Matthew Rubenstein serves as Director of the Capital Resource Counsel Project. The Capital Resource Counsel and the Federal Death Penalty Resource Counsel are the capital trial projects (commonly referred together as the “Trial Project”) of the Defender Services Office of the Administrative Office of the United States Courts. These projects work in close coordination to assist the federal courts, federal defenders, and appointed counsel in connection with matters related to the defense function in federal capital prosecutions. The Capital Resource Counsel attorneys are full-time salaried federal defender staff available to be appointed as co-counsel with a Federal Defender Organization or work on the case on “loan” to an FDO in a limited number of cases, and the FDPRC resource counsel are part-time contractors who do not appear as counsel of record in their role with the Trial Project.
Rubenstein has served as counsel in death penalty cases in state or federal courts in Louisiana, Georgia, Texas, Oregon, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Missouri, Massachusetts, and Vermont. He has conducted Morgan method life-qualification voir dire in over a dozen capital cases, provided case consultations to capital defense teams in jurisdictions across the United States, and lectures frequently on death penalty litigation, capital voir dire, and criminal justice issues. Prior to his Capital Resource Counsel position, Rubenstein was the founding director of the Oregon Capital Resource Center, a senior staff attorney at the Georgia Capital Defender, and counsel at the Louisiana Capital Assistance Center. He has also worked as a public defender at the Federal Public Defender for the District of Oregon and the Seattle-King County Defender Association. Rubenstein is an Affiliate Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychiatry at Oregon Health and Science University. Rubenstein lives in Portland, Oregon.