Civil Rights Clinic 2025 Highlights
CRC student attorneys Cynthia Mouzis, Maya Cemper-Walker, Kemiya Jenab-Nutter, Rylee Beltran, Mary Emmerling, Allyson Harris, Emma Richards, Natalie Kenoyer, and Isaac Sargent celebrate the filing of a new case.
The Sturm College of Law’s Civil Rights Clinic (CRC) celebrated its 20th anniversary last academic year, and student attorneys carried on the two-decade tradition of representing incarcerated clients and other victims of civil-rights violations.
Student attorneys Katherine Ewing, Kemiya Jenab-Nutter, Natalie Kenoyer, and Serena Phillips continued the CRC’s six-year long representation of a man with intellectual disability and mental illness who has spent most of the last 30 years in solitary confinement. The team represented their client on multiple fronts, trying to secure him postconviction relief and accommodations for his disability. On the postconviction front, the team filed multiple supplemental briefs with the D.C. Superior Court, providing updates on changes in law and the client’s factual circumstances as they awaited a decision on the client’s motion for a sentence reduction under D.C.’s Incarceration Reduction Amendments Act (IRAA). While waiting on the IRAA decision, the student attorneys also drafted and filed an administrative complaint with the Department of Justice’s Equal Employment Office for the Federal Bureau of Prisons, seeking accommodations under Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act for their client. Upon receipt of a disappointing IRAA decision, the student attorneys immediately prepared for an appeal, and that work is ongoing this year, where Katherine and Kemiya have been joined by two new student attorneys, Oluwatomi Olasunkanmi and Chloe Peters.
Above: CRC student attorneys Serena Phillips, Natalie Kenoyer, Katherine Ewing, and Kemiya-Jenab Nutter, arriving in Pennsylvania to visit their incarcerated client.
In January 2025, CRC student attorneys Stephanie Holt, Cynthia Mouzis, and Isaac Sargent finalized a long-negotiated Amended Settlement Agreement in the CRC’s long-standing case Disability Law Colorado v. Colo. Dep’t of Corrections (DLC). The DLC case sought to correct rampant discrimination against Deaf and hard of hearing people incarcerated in the Colorado Department of Corrections (CDOC). With the amended agreement, CDOC agreed to do many things to eliminate the discrimination experienced by Deaf and hard of hearing people in its custody, including ensuring that Deaf people have access to interpreters, providing text-based notifications and visual and tactile alarms to allow Deaf and hard of hearing people to learn of announcement and emergencies, and ensuring that hard of hearing people are evaluated by an audiologist, provided hearing aids, and given prompt repairs or replacements when those hearing aids break or are lost. The amended agreement also requires an outside trainer, mutually agreed upon by the parties, that will assist CDOC in updating its training materials and processes relating to accommodations for, auxiliary aids and services for, and working with Deaf and hard of hearing individuals. The Amended Agreement also created a monitoring team meant to ensure that the changes are effectuated throughout all of Colorado’s prisons. Cynthia, Isaac, and Steph immediately started working with the monitoring team to begin implementation of the agreement while simultaneously working with another client incarcerated in CDOC seeking postconviction relief.
Also in January 2025, student attorney Casey Dinaro, supported by their colleagues Maya Cemper-Walker and Makayla Shoults, argued a case to the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals. The case involved the police killing of Patrick Harmon, a Black man stopped by Salt Lake City police officers while riding his bike.
In April, just three short months after argument, the Tenth Circuit issued a published decision in Estate of Harmon v. Salt Lake City, et al., reversing and remanding the district court’s grant of summary judgment to defendants. The decision effectively examines the record through the lens of summary judgment and correctly determines that summary judgment is not the place to decide the imminence of a threat when factfinders can reasonably disagree about the decedent’s actions.
Right: CRC student attorneys Makayla Shoults, Casey Dinaro, and Maya Cemper-Walker after argument in the Tenth Circuit.
A team of CRC student attorneys filed a new case on behalf a client who maintains her innocence and sincerely believes that she cannot lie about her innocence simply to access sex offender treatment, which is the only way she may someday leave prison under Colorado’s lifetime supervision act. Student attorneys Rylee Beltran, Allyson Harris, and Emma Richards filed the case in December 2024 and prepared for discovery; Rylee and Emma returned to the CRC for the 2025-26 academic year and have been moving the case through discovery.
Finally, a team of CRC student attorneys, Mary Emmerling and Hank Legan, worked on a test case seeking to challenge Supreme Court precedent that allows law enforcement to use secondhand information to get warrants and simultaneously investigated certain violations of a long-standing settlement agreement secured by the CRC nearly a decade ago that ensures people confined to the state supermax, the Colorado State Penitentiary, will have access to outdoor exercise.
CRC Faculty Highlights
Professor Laura Rovner
Publication: Solitary Confinement, Human Dignity, and the Eighth Amendment, 111 Va. L. Rev. 671 (2025).
Service: Planning Committee, 2026 AALS Conference on Clinical Legal Education; Steering Committee, 2024 Prison Law & Advocacy Conference; Nebraska Journal on Advancing Justice, Peer Review Panelist (2024-present).
Professor Nicole B. Godfrey
Publication: Decades of Indifference: Failures in Accountability and Oversight in the Provision of Medical Care in Federal Prisons, 24 Nev. L.J. 755 (2025).
Service: Association of American Law Schools, Section on Clinical Legal Education, Membership, Outreach, and Training Committee Member (2024-present); Association of American Law Schools, Section on Litigation, Treasurer (2022-present); Nebraska Journal on Advancing Justice, Peer Review Panelist (2024-present).
Graduate Fellow Miriam Kerler
Publication: The Right to Intimate Association in Prison, 100 Tul. L. Rev. (forthcoming 2026).
Service: Colorado Bar Association, Civil Rights Section, Board of Governors Liaison (2025-present).
