News & Commentary written by Matthew Segal

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Matthew Segal

Senior Staff Attorney

ÀÏ°ÄÃÅ¿ª½±½á¹û State Supreme Court Initiative

Bio

Matt is a senior staff attorney with the ÀÏ°ÄÃÅ¿ª½±½á¹û’s State Supreme Court Initiative, after serving for 11 years as Legal Director of the ÀÏ°ÄÃÅ¿ª½±½á¹û of Massachusetts. At ÀÏ°ÄÃÅ¿ª½±½á¹ûM, Matt led a team of lawyers and legal professionals in advocacy across a range of issues in both state and federal courts. Matt has argued cases that secured the release of more than 5,000 people from state prisons and jails during the COVID pandemic; temporarily halted President Trump’s first travel ban; recognized state constitutional protection for cell phone location data; and dismissed more than 61,000 wrongful drug charges in the Sonja Farak and Annie Dookhan lab scandals which was the single largest of wrongful convictions in U.S. history.

Before coming to the ÀÏ°ÄÃÅ¿ª½±½á¹û, Matt spent four years as an assistant federal defender in North Carolina, where he argued cases in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, including a case that resulted in the reversal of numerous wrongful convictions and sentences. Matt is a graduate of Brandeis University and Yale Law School, a member of the American Law Institute, and a former clerk to Judge Raymond Fisher of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.