The Rittenhouse Trial: Implicit Bias in Plain View

Yessenia Manzo is a King County Deputy Prosecuting Attorney, working in the General Crimes Unit as well as a Co-Lead Hate Crimes Prosecutor. Yessenia was born in Guadalajara, Jalisco, Mexico and raised in a migrant community on the Yakama reservation. She received her B.S. in Psychology from Whitman College, M.S. in Mental Health Counseling from Central Washington University, and J.D. from Seattle University Law School.

Prior to starting a legal career, she worked for 10 years as a mental health practitioner, specializing in serving the Spanish-speaking immigrant community as well as the criminal justice population.

Judge McKee was appointed to the King County Superior Court bench on August 13, 2018 by Governor Jay Inslee. She assumed the position previously occupied by the Hon. Lori K. Smith, who was appointed to Division I of the Washington State Court of Appeals.

Judge McKee received her B.A. degree from Oberlin College and received her law degree from Cornell Law School. Prior to law school, Judge McKee was a VISTA Volunteer in Chicago, IL and a job developer at the National Institute for People with Disabilities in New York, NY. During law school, Judge McKee received the opportunity to serve displaced persons at the American Rescue Committee in Mostar, Bosnia and incarcerated mothers at Legal Services for Prisoners with Children in San Francisco, CA.

Upon graduating from law school, Judge McKee joined The Defender Association as a staff attorney for 12 years. For the next three and a half years, she supervised the Investigation and Misdemeanor Units before being appointed the Interim Managing Attorney of The Defender Association Division.

Ben Goldsmith is managing attorney at The Defender Association Division, where he supervises attorneys and support staff, provides case strategy reviews, oversees office management, monitors caseloads, and handles the many other duties that come with running a large legal division.

Ben has been a public defender since he joined The Defender Association, then a nonprofit public defense firm, in 2006, working first as a staff attorney, then as the assistant felony supervisor, and, most recently, as the division's felony supervisor. He became managing attorney at the division in November 2019.

Before earning his law degree from the University of Michigan, Ben worked as a staff investigator for the Public Defender Service in Washington, D.C. He was also an E. Barrett Prettyman Fellow at Georgetown Law, has co-taught a forensics course at Seattle University School of Law, and has presented numerous local and national CLEs. He is recognized for his work on the role of race in jury selection and the misuse of DNA in criminal trials.

Bernice Bouie Donald is a federal judge for the United States Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit. She first joined the court in 2011 after a nomination from President Barack Obama. Prior to her service on the Sixth Circuit, she served on the United States District Court for the Western District of Tennessee.

Donald graduated from Memphis State University with both her bachelor's and J.D. degrees in 1974 and 1979, respectively.