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Olinda Moyd
The Public Defender Service for the District of Columbia
Chief, Parole Division
Washington DC
Olinda Moyd is chief attorney of the Parole Division at the D.C. Public Defender Service. She has been an attorney at PDS since January 1990, initially assigned to the Prisoner’s Rights Division. In this capacity, Olinda represented D.C. residents imprisoned in Lorton, Virginia, at both administrative hearings and in litigation before local and federal courts challenging 8th Amendment and other constitutional violations. Since 1998, Olinda has been assigned to the Parole Division, and, in August 2003, she was appointed division chief. Under her leadership, this team of attorneys provides quality legal representation to District residents facing imprisonment through revocation of their parole or supervised release by the U.S. Parole Commission. During her experience in representing prisoners and parolees, Olinda has become keenly aware of the overwhelming number of poor people and people of color who flood the criminal justice system: either in prison or jail, or those subjected to restrictive supervision conditions while in the community.
Olinda previously worked in the Legal Department of the NAACP, Inc Fund and then at the ACLU National Prison Project. She has dedicated her legal career to representing the most under-represented group of persons in our society – those who are incarcerated and those persons facing loss of liberty. She has also served as a visiting professor at the University of the District of Columbia David A. Clarke School of Law, where she co-taught the Prisoner’s Rights and Advocacy Clinic. Olinda also served as the coordinator of Legal Services, was a board member and member of the scholarship committee at Our Place, DC. She continues to serve as a board member of the Pauline Sullivan Scholarship Fund, which provides educational scholarships to D.C. women in BOP facilities. Olinda also volunteers in Maryland institutions where she has taught for several years, and she currently teaches parole education and legal writing to men who are serving life sentences at the Jessup Correctional Institution. She founded the Maryland Prison Renewal Committee, a community-based prisoner support and advocacy group, which is now the Maryland Restorative Justice Initiative.
She is a 1984 graduate of The Ohio State University, Moritz College of Law. Olinda is a member of the District of Columbia, U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, and United States Supreme Court bars.