Samuel “Sam” Spital is Associate Director-Counsel of the Legal Defense Fund (LDF).
As one of two Associate Directors-Counsel, Sam will work in partnership with LDF’s eighth President and Director-Counsel Janai Nelson, Associate Director Counsel Todd A. Cox, and LDF’s senior leadership team to set and execute the strategic direction of the organization’s programmatic and internal work.
Sam has been a member of LDF’s senior leadership team since 2017 when he joined the organization as Director of Litigation, and in 2018 he was named General Counsel.
An expert and nimble litigant with more than two decades of experience in civil rights law, Sam brings a wealth of experience to his new role. As General Counsel, Sam supervised in-house legal issues for LDF and provided legal counsel to LDF’s other senior leaders. As Director of Litigation, he oversaw LDF’s racial justice litigation docket across the organization’s four pillars of education, economic justice, criminal justice, and political participation while supervising LDF’s appellate litigation in the Supreme Court, federal circuit courts, and state supreme courts. Since joining LDF, he drafted or contributed to dozens of Supreme Court briefs and maintained an active docket of high profile and high impact criminal justice, voting rights, and education related cases.
He was lead counsel in NAACP v. USPS, in which LDF and our co-counsel Public Citizen secured a historic injunction requiring that the United States Postal Service implement “Extraordinary Measures” to ensure the timely delivery of ballots in advance of the 2020 election. In LDF v. Trump, Sam was a key member of the LDF team that successfully challenged a Presidential Commission on “Election Integrity,” which the first Trump Administration created to support the President’s false claims about widespread voter fraud. In Stout v. Jefferson County Board of Education, Sam was among the LDF attorneys who persuaded the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals that a small city in Jefferson County, Alabama was motivated by racial discrimination in seeking to secede from the racially diverse county school district.
A recognized expert in death penalty litigation, Sam represented LDF-client Duane Buck in Buck v. Davis, in which the Supreme Court held that Mr. Buck’s constitutional rights were violated when his appointed trial counsel presented an “expert” who falsely testified that Mr. Buck was more likely to commit future acts of criminal violence because he is Black. Sam also successfully represented two men sentenced to death as teenagers in Alabama and Florida, in which the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals overturned their sentences because their trial attorneys failed to investigate compelling mitigating evidence.
Outside of the courtroom, Sam has testified before Congress about the need for new voting rights legislation, and he is a frequent participant on panels at conferences for legal academics and practitioners. He is an expert on the Supreme Court and is often called upon to provide analysis about pending and prospective cases, as well as matters relating to the appropriate role of the Court in our constitutional democracy. Sam’s commentary on civil rights issues, capital punishment, and Supreme Court litigation has appeared in law reviews and general publications, including The George Washington Law Review (On the Docket), The National Law Journal, The Northern Illinois Law Review, The Hill, cnn.com, and Salon. He is also regularly interviewed about those subjects, including by NPR, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Bloomberg News, Newsweek, USA Today, and Reuters Legal.
Prior to joining LDF, Sam practiced for over a decade at two national law firms, where he was co-counsel with LDF in Northwest Austin Municipal Utility District No. 1 v. Holder and Shelby County v. Holder, representing Black voters who intervened to defend the constitutionality of the Voting Rights Act. Sam’s extensive experience in civil rights litigation also includes representing the “Angola 3,” three men who served between 25 and 40 years in solitary confinement conditions at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola for crimes they did not commit.
Between 2012 and 2017, Sam was a Lecturer-in-Law at Columbia Law School, where he taught a course on death penalty and prison litigation. He is a 2000 graduate of Harvard College and a 2004 graduate of Harvard Law School. After graduating law school, Sam clerked for The Honorable Harry T. Edwards of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, and for The Honorable John Paul Stevens of the United States Supreme Court.
