Jane Raley
Jane Raley (Photo: Jennifer Linzer)
Senior Staff Attorney Jane Raley represented hundreds of indigent felony defendants as an assistant Illinois appellate defender from 1982 until 1997, winning reversals in appellate courts throughout the state and in the Illinois Supreme Court.
From 1990 to 1994, Ms. Raley’s practice was devoted entirely to capital cases at the Illinois Appellate Defender’s Capital Resource Center, where, in addition to litigating cases herself, she recruited and trained attorneys to work on death penalty appeals in post-conviction and federal habeas proceedings.
Among Ms. Raley’s more significant cases have been those of Robert Kubat, whose death sentence was overturned in a federal habeas corpus proceeding, and Alejandro Hernandez, who was sentenced to death along with Rolando Cruz for a highly publicized DuPage County murder they did not commit.
Ms. Raley decided to devote her career to public interest law after interning at a public defender’s office while a student at Indiana University School of Law, from which she graduated in 1982.
