Katie is an experienced civil rights litigator with a successful record in state and federal trial and appellate courts, including on novel constitutional claims.

Katie came to ELG in 2025 from the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice. While in the Civil Rights Division, Katie served as lead attorney in the negotiations for United States v. Minneapolis, which alleged a pattern or practice of unconstitutional conduct by the Minneapolis Police Department in the wake of George Floyd’s murder. In that case and others, Katie successfully developed first-of-their-kind findings for the Department on unlawful retaliation against journalists; law enforcement officers’ duty to intervene against excessive force; and law enforcement agencies that operate under unconstitutional financial conflicts of interest. Katie also played a lead role in crafting the Department’s 2024 Dear Colleague Letter on Fines and Fees, which set forth the constitutional requirements for imposing and collecting monetary payments in the criminal system for state and local courts. Before joining the Department of Justice, Katie was a Senior Attorney at Civil Rights Corps, where she led efforts to challenge systemic prosecutorial misconduct, including a successful lawsuit against Leon Cannizzaro and others in the New Orleans District Attorney’s Office for using fake subpoenas and unlawfully jailing witnesses and victims of crime. Earlier in her career, Katie was a death penalty litigator at the Southern Center for Human Rights, where she was part of the team that won Foster v. Chatman in the U.S. Supreme Court, which addressed race discrimination in jury selection. Katie’s work has been featured in The New Yorker, The New York Times, and other leading publications.

Katie is a graduate of Yale Law School, where she won the Chubb Prize for Excellence in Legal Draftsmanship, and was a Harry S. Truman scholar. She clerked for Hon. Myron H. Thompson in the Middle District of Alabama.