Everyday Injustice

Matt Toporowski is running for DA in Albany, NY. A current defense attorney and former prosecutor, he is challenging the incumbent DA in the Democratic primary, scheduled for June 23. Albany County DA David Soares headed the state's DA Association last year and has led a pushback against some of the enacted reforms by the state legislature - filing a lawsuit against a prosecutorial misconduct comm...

Kim Gardner was elected chief prosecutor in St. Louis in 2016. Since then she has been taking on the system - the first black circuit attorney in St. Louis, in January she filed a federal civil rights lawsuit that accuses the city, the city's police union and others of a coordinated and racist conspiracy aimed at forcing her out of office. The lawsuit among other things alleges the city's police u...

Bexar County Criminal District Attorney Joe Gonzales took office in January of 2019 on a pledge to reform the office, restore public confidence, and make the office more accountable to the voters. Since being elected he has pushed for reforms in the criminal justice system and looking at ways to reduce the jail population - before and since the COVID crisis. In the fall of 2019, he sent a letter t...

In 1981, Jodie Sinclair was a journalist visiting the Angola Prison to do a story on the newly reinstated death penalty. She met Billy Sinclair, who had been sentenced to death for his role in a robbery gone wrong, had his sentence reduced to life and eventually earning parole in 2006. She fell in love and married him in the early 80s, beginning a 25 year fight for his freedom. Joining her on the...

Jacquelyn Esser is running for DA in Honululu, Hawaii. She was born and raised in Phoenix, Arizona and moved to Hawaiʻi in 2000 to attend the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. She graduated in 2004 with a bachelor’s degree in Business Management and earned a law degree at the University of Hawai‘i William S. Richardson School of Law. She became a public defender and now is a candidate for prosecutor...

Pamela Price ran for DA in Alameda County, home of Oakland in California but was unsuccessful in 2018 in knocking off incumbent Nancy O'Mally. Price, a civil rights attorney, ran on a platform that vowed to enact a series of criminal justice reforms if she defeated the incumbent who is a traditional tough on crime prosecutor. In the podcast she talks about the problems of police accountability tha...

Arlington Virginia Commonwealth Attorney Parisa Dehghani-Tafti was elected overwhelmingly in November after stunning incumbent prosecutor Theo Stamos by a 52-48 margin. She ran a progressive campaign centered on criminal justice reform during a contentious and expensive primary. Her focus on reform has turned her into a target for reactionary criticis. As the Washington Post wrote recently: "Ms. D...

Anand Jon Alexander was a rising star in the fashion industry in 2007 when he was arrested and ultimately convicted of one count of rape and many counts of lesser sexual offenses. Although there were no injuries on anyone and he had no history of violence, he was sentenced to 59 years to life in prison. He has spent over 13 years in prison and barely survived a racial hate crime stabbing in 2019....

In February, Senator Scott Wiener introduced new criminal justice reform legislation, Senate Bill 938. This bill would amend the standards used for evaluating expert testimony and forensics in court pre- and post-conviction. Faulty forensic and scientific evidence, provided by expert witnesses, are the second most common reason that individuals are wrongfully convicted for crimes they did not comm...

Eric Gonzalez was appointed the DA of Kings County (Brooklyn), New York in 2016 after Ken Thompson, his predecessor died. In 2017, he won his own term. We talked extensively about the COVID-19 threat to Brooklyn and also the conditions at Rikers Island, the notorious jail he referred to in the interview as a "hell hole." He was very critical of the failure to get people who did not need to be inca...

Ronnie Long has served nearly 44 years in prison for a crime he did not commit. He was arrested in 1976 on trespass charges, charged and later convicted of rape, sentenced to 80 years and has been in prison for more than 40 years despite evidence of an unfair trial and that he was wrongly convicted. We talk with Jamie Lau with the Duke Wrongful Convictions Clinic. Ronnie Long had his case reviewed...

In 1989 she was a young mother who lost her kids in a tragic fire. Except the investigators at the time, using archaic methods, determined that it wasn't a tragic fire, it was arson and therefore murder and on the basis of this evidence, Ms. Parks was sentenced to life in prison. But we have learned a lot about arson since then - and we now know that things that used to be taken as telltale signs...

Sim Gill - born in India, is the first Indian-American prosecutor in the US and one of only two elected Democrats in the entire state of Utah. He first was elected in November 2010. He has enacted a series of reforms - and has battled the Utah Attorney General in trying to get conviction integrity statewide in Utah. He has also pushed through a Criminal Justice Reform effort, the first in the nati...

Michael Dougherty came to Boulder from Manhattan and worked as a deputy in the DA's for nearly twenty years before being appointed in 2018 to replace the long time prosecutor. He then won on his own. He now is running to be elected to his first four term. He was a strong supporter of the effort recently completed with the governor's signing to end the death penalty. “I’m strongly opposed to the de...

Buta Biberai was elected last year as Commonwealth Attorney in Loudon County Virginia. She ran as the progressive reformer and became the first new top prosecutor in 16 years. Criminal justice reform looks a bit different in suburban Virginia, what has traditionally been more red but has over time shifted. We talk about the issues and challenges of reform in Virginia and it how it differs from oth...

Maurice Caldwell was convicted in 1991 in San Francisco Superior Court in the June 1990 death of Judy Acosta, who was shot dead during an apparent drug deal that went sour in the Alemany public housing project in San Francisco. A woman would identify Mr. Caldwell as one of the gunmen and based solely on her testimony that she saw him standing under a light pole, Mr. Caldwell was convicted and sent...

In November of 2019, the 4th District Court of Appeal in the cases of Lamaroux and Gooden, ruled that SB 1437, Felony Murder Reform was constitutional. SB 1437 redefines that law for felony-murder liability by excluding “a person who is not the actual killer, did not act with the intent to kill, or was not a major participant in the underlying felony who acted with reckless indifference to human l...

In 2019, Tiffany Caban, a career public defender ran for DA in QUeens, NY and came within an eyelash of beating the establishment backed candidate. Ms. Caban talks about what she is doing today and the ramifications of her race as well as the future of the progressive prosecution movement.

UDi Ofer is the ACLU Director of the Justice Division and Deputy National Political Director. We talk with him about recent elections and their implications for criminal justice reform as well as the goal of reducing incarceration by 50 percent and the how to reach that number. “The next president must tackle the country’s mass incarceration crisis in a way that restores fundamental civil libertie...

Diana Becton took an unusual route to become prosecutor. She had served 22 years as a judge in Contra Costa County before the Board of Supervisors in 2017 appointed her interim DA, then she was elected DA in 2018. She became the first African American woman to serve as DA in the county. The previous DA in Contra Costa County was charged with felonies and was forced to resign. “The reasons people t...

Jonathan Rapping is a nationally renowned criminal justice innovator who is the founder and president of Gideon’s Promise, a 501(c)(3) non-profit public defender advocacy organization that provides training, leadership development and mentorship to improve the quality of legal representation for the clients and communities they serve. His book by the name of Gideon’s Promise will be out May 5. We...

John Pfaff is a law professor at Fordham University. He is the author of a groundbreaking work which looks at a series of data to analyze mass incarceration and the true causes of it and presents a path to achieve real reform. He argues that the "standard story" about mass incarceration is largely wrong. Mass incarceration is not drive by the war on drugs as some have argued and instead in order t...

ASUCD President Justin Hurst along with External Affairs Vice President Adam Hatefi and Francois Kaeppelin talk about the successful fee referendum and what that means, as well as the strike over the UC Santa Cruz COLA demands and how that impacts UC Davis and student housing issues on campus.

Laura Conover who is running for County Attorney in Pima County Arizona, home of Tuscon. According to her bio, she “dedicated her career to helping the Southern Arizona community by defending the poor, advocating for victims, and fighting for justice in local and federal courts. She decided to run for the position of Pima County Attorney to bring much-needed reform to Southern Arizona’s criminal j...

Senator Nancy Skinner has authored some of the most important criminal justice legislation in the state. Senator Skinner represents among other places, Berkeley in the State Senate. Prior to her election to the State Senate in 2016, Skinner was a member of the California State Assembly representing California's 15th State Assembly district from 2008 to 2014. On the Podcast, the Senator talks about...