Bess Stiffelman, Principal Attorney & Founder

Bess Stiffelman is lead attorney and founder of the Law Office of Bess Stiffelman. She started her private practice in May of 2020. Before moving to Los Angeles, Ms. Stiffelman was a public defender in both the Bronx and Brooklyn, representing individuals charged with misdemeanors and serious felonies. She attended law school at UCLA, where she participated in the school’s first criminal defense clinic, clerked for the Federal Defenders of the Southern District of California, and did post-conviction death penalty work with the California State Public Defender. Immediately after law school, she clerked for a federal judge in the Eastern District of New York.

Throughout her career, Stiffelman has aggressively litigated forensic evidence. She's published articles on complex mixtures of DNA and the probabilistic genotyping programs that crime labs are using to analyze those mixtures. 

As a public defender, she trained new and experienced lawyers on issues ranging from forensic science challenges, eyewitness identification, and approaches to sexual assault cases. She continues to train new and experienced defense attorneys on issues ranging from DNA evidence, the scope of the constitutional right to counsel, and the science of memory, among other topics. She lectures across the country to a broad range of audiences, including at the American Academy of Forensic Science annual conference. 

Before leaving New York, she represented Otis Boone in his second trial that led to his exoneration. In his first trial, Mr. Boone, who is black, was convicted of two knifepoint robberies based entirely on the testimony of two young white men. At the second trial, after conducting an extensive admissibility hearing, Stiffelman (with co-counsel Amy Swenson) presented expert testimony on the cross-race effect, among other factors that called the reliability of the identification into question. Boone was quickly acquitted. His case is cited in New York’s now mandatory model jury instruction on the cross-race effect. 

After the murder of George Floyd, Stiffelman represented protesters in Beverly Hills, and along with co-counsel Jeffrey Douglas, successfully argued that the ordinance was unconstitutional leading to the dismissal of all twenty-five cases. 

Ms. Stiffelman still devotes the majority of her work to the representation of indigent people accused of crimes, at trial and post-conviction. She currently represents people challenging homicide convictions based on the change in the law that previously permitted a conviction when someone did not intend to kill and was not the actual killer, through either felony murder or something called the natural and probable consequences theory of murder. (SB 1437.) She also represents former minors petitioning to recall their sentences if they were convicted when under the age of 18 and sentenced to the functional equivalent of life without the possibility of parole. She also consults for other attorneys facing complex forensic evidence, including DNA mixtures, and accepts limited private cases involving direct representation in trial and post-conviction matters.