The bookshelf is bare, the computer is gone and only tacks remain on the walls where picture frames hung just days earlier. All that remains in the office is furniture, the telephone and a short stack of documents.

After three years, it is Lisette McCormick's last day on the job as executive director of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court's Committee on Racial and Gender Bias in the Justice System.

Just days earlier, the committee completed a 554-page report that included more than 170 recommendations to district attorneys, public defenders and all three branches of state government on methods aimed at improving equity in the state's justice system. The report can be viewed at www.courts.state.pa.us.

The court commissioned the 10-member committee comprised of legal minds from across the Commonwealth in late 1999 to undertake the study, an initiative similar to previous studies on bias in 37 other states.

The committee hired McCormick to direct the $750,000 research project funded by the court's budget and a grant from the Pennsylvania Commission on Crime and Delinquency.

"I have always been someone who believes strongly in equality," McCormick said. "From the time I was young, I have always been someone who stands up for the person being picked on. I think that developed philosophically into something I wanted to do with my life."

Committee members thought her experience and enthusiasm made McCormick the ideal person for the job.

"Lisette brought a life-long commitment to racial and gender justice issues," said Nicholas Cafardi, committee chairman and dean of the Duquesne University School of Law. "She had a lot of energy, an extensive background in equity."

McCormick worked with the committee to review topics similar task forces had investigated in other states; they compared those reports with their sense of what needed to be studied in Pennsylvania. Fifteen topics -- including capital punishment, indigent defense, jury selection, sentencing disparities and family law -- were investigated.

The next step was to set up smaller work groups to explore each issue. The committee sought racial and gender diversity for each work group and recruited more than 130 attorneys, judges, academics and community members.

"I assisted each of the work groups with the process of picking out what they were going to study and how they would acquire the information," McCormick said. "In the process of doing that, I had to find statisticians and other people who could help conduct original research for each group and then also locate sources of information that already existed on each particular topic."

The committee also conducted public hearings statewide and acquired anecdotal information.

The work groups also used surveys, focus group discussions, information gathered by other task forces, existing statistical studies and statewide studies commissioned by the committee. All of the recommendations were then reviewed by the committee prior to the publication of the final report.

Cafardi praised McCormick's work.

"She did a spectacular job," he said. "The report is excellent and she shepherded the project through the entire process. It took a lot of organization and persuasion to convince people to meet deadlines. That's tough to do with volunteers."

Looking back, McCormick said her knowledge of the justice system from the vantage point of females and minorities was an important asset in assisting the work groups. She said she had gained an understanding of how minorities are treated in the criminal justice system by working in the Pittsburgh Public Defender's Office.

"The treatment wasn't obvious; it was subtle," McCormick said. "I knew that white juries reacted fairly negative to my minority clients, and because of that, I rarely put them on the stand to testify. Far fewer white clients were held in jail before the trial started, and most of the defendants who were brought into the courtroom from jail in handcuffs or shackles were black."

At times, she said she had as many as four trials a day with essentially no support.

"I left after two years," she said. "I couldn't stay in a job like that. The stress and the pressure were just overwhelming, and I couldn't continue to represent people in an inadequate way."

Before serving as a public defender, McCormick completed her undergraduate degree at Penn State and interned for the National Urban Coalition, an advocacy group that represents minority interests in the areas of employment, education, housing and civil rights legislation.

She then attended Duquesne University School of Law with the intention of working at the Neighborhood Legal Services Association (NSLA) representing indigent citizens in court. She worked for the association part time for two years during law school.

Upon graduation, she accepted a full-time job with NSLA but was laid off four times within a year before deciding to move on. During that year, she represented poor people, the majority of whom were minorities, in the civil justice system.

After leaving NSLA, McCormick spent the next two years as a public defender before becoming assistant counsel for the Department of Environmental Resources (now the Department of Environmental Protection).

She served as a courtroom clerk part-time during maternity leave and then entered private practice for nine years, where she represented plaintiffs in employment law and civil rights litigation. In May 2000, she was hired to direct the committee.

"This position has been an outgrowth of my prior experiences," McCormick said. "Particularly, it allowed me to study and address inequities in the judicial system that my clients have experienced, on a broader level rather than on a case-by-case basis."

She hopes to be involved in the implementation process of the committee's recommendations but said she also is considering teaching an undergraduate course related to the report's findings. There also is a chance she might return to private practice.

One thing is clear: for McCormick, the fight for equity will continue.

She pauses briefly to glance out the window of her nineteenth floor office in downtown Pittsburgh, absorbing the backdrop of the Allegheny River one last time before walking out into a crisp, but sunny, day.