Who we are

Sandra Babcock is a Clinical Professor at Cornell Law School, where she is the Faculty Director and founder of the Cornell Center on the Death Penalty Worldwide (CCDPW). Over the last thirty years she has helped defend hundreds of men and women facing execution around the world. She began her career as a staff attorney at the Texas Resource Center, where she defended persons facing execution in post-conviction proceedings for four years. Following a five-year stint as a public defender in Minneapolis, she served for six years as the founding director of the Mexican Capital Legal Assistance Program, a project funded by the Government of Mexico to defend Mexican nationals facing the death penalty in the U.S. In that capacity she provided litigation support to attorneys around the country, defended Mexican nationals facing execution, and represented Mexico before the International Court of Justice in Avena and Other Mexican Nationals. In 2006, she became a Clinical Professor at Northwestern Law School, where she spearheaded a ten-year project in Malawi that ultimately resulted in the release of over 250 prisoners, 150 of whom were formerly sentenced to death. She moved to Cornell Law in 2014, where she founded the Cornell Center on the Death Penalty Worldwide. In 2018, together with her colleagues at CDPW, she launched the Alice Project, a global movement to end extreme sentencing of women and gender non-conforming individuals. Her clinic currently represents women facing the death penalty in the United States, Malawi, and Tanzania. She has authored numerous articles, book chapters and reports on the application of the death penalty under international law. She teaches classes in international human rights, gender rights, and the death penalty. In September 2021, she received the American Bar Association’s John Paul Stevens Guiding Hand of Counsel Award, given to one capital defender every two years whose work has improved the legal representation of persons facing the death penalty and contributed to systemic reform.

Chelsea L. Halstead is the Director of the Cornell Center on the Death Penalty Worldwide, where she oversees the center’s operations, communications, strategy, advocacy, and fundraising efforts. Prior to her appointment at CCDPW, Chelsea co-founded the Colibrí Center for Human Rights in Tucson, Arizona. Colibrí combines forensic science with human rights advocacy to identify the remains of people who have died in their attempt to cross the U.S.-Mexico border while calling attention to failed immigration policy. Chelsea helped design the organization’s innovative DNA program, which has facilitated the identification of over 200 previously unidentified human remains. Her work has been recognized in USA Today, The Guardian, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Al Jazeera, and other media. Chelsea holds a B.A. in Geography from the University of Arizona and an M.P.A. from Cornell University.

Bahar Mirhosseni is a human rights and criminal defense lawyer and the Director of Legal Advocacy at the Cornell Center on the Death Penalty Worldwide. For the last three years, she has co-taught the Pretrial Justice Clinic at UCLA School of Law. She has collaborated with a range of human rights organizations including the Georgia Capital Defender Office, the Southern Africa Litigation Centre, and Addameer Prisoner Support and Human Rights Association. She serves on both the Racial Justice Committee and the Education Committee of the National Association for Public Defense. As Program Director, at The International Legal Foundation, she worked with lawyers in the MENA region on access to justice, human rights, and high quality public defense. 

She has spent over fifteen years in indigent defense, in New York and California, first through The Legal Aid Society of New York, as a public defender in Brooklyn and as a Criminal-Immigration Staff Attorney representing non-citizens, conducting select post-conviction advocacy, and advising criminal defense attorneys across New York City. As a Legal Specialist for the American Bar Association Rule of Law Initiative, she oversaw a legal education program for Palestinian law students across the West Bank. She has mentored/trained hundreds of law students and lawyers in Palestine, Tunisia, Afghanistan and the United States. She is a Senior Advocate with The Color of Excellence.

Mirhosseni received her B.A. degree with Honors from the University of California at Berkeley and in 2007, she earned her J.D. from the City University of New York School of Law. As a law student, she was awarded the Haywood Burns Fellowship in Civil and Human Rights from CUNY Law School and a Millspaugh-Catlin Fellowship in Human Rights as an Ella Baker intern at the Center for Constitutional Rights. Hedgebrook Writing Residency awarded her the Women Authoring Change Fellowship in honor of slain Libyan human rights advocate Salwa Bugaighis.