Visiting International Research Fellow,
donnamarie.mcnamara8@mail.dcu.ieDonna-Marie McNamara, has been appointed a Burton Blatt Institute (BBI) Visiting Fellow during Fall 2016. Donna is currently a PhD candidate from Dublin City University. She received the DCU School of Law and Government PhD Scholarship to conduct doctoral research which considers the rights of suspects with cognitive disabilities in the Irish criminal justice system. Her research looks at using the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities as a tool of law reform within the pre-trial criminal justice process and identifying obstacles in the criminal process for suspects with cognitive disabilities in light of the convention on the rights of persons with disabilities. She is particularly interested in how to support suspects with intellectual disabilities and mental health illnesses during the arrest, police interrogation and pre-trial detention phases. During her time in Syracuse she anticipates looking at the reasonable accommodation provision and examining the relationship in her work.
Donna’s interests lie broadly in the areas of disability law, mental health law, children’s rights, human rights law and criminal justice. She also has a particular interest in the rights of children living in alternative forms of care and examined this as part of her LLM thesis, entitled ‘Child Participation in Irish Foster Care Proceedings: Assessing Ireland’s Compliance with Article 12 UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.’
Donna graduated with a BCL (Law and Society) degree from Dublin City University in 2013 and achieved an LLM (First Class Honours) from University College Cork in 2014. She was a recipient of the UCC Faculty of Law Scholarship and worked as a legal research assistant to Dr Mary Donnelly.
Conferences
Donna-Marie McNamara, The Detention of Mentally Disordered Offenders in Ireland: Evolution and Contemporary Challenges, European Society of Criminology Conference, 02-September 2015 – 05 September 2015, Porto
Donna-Marie McNamara, The Role of the Mental Health (Criminal Law) Review Board in Ireland, 7th Annual Postgraduate Criminology Conference, 31 August 2015, Queens University Belfast
Research
Copy-Editor, The Routledge Handbook of Irish Criminology, March – April 2015
(Dr Yvonne Marie Daly, Dr Deirdre Healy, Dr Claire Hamilton, Dr Michelle Butler (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Irish Criminology, Routledge, 2015)