Tell Us YOUR Story!
The best part about fundraising is the people we meet and the stories they tell us about why they support our mission. We’re so grateful for each and every one (donors AND stories!), and we want to hear your stories. Our new friend Gretchen Eikermann sent us a donation last week and told us this story:
The reason I was using the website last night was to assist my niece, an 8th grader, with her homework. The homework was essentially to determine whether the narrator of A Telltale Heart would qualify for the insanity defense in any of its iterations for a mock trial this Friday. Although I specialized in defending persons suffering from mental illness and developmental disability as a Public Defender, I would have been hard pressed completing this assignment following her teacher’s instructions to use the inscrutable search results Findlaw produces as my reference. My niece called me utterly confused and panicked trying to figure out what the heck M’Naughten and Durham were. I sent her the link to your site’s Insanity Defense page and by the time I called her back to “explain the law” she had pretty much figured it out herself after reading your site’s clear and accessible, but not “dumbed down” information on the law of insanity defense. She is no longer panicked but excited for her mock trial. I was excited that she was excited about the law.
We sit in a literal tower on a college campus in a little city in Upstate New York. Over 40 million people use our resources each year. In the typical year, we only hear from a few hundred of you (most donors don’t leave comments of any sort.) So, for every great story we hear, we’re sure there are lots we don’t. So we thought we’d ask.
Please consider taking a minute to email us your best story about how you’ve used the materials at www.law.cornell.edu or www.oyez.org by clicking here.
Or, if you’ve been meaning to support our fundraising efforts anyhow, you can click on the button below and leave your story in the Comment box on the donation page.
Thanks,
Tom, Sara, Craig, Val, Nic, Sylvia, Jim, Ayham & Neli
