Jodie has been a public defender in North Carolina and a federal defender in Baltimore. She represented her first capital client forty-three years ago. For the past 33 years she has been in private practice in Indianapolis handling death penalty cases  - at times as a trial defender, a mentor or expert witness in post-conviction proceedings or, as a capital mitigation specialist or jury consultant in Colorado, Indiana, Kentucky, Michigan, Oklahoma and Ohio. From 2018-2019 she served as lead counsel or the mitigation specialist for three Indiana death row prisoners who are now serving either a life sentence or a term of years with parole eligibility. Her testimony as an expert witness on ineffective assistance of capital trial counsel resulted in the Seventh Circuit’s grant of a penalty phase retrial.

From 1998 – 2009, in addition to lawyering, Jodie was the Training Director for the Indiana Public Defender Council. Jodie has served as a faculty member for the National Criminal Defense College (NCDC) summer Trial Practice Institutes since 1981, for NCDC’s advanced programs in Cross Examination, Theories and Themes of Persuasion, Voir Dire and Closing Argument; and capital trial advocacy programs including Life in the Balance, the Darrow Death Penalty College, and the Bryan Schechmeister Death Penalty College in San Jose, California. Jodie has taught thousands of criminal defense lawyers, as well as social workers and mitigation specialists in twenty-seven states. She was part of a team of defenders invited to Moscow to facilitate the Russians’ transition from three judge panels to juries. Jodie was a “Super Lawyer” for seven years. Writing and storytelling are special passions. In 2014 Jodie earned an MFA in Creative Writing from Butler University.

In her spare time Jodie writes poetry, jogs, kayaks, dances, hikes and reads. Her grandson, Sovann, was born in Cambodia on the Fall Equinox and now lives with her and his parents, disrupting their sleep cycles with exquisite precision and yet his smile, on waking, is poetry itself.