Ken has lived in Arizona since childhood and received his Bachelor of Arts in Psychology from Arizona State University, graduating magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa in 1988. Ken applied his degree in the fields of adolescent residential treatment and adult community mental health following college and prior to attending Emory University School of Law, from which he received his Juris Doctor in 1994. As a law student, Ken focused his externships in criminal law for both the prosecution and the defense, and upon graduation briefly assisted at a county prosecutor's office in Georgia. Upon returning to Arizona, Ken was selected as one of the three staff attorneys to serve the judges of the Superior Court of Arizona in the newly-created Capital Case Staff Attorney Program. As an attorney for the start-up program, Ken both educated and assisted judges in all phases of death penalty litigation, and co-authored the bench book for use by the judges in capital cases throughout the state. Among other indelible experiences, Ken worked closely with the judge who courageously sentenced Raymond Krone, who had previously been sentenced to death, to life imprisonment. (Mr. Krone was later celebrated as the 100th former death row inmate freed because of innocence since capital punishment was reinstated in 1976.) Moved by these early experiences, Ken answered what he felt to be a calling, and joined the Maricopa County Public Defender's Office as a trial attorney in 1997.
As a public defender, Ken gained broad experience defending a variety of criminal charges up to and including first degree murder and capital sentencing. He was selected to attend and is a graduate of both the Western Trial Advocacy Institue and the National Criminal Defense College, has served as trial college faculty, and has taught a variey of legal education topics including trial techniques, capital defense, and criminal competency. In addition to his work as a trial attorney at the Maricopa County Public Defender’s Office, Ken mentored dozens of attorneys in his capacity as Trial Group Counsel and supervised numerous other attorneys as Trial Group Supervisor. As a public defender, Ken investigated, supervised, and served as lead counsel for a large, class action scale litigation, which resulted in the dismissal of numerous felony cases due to inadequate jail conditions and delay in providing restoration to competency treatment to mentally ill defendants in the Maricopa County jail system. Before leaving public practice, the Arizona Public Defender Association honored Ken as the Outstanding Public Defender of the Year for Urban Counties in 2004.
In 2005, Ken joined the law firm of Kimerer & Derrick, P.C., and expanded his state court criminal defense practice to include the municipal and federal courts. While at Kimerer & Derrick, Ken defended a number of high profile cases with media attention, and upon his motion obtained the dismissal of a high profle matter, which he then successfully defended through the prosecution’s Petition for Certiorari to the United States Supreme Court.
In 2010, Ken established his own firm, Ken Huls - Criminal Defense Lawyer, as a sole practitioner, and continues to provide personalized criminal defense services while aggressively defending clients on a wide variety of criminal matters. In 2012, Ken was pleased to join the Law Offices of Matthew H. Green as Of Counsel, while maintaining his solo practice. Ken is admitted to practice before the Arizona Supreme Court and the United States District Court for the District of Arizona, and was honored in the initial listing of the Criminal Defense section of Arizona’s Finest Lawyers.
