Gideon's Promise

Gideon’s Promise, formerly the Southern Public Defender Training Center, is a non-profit organization founded in 2007. The organization is based in Atlanta, Georgia, and provides ongoing continuing education programs for law school students, new public defenders, senior public defenders, law school clinicians and chief public defenders. The organization partners with public defender offices around the country to implement best practices in public defense. Gideon’s Promise is dedicated to transforming the culture of the criminal justice system.

Their mission is to transform the criminal justice system by building a movement of public defenders who provide equal justice for marginalized communities. Public defenders are necessary if we are to realize equal justice in America.

Gideon’s Promise sees public defenders as the primary engine of change in the criminal justice system and thus they are the primary focus of our efforts. They seek to transform the culture of offices in the belief that it will affect both the larger criminal justice system and communities. The organization partners with public defender offices around the country to implement best practices while driving systemic reform.

Jonathan Rapping, president and founder of Gideon’s Promise, is a nationally renowned criminal justice innovator and 2014 MacArthur Foundation “Genius” Fellow, who moved from Washington, D.C. to Atlanta, because he found the injustice within our criminal justice system – particularly in the South – to be unacceptable.

In 2007, Rapping founded Gideon’s Promise and began an initiative to change the public defense landscape across America by grooming a generation of public defenders – many of whom are often so overwhelmed by crushing caseloads that they are unable to provide their clients the representation the Constitution demands – to rise up and fight against the injustice within our justice system.

In his quest to train and equip public defenders with the resources necessary to ensure all citizens receive their Constitutional right of “equal justice for all,” Rapping and his organization have become symbols of a new civil rights movement.

Professor Rapping received a J.D. from the George Washington University School of Law, a M.P.A. from the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University, and a B.A. from the University of Chicago. He is currently a Professor at Atlanta’s John Marshall Law School.

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