Defender training center receives honor

The Atlanta-based Southern Defender Training Center has been given the Emil Gumpert Award and $50,000 for its work training lawyers to represent indigent defendants across the South.

The American College of Trial Lawyers, which presented the award, hopes the cash prize will help cement the training center as "a free-standing nonprofit organization that changes lives, improves society and elevates the standards of the administration of justice," Michael Cooper, the group's president, said in a Sept. 22 letter to the center's founder, Jon Rapping.