About Mike
Mike Apsan-Orgera is a Law Clerk at the Jeffrey Deskovic Foundation for Justice, where he drafts state post-conviction and federal habeas petitions for clients asserting wrongful conviction and factual innocence and investigates trial and appellate records to identify constitutional violations.
He came to that work after serving as a Law Graduate Fellow at Americans for Immigrant Justice(AI Justice) in Miami, where he directed a legal team building a new initiative to secure constitutional relief for indigent detained noncitizens and developed model habeas petitions for pro se litigants and pro bono counsel. Earlier, as a Summer Fellow in the Criminal Justice Clinic at Yale Law School’s Jerome N. Frank Legal Services Organization, he drafted memoranda on federal compassionate release and resentencing and investigated unconstitutional conditions of confinement for a client on Alabama’s death row.
Mike earned his LL.M. with a specialization in Criminal Justice from UCLA School of Law, graduating third in a class of 214, and received a distinction from the Judge Rand Schrader Pro Bono Program for his work in the El Centro Legal Reentry and Veterans Legal Clinics. He obtained his J.D., summa cum laude, from Nova Southeastern University (NSU) Shepard Broad College of Law, where he served on the Nova Law Review and was recognized through the Van Horn Law Group Pro Bono Honor Program for his work in NSU’s disability law clinic.
His practical experience also includes an externship in the Noncapital Habeas Unit at the Los Angeles Office of the Federal Public Defender and extensive clinical work in prisoners’ rights, veterans’ law, and disability advocacy. He has clerked for several law firms and corporations, including Reid Levin, PLLC, Ramey Litigation Group APC, Apsan Law Offices, Philips Corp., and Avaya, Inc.
Mike’s scholarly interests lie at the intersection of wrongful convictions, bail reform, and preventive detention. His research examines non-DNA exonerations of people who pleaded guilty to crimes they did not commit, and how modern bail reform can erode the constitutional presumption of innocence by imposing pretrial detention on individuals who are legally—and sometimes factually—innocent.