Law and Procedure in 2017. She was admitted to the practice of law in January of 2018 and is a member of the American Bar Association, the New York State Bar Association, New York State Defenders Association, and New York State Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers.

Madeline’s passion for public defense was cultivated during her participation in Hofstra Law’s Criminal Justice Clinic, the Hofstra Trial Advocacy Association and externships at various organizations from the Federal Defenders of the Eastern District of New York to The Legal Aid Society of Nassau County, where she would later work as a staff attorney. She spent her second and third years of law school as a Teaching Assistant for Legal Analysis, Writing and Research, a first-year legal writing course, and was additionally an inaugural Freedman Justice Fellow at Hofstra Law’s Monroe H. Freedman Institute for the Study of Legal Ethics, studying and researching various topics related to judicial, prosecutorial and defense ethics within the criminal justice system. Madeline returns to her alma mater each spring to serve as a mock judge for first-year oral arguments.