Bradley S. Bridge

Bradley S. Bridge is an Assistant Defender at the Defender Association of Philadelphia, Philadelphia. Mr. Bridge graduated from the University of Washington with a B.S. in Psychology in 1976 and from Harvard Law School with a J.D. in 1979. From 1979 to 1983 he worked in the State Appellate Defender in Chicago, Illinois representing indigent defendants in their appeals to the Illinois Appellate and Supreme Court and in federal habeas corpus cases in the Northern District of Illinois and the Seventh Circuit.

From 1983 to the present he’s worked with the Defender Association of Philadelphia. His responsibilities have included representation of indigent defendants in Municipal Court, the Court of Common Pleas (waivers and jury trials, homicide and non-homicide cases), Juvenile Court, Mental Health Court, and on appeal to the Pennsylvania Superior Court and Supreme Court, in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania and in the Third Circuit. Since 2005 he has been challenging the constitutionality of sentencing juveniles to life imprisonment without parole and was ultimately successful in that litigation. He was the co-chair of the Defender Association’s Juvenile Lifer Resentencing Project that handled 225 of the 325 Philadelphia juvenile lifer resentencings and he personally represented twenty juvenile lifers at their resentencings.

Other responsibilities include evaluation of cases that should be reopened in light of police corruption. He was involved in litigating issues arising out of the 39th District scandal as well as the Bureau of Narcotics Investigations and others. This has led to well over 2,300 cases being reopened and vacated from 1995 to the present.