Melanie Kalmanson dedicates pro bono work to death penalty education
Melanie Kalmanson dedicates her pro bono work to death penalty education. (Photo courtesy of Quarles & Brady)
When the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its decision in the death penalty case Hurst v. Florida in January 2016, it effectively changed the course of Melanie Kalmanson’s career.
She had just started as an intern for Justice Barbara Pariente of the Florida Supreme Court, which held earlier in the case that the capital defendant’s sentence did not violate the Sixth Amendment right to a jury trial. The U.S. Supreme Court, however, reversed that ruling. It found Florida’s sentencing scheme, which allowed a judge rather than a jury to find the facts necessary to impose the death penalty, was unconstitutional.
“It was all of a sudden this trial by fire, learning, ‘What is the death penalty? How does it work? What does this decision mean?’” says Kalmanson, explaining that Hurst went back on remand to the Florida Supreme Court.
After graduating from Florida State University College of Law in May 2016, Kalmanson became a law clerk and then a staff attorney for Pariente. She was at the Florida Supreme Court in October 2016, when it reconsidered Hurst and held a jury’s recommended sentence of death must be unanimous. She was also there when hundreds of people on death row began requesting relief under the decision.
Kalmanson reviewed the briefing and records in these cases to assist the court’s justices in their decisions.
“That’s when my passion for these issues started, when I was seeing it in real life, living these cases, working on these cases, seeing how it affected Florida,” Kalmanson says. “The thing that really hit me was how little society knows about the reality of the death penalty.”
Since then, Kalmanson, an associate in Quarles & Brady’s Tampa, Florida, office, has educated the legal profession and the public on the death penalty. She writes law review articles and op-eds on constitutional issues involved in the capital sentencing process and teaches a course on Florida capital punishment to law students at her alma mater.
As a member of the ABA Death Penalty Representation Project, she works to improve the quality and availability of legal representation for defendants facing the death penalty. She also serves as pro bono counsel with her firm, representing individuals sentenced to death both at trial and in appeals.
“One thing about Melanie that I think sets her apart from so many people I’ve worked with over the course of my career is that she really lives a life of service,” says Dawn Caldart, the pro bono director at Quarles & Brady. “Not only does she lead by example in the work that she does, but she brings others along through mentoring them and encouraging them to get involved.”
Quarles & Brady gave Kalmanson its Gonring Pro Bono Award in 2023. (Photo courtesy of Melanie Kalmanson)‘Transformative experience’
Kalmanson, a native of central Florida, says her childhood prompted her penchant for pro bono.
She and her younger sister grew up in the middle of their parents’ high-conflict divorce. She remembers learning that a lack of financial resources can affect someone’s access to justice and the outcome of litigation. She later decided to become a lawyer, in part to help families in similar situations.
“I knew I couldn’t do family law all day, but I wanted it to be part of what I did,” says Kalmanson, who gained experience by working for family law practitioners in Orlando and Tallahassee during college. “I wanted to focus on pro bono and for it to be a large part of my practice.”
She graduated from high school early and started at Florida State University in 2010, shortly after she turned 17. She earned her bachelor’s degree in finance and international affairs in three years and went to law school planning to practice corporate law.
Kalmanson had never liked writing. But that all changed when she discovered academic writing and how valuable it could be to both the author and the audience.
In what she describes as a “transformative experience,” Kalmanson wrote her first law review article about how pro bono attorneys can help children in high-conflict custody battles. She used her parents’ divorce papers as an example.
“It was healing, and I learned more about what happened and how I could contribute to helping others,” says Kalmanson, who ended up writing four more articles in law school.
Teaching moments
Kalmanson’s scholarship shifted to the death penalty after her experience with the Florida Supreme Court.
She had gone into private practice, representing business clients in litigation and appeals at Akerman in Tallahassee and Jacksonville. In 2022, she joined Quarles & Brady, where she focuses on commercial litigation.
“I had all these ideas in mind from my clerkship,” says Kalmanson, who published four law review articles on capital sentencing in 2020 alone. “I remember saying to somebody, ‘If you knit blankets on the weekend, like, these articles are my blankets.’ This was what I did in my free time.”
Kalmanson also began writing op-eds on the problems with Florida’s death penalty laws and the constitutional crisis created by recent legislation in the state.
In 2023, Florida reduced the standard for imposing a death sentence to the lowest in the country, requiring that only eight of 12 jurors vote to recommend a sentence of death. Three years earlier, the Florida Supreme Court had reversed its decision requiring that juries unanimously agree to the death penalty.
Kalmanson has noted that Florida’s nonunanimity law erases important procedural safeguards and increases the risk of sentencing innocent people to death.
“I just feel a duty, with everything that I know, to explain what’s going on so that somebody who serves on a jury or as counsel on one of these cases understands the background and the issues that are in play,” Kalmanson says.
Mary Ziegler was one of Kalmanson’s law school professors who has since become a mentor and friend. She noticed right away that Kalmanson “really just loves the work.”
“She is obviously very successful at her firm, and then in her free time, she is the person who is writing law review articles,” says Ziegler, now a professor at the University of California at Davis School of Law. “Because of this incredible work ethic and because she is perceptive, I think the kinds of analyses she had about how death litigation worked were original and important, even though at most points she was not even 30.”
Pro bono and public service
For Kalmanson, writing often about capital punishment led to other opportunities, including being appointed to the ABA Death Penalty Representation Project and becoming an adjunct professor at FSU Law.
Kalmanson—who also annually contributes hundreds of hours of pro bono—is part of a Quarles & Brady team working on a capital defense case for a man who has been on Texas’ death row since the early 1990s.
In May, Kalmanson served as the lead author of an amicus brief filed with the Florida Supreme Court on behalf of the Florida Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers and 11 other groups in support of Michael James Jackson’s appeal of his death sentence. Jackson, who was convicted of two 2005 Jacksonville murders, had been awaiting resentencing after the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Hurst. But in 2023, after Florida’s new law went into effect, a jury recommended in an 8-4 vote that he be resentenced to death.
“I’ve built this expertise on issues with Florida capital sentencing, and it started as sort of a hobby,” Kalmanson says. “But I think going to Quarles, and with them supporting this pro bono work, it all came together. This amicus brief is a really good example of that.”
Kalmanson received the Outstanding Pro Bono Service by a Young Lawyer Award from the Thirteenth Judicial Circuit Pro Bono Committee and Volunteer Lawyers Program in April. In addition to her work on the death penalty, she has served as pro bono counsel in family law matters and child dependency cases. “I always tell people, ‘Don’t do pro bono because someone’s making you. Find what you’re passionate about, and then do pro bono in that area,’” says Kalmanson, who also received her firm’s Gonring Pro Bono Award in 2023.
Kalmanson lives in Jacksonville, and when she’s not working, writing or sleeping, she’s hanging out with her two rescue hound dogs, Wrigley and Turner, named after Major League Baseball stadiums.
This story was originally published in the October/November 2024 issue of the ABA Journal under the headline: “Personal Capital: Melanie Kalmanson dedicates pro bono work to death penalty education.”
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