Frank Goldsmith

Frank Goldsmith is a local champion who has worked tirelessly to create a more just and equitable place where everyone can thrive. Frank practiced law for over 50 years, mostly in the fields of civil rights, employment discrimination, and criminal defense. He continues to work as a mediator and arbitrator. He was inducted as a Fellow in the American College of Trial Lawyers and has been listed in “Best Lawyers in America” and “Super Lawyers” for many years. At the age of 31, Frank argued and won a case in the United States Supreme Court as court-appointed counsel for a prison inmate. In 2008, he won the exoneration of a man who spent nearly 15 years on Death Row for two murders he did not commit, and in 2015, he obtained the exoneration of another client who had been wrongly convicted of murder when DNA evidence of the client’s innocence was covered up by police.

For seven years Frank represented detainees at the U.S. Naval Base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. In addition to his legal practice, Frank taught as an adjunct professor of trial advocacy at Duke University and has lectured and written on civil rights law and other subjects at various legal education programs. A former president of the ACLU of North Carolina and chair of its Legal Committee for many years, he received that organization’s Frank Porter Graham Award and was later honored with its International Human Rights Award for his work in representing Guantánamo detainees. He has also served as co-chair of the North Carolina Commission of Inquiry on Torture and as a member of the board of Carolina Jews for Justice, and he currently is a member of the board of the Racial Justice Coalition of Asheville. He is especially proud to have served two terms on the Board of Directors of the North Carolina Justice Center. Frank is a U.S. Army veteran of the Vietnam Era.