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Ilona Picou, Executive Director

Ilona Picou is a graduate of the Washington College of Law in Washington D.C. She began her career as a juvenile defender in clinic at WCL and through internships with the Public Defender Service for the District of Columbia and the Office of the Public Defender for the State of Maryland. She was a juvenile defender in Baltimore City, MD specializing in the representation of incarcerated youth from pre-disposition to post-disposition in the Detention Response Unit.

Ilona worked as part of the national indigent defense movement directly out of law school with the American Bar Association’s Juvenile Justice Center. She has been working with the National Juvenile Defender Center as a expert on assessments of access to counsel and quality of representation in delinquency proceedings. She also worked with the Louisiana Indigent Defender Board in 1999 to assess Louisiana’s juvenile indigent defense delivery system. Ilona served as the Senior Fellow of the Southern Juvenile Defender Center and Director of the Mid-Atlantic Juvenile Defender Center where she authored two state based assessments in Virginia and Maryland.

Ilona served as part of a legal team post-Katrina who assisted the Orleans Parish Juvenile Court and the Louisiana Office of Juvenile Justice (OJJ) in representing, locating and reuniting youth evacuated to OJJ facilities after being trapped by floodwaters in the Orleans Parish Prison.

Her work with the Orleans Parish Juvenile Court lead to her being commissioned to serve as the Recovery Coordinator for the court where she worked for three years to implement system and court reform implementing the Annie E. Casey Foundation Juvenile Detention Alternative Initiatives (JDAI) in partnership with a broad base stakeholder and citizen collaborative.

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