Everyday Injustice

In 2018, California passed a lass that mandated police departments to release body camera footage within 45 days of any incident when an officer fires a gun, or uses force that leads to great bodily injury or death. However, a CalMatters investigative report found that agencies rarely release the raw footage to the public. Instead, CalMatters reported “the public and the media must rely on edited...

This week on Everyday Injustice, we are joined by UCLA Law Professor Scott Cummings who discusses a 2020 paper published in Georgetown Journal of Legal Ethics, that looks into the role that lawyers and schools play in movements of social transformation. One of the key findings in the literature has been the notion of drift away from public interest work – he cited that when law students enter law...

Dave Beers, a NY state licensed PI with law enforcement experience ended up working with the Taft Defense. He tells the story of how the mother of a young child arrived to find her child dead. Veronica Taft, a single mother with four small children, all under the age of five, was convicted of Murder and Manslaughter for the brutal murder of her two-year-old son Lyric. For reasons that are unclear,...

In March, the Sentencing Project announced the creation of the Second Look Network. Across the country, we have seen the rise of resentencing and other laws designed to allow people who have served decades in prison, but who no longer represent a threat to public safety, to have their sentences reconsidered and at times, resentenced and gain release. “The Second Look Network is a coalition of atto...

In 2021, Professor Daniel Medwed published an article in the Brooklyn Law Review: “Black Deaths Matter: the Race-of-Victim Effect and Capital Punishment.” In it, he found that irrespective of the race of the perpetrator, cases with white victims were more likely to see a death penalty charge. Medwed notes, that one of the “troubling feature(s) of the death penalty landscape: Similarly situated off...

Recently a Texas Judge delayed the execution of Andre Thomas – a man who is so severely mentally ill, the crime he committed of killing his wife and mixed race children involved cutting out their hearts and carrying them in his pocket. He proceeded to separately gouge out both of his eyes, the second of which he ate. Talking with Marc Bookman, who founded the Atlantic Center for Capital Representa...

In Everyday Injustice’s second installment with Marc Bookman, we discuss the Atlantic Center for Capital Representation – a non-profit set up in 2010 that was created due to lack of state funding in Pennsylvania for indigent defense. “ACCR fills a void created by the lack of adequate funding for poor defendants and provides hope to those who have lost it,” the group’s mission explains. Pennsylvani...

In Everyday Injustice’s second installment with Marc Bookman, we discuss the Atlantic Center for Capital Representation – a non-profit set up in 2010 that was created due to lack of state funding in Pennsylvania for indigent defense. “ACCR fills a void created by the lack of adequate funding for poor defendants and provides hope to those who have lost it,” the group’s mission explains. Pennsylvani...

Andrew Krivak was acquitted last week in a second trial, after spending 24 years in prison for the rape and murder of a 12 year old girl. The jury spend just three hours deliberating following a seven week trial. In 2016, Krivak’s co-defendant, Anthony DiPippo, was acquitted at his third trial. DiPippo also spent more than two decades in prison. Everyday Injustice interviews attorney Oscar Michela...

Earlier in February, the state of Missouri executed Leonard Taylor, despite strong evidence of innocence. Discussing that and a number of other cases recently and over the years is Sean O’Brien, Professor of Law at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. Sean O’Brien has been director of various criminal defense clinics at UMKC School of Law since 1983, including the Public Defender Appeals Clinic...

The year 2023, marks the 50th year since the US prison population began its unprecedented surge. The Sentencing Project, is marking this year with a series of reports on Mass Incarceration Trends. Joining Everyday Injustice this week, is Sentencing Project, co-director of research, Ashley Nellis. In a recently published account, Nellis noted, “In 1972, the imprisonment rate was 93 per 100,000 peop...

In their book, Suspect Citizens, Frank Baumgartner and his colleagues looked at a massive amount of police stops in North Carolina over a number of years. The findings shed light on the nature of police stops and one of the remarkable features is that the findings have held outside of North Carolina as well. In short, Black and brown drivers are disproportionately stopped. When they are stopped, t...

Marc Bookman, Co-founder of nonprofit Atlantic Center for Capital Representation in Philadelphia and author of the book, A Descending Spiral: Exposing the Death Penalty in 12 Essays. This book, a collection of essays that highlights the injustice of the death penalty. Listen as he discusses some of the worst aspects of the criminal legal system. Bookman discusses among other things: racist judges...

Aasha Ealy was a law student accused of a crime that she didn’t commit. What should have a simple case has dragged on since 2016. During that time, she has finished law school and passed the bar. And still, her case languishes in the system. Listen to her amazing story as she was pressured into taking a plea, ended up rescinding that plea agreement, lost her attorney and ended up representing hers...

This week on Everyday Injustice, Jessica Henry talks about people who are convicted of crimes that never happened. There are a whole class of wrongful convictions – some based on flawed forensic science, such as shaken baby or arson investigators. Henry also chronicles suicide being mislabeled as a homicide. And more nefarious problems such as corrupt police planting drugs on an innocent suspect....

As most observers are well aware by now, the US incarcerates a much higher proportion of its population than any other nation. In Jeffrey Bellin’s book, “Mass Incarceration Nation,” he conceives of the system as having two distinct levels. The criminal justice system where the public seeks “justice” in response to serious crimes like murder and rape. And the criminal legal system, “where the gover...

Pamela Price made history on Monday, being sworn in by Oakland Mayor-Elect Sheng Thao, who herself made history as the first Hmong to be elected mayor of a major US City. Price became the first Black elected DA in Alameda County, birthplace of the Black Panthers. Also speaking during the ceremony in front of at least 200 enthusiastic supporters in Downtown Oakland was Wanda Johnson, mother of Osca...

This week on Everyday Injustice we have NCAJ (National Center for Access to Justice) Policy Director Lauren Jones talking about their work on behalf of criminal justice reform. “NCAJ uses data, research and policy analysis to expose how the justice system fails to stand up for equal justice- and all too often, functions as a source of oppression.” We talk about their creation of the Justice Index...

This week on Everyday Injustice we talk with Joanne Scheer, whose son’s incarceration on felony murder, special circumstances led her to create the Felony Murder Elimination Project. Under the felony murder law, if someone committee a felony and a person died during the commission of that crime, all individuals are held accountable for that death and are legally guilty of murder. Even if they were...

Today on Everyday Injustice we talk with Talitha Floyd from Sacramento Area Congregations Together (Sac ACT). Sacramento ACT empowers ordinary people to identify and change the conditions that create economic and racial injustice. Among the work we discussed was their Live Free program, whereby Sac ACT works to increase transparency and accountability with law enforcement, addressing implicit bias...

Justin Brooks, the director of the California Innocence Project has spent his career freeing the innocent from prison. He told Everyday Injustice that after 30 years, he decided to put his insights into a book. His message to all of us: it could happen to anyone – it could happen to you. At the same time, there are inequities and flaws in the system that disproportionately mean that people of colo...

Following the primary elections, reformers were braced for setbacks in the reform prosecutor movement – but a strange thing happened this November, that set back never came. Everyday Injustice spoke with Miriam Krinsky of Fair and Just Prosecution. She discussed the formation of her organization, and why she believed that reform prosecutors fared much better than expected in the midterm elections....

This week on Everyday Injustice, Brian Hofer of Secure-Justice discusses the surveillance state, and the abuse of state power as well as the current state of criminal justice reform. A recent incident in Berkeley, where the leak of text messages showed the president of the police officers union making racially charged remarks and calling for arrest quotas. The leak was made public by Secure Justic...

This week on Everyday Injustice we talk with Elliot Hosman, the Prison Advocacy Coordinator at Ella Baker Center on their work on behalf of resentencing. California has some of the most severe sentence enhancements in the nation. But with the help of some key legislation, including SB 1393, the Fair and Just Sentencing Reform Act, and 1170(d), the Recall of Sentence and Resentencing there are mech...

One of the important ways to disrupt mass incarceration is to get formerly incarcerated people to get college and graduate degrees. Such programs help to greatly reduce recidivism rates. Popping up all over the state at Underground Scholars Programs. Organizations that help “create pathways into higher education for formerly incarcerated and justice system-impacted individual” by providing support...