Christopher M. Johnson

Christopher M. Johnson is the Chief Appellate Defender for the state of New Hampshire. He has also served as a professor at UNH Law and a staff attorney at the Southern Center for Human Rights in Atlanta, Ga. There, Johnson represented persons facing the death penalty in Georgia and Alabama.

Johnson is a member of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers and the New Hampshire Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers. He has participated in the trial of capital cases in Georgia and Alabama; and has argued cases in the United States Courts of Appeals for the First and Eleventh Circuits, as well as in the appellate courts of Georgia, Alabama and New Hampshire.

In 2010, Johnson spent a semester on a Fulbright Fellowship in the law faculty at the University of Turku, in Finland. While there, he taught a course, conducted research on the Finnish criminal justice system, and gave lectures at the Supreme Court of Finland and at the University of Lapland.

Johnson is the author of several articles focusing on issues relating to the ethics and practice of criminal defense. Most recently, he has written an article published in the Mississippi Law Journal entitled Not for Love or Money: Appointing a Public Defender to Litigate a Claim of Ineffective Assistance of Counsel Involving Another Public Defender, 78 Mississippi L.J. 69 (2008).

He is also the author of The Law’s Hard Choice: Self-Inflicted Injustice or Lawyer-Inflicted Indignity, 93 Kentucky L.J. 39 (2004-2005) and The New Hampshire Appellate Defender Program: An Apprenticeship Clinic, 75 Mississippi L.J. 825 (2006).