Everyday Injustice

This week on Everyday Injustice we talk with Santa Clara Law Professor David Ball. Among the topics we discuss are his work on the Corrections Committee of the ABA’s Criminal Justice Section where he has been co-chair. We talk about mass incarcerations and alternatives to traditional incarceration. We talk about the new jail in Santa Clara County and about the need for bail reform. We also talked...

Jarrett Adams was a high school student and made one mistake - he went to a college party, ending up wrongly convicted for the rape of a white college woman having been convicted by an all-white jury - and facing nearly 30 years in prison. It took him nearly ten years to get exonerated with the help of the Wisconsin Innocence Project. Amazingly, he took the lessons he learned as a jailhouse attorn...

Jeffrey Baker grew up in the deep south and moved to teaching law school at Pepperdine’s Caruso School of law where he heads up the Community Justice Clinic. Professor Baker discussed the differences but also the similarities between Alabama and Southern California. Listen as Professor Bakers talks about his work on domestic violence, social justice as well as research on the Trump administration’...

Everyday Injustice this week talks with the Los Angeles Stonewall Democratcs – Alex Mohajer the President and Jasmyne Cannick a Steering Member At-Large. The Stonewall Democrats, named after the protests represent the LGBTQ community. The discussion focused on two critical races in LA – the Sheriff’s race where they talked about the problematic administration of current sheriff Alex Villanueva and...

UC Davis Law Professor Irene Joe has had an interesting experience - born in Nigeria, grew up in Texas, and came to California for law school. After law school she worked doing death penalty work with the Equal Justice Initiative and Bryan Stevenson. From there, she ended up working as a public defender in New Orleans and experiencing the post-Katrina world there and then back to California to bec...

In 2020, Eli Savit rode a wave of progressive prosecutorial successes to victory in Washtenaw County Michigan, the home of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. For the most part, Savit has avoided a lot of the extreme pushback that some of his progressive prosecutor colleagues have suffered. In part that is because he knew he would win the race well before he took office and was able to bring...

Anne Irwin and Natasha Minsker of Smart Justice California join Everyday Injustice this week to talk about criminal justice reform efforts. Smart Justice California works to educate and embolden policymakers who support meaningful criminal justice reforms that promote safety, fairness and healthy communities. Among the legislation they are supporting this year includes, the follow up to the Racial...

The right to a trial by jury is enshrined into the constitution, yet increasingly over the last few decades, trials have become a vanishing feature of the criminal justice system. University of North Carolina law professor Carissa Hessick recently wrote the book, Punishment Without Trial: Why Plea Bargaining Is a Bad Deal. While there are positive aspects of the plea bargain – efficiency in the sy...

Duke Law Professor Brandon Garrett wrote one of the seminal books of the Innocence Movement, Convicting the Innocent – a must-read classic that highlights the problem of wrongful convictions and its causes. We have been taught to believe that fingerprint analysis is an ironclad science. But we learned in the case of Brandon Mayfield, who was wrongly identified as the Madrid Subway bomber, even tho...

Tony Messenger, a reporter for the St. Louis Post Dispatch talks about the issue of fines and fees and is the author of the recent book, Profit and Punishment How America Criminalizes the Poor in the Name of Justice. In his book, he goes into rural Missouri to follow the lives of poor white people who are victimized by a system of fines and fees that ends up entrapping them into a cycle of poverty...

Kristin Henning is a Georgetown Law Professor and a former public defender in DC. In her book, Rage of Innocence: How America Criminalizes Black Youth she discusses how what is ordinary adolescent behavior gets criminalized the criminal justice system and ends up locking Black youth into cycles of incarceration. She brings vivid case studies and data to bear on her analysis and critique of the sys...

Rachelle Barbour has worked as an Assistant Federal Defender at the Sacramento federal court for over 20 years. She also heads up the CJS clinic at McGeorge Law School. Her most prominent case has been that of Iraqi refugee Omar Ameen, who was accused of being an ISIS commander and murdering a police officer in Iraq. He was acquitted of those charges in April as a federal judge ruled this was phys...

Sacramento in 2022 figures to be a hotbed for political intrigue. DA Anne Marie Schubert is running for AG leaving an open DA seat where a progressive – Alana Matthews will take on current Assistant Chief Deputy DA Thien Ho. Sheriff Jones is retiring. And there is a new police chief. Everyday Injustice talked with longtime attorney Mark Reichel to get the lay of the Sacramento landscape – discussi...

Senator Dave Cortese has sponsored some critical criminal justice reform efforts over the past term, including the current two year bill SB 300 which would allow for people sentenced to LWOP who were not the actual killers to have a chance at parole. Current California law mandates a sentence of death or life without the possibility of parole (LWOP) for anyone convicted of “murder with special cir...

This fall, attorneys for Nakia Porter filed a federal lawsuit for an incident on August 6, 2020 when she and her father were driving home on I-80. They stopped to switch drivers when the police intervened. At the press conference attorney Yasin Almadani explained that Porter, age 33 and weighing all of 125 pound “had done nothing wrong” when she was approached by the deputy and explained that they...

UC Davis Law Professor Jack Chin does just about everything and this week’s episode, we discuss the then recent Rittenhouse trial and guns and self-defense, the death penalty and Julius Jones, and the Sentencing Clinic he founded at UC Davis Law School working with the Yolo County DA’s office to reduce the lengthy sentences of incarcerated people.

In 2020, the Vanguard covered a series of hearings involving Zachary Vanderhorst, 65, who had been imprisoned for 46 years after guilty pleas he made 1974 for crimes he did not commit. A judge after a series of evidentiary hearings vacated the murder charges and Vanderhorst after 46 years was able to be released from prison. This year, a San Francisco judge vacated two of the remaining charges, in...

In 2020, Melba Pearson ran to attempt to unseat, unsuccessfully the 27 year incumbent prosecutor of Miami-Dade County. Now she is policy director of the FIU project that pushes for data transparency in prosecution, demonstrating racial disparities in the criminal legal system. Pearson discusses her campaign to reform the criminal legal system in Miami-Dade – including racial disparities and the fi...

On October 8, 2020, Shayne Sutherland, 29, died in a manner similar to George Floyd, with a police officer on his back, handcuffed, yelling, “I can’t breathe,” and calling out for his Momma. He had called 911 the morning of October 8, 2020. While being questioned in front of a store, Shayne jumped up after hearing a noise, only to be tackled by law enforcement. After close to three minutes of forc...

This spring after a long and at times bitter process, activists following the killing of George Floyd pushed for and finally got the city of Placerville to remove a noose from the city’s seal but the council opted to keep the Gold Rush-era nickname, “Hangtown.” The noose was probably not historical - and probably not incorporated into the city logos until the 1970s but is now widely considered a h...

It was once a poster child for things like Wrongful Convictions and the carceral state. But the Orleans DA has transformed his office - immediately dismissing over 400 cases that were prosecuted under his predecessor - a majority of those were drug related. When he ran for DA in 2020, Jason Williams, a former councilmember in New Orleans, pledged to free people from prison - already he “has grante...

Vanguard Court Watch is a unique and innovative program that trains college interns on the law and journalism, sends them into the courts where they report and monitor on injustice in the system. Listen as they tell their stories about what they see and what they have learned in the process.

While the public has become aware of how various aspects of the criminal legal system produce unjust results, one area that many are less aware of is that things seemingly as simple as fines and fees can devastate millions of Americans who are poor, end up in debt, lose their vehicles and other impacts. The Fines and Fees Justice has been working to identify the problems associated with fines and...

In 2020, San Joaquin District Attorney Tori Verber Salazar made headlines when she resigned from the California District Attorney Association (CDAA) after noting the organization has been opposing criminal justice reform for many years. While that action was notable enough, it was even more so because Verber Salazar is not a progressive liberal like much of the reform movement instead she is a lif...

Dr. Vilasni Ganesh in November will be heading off to prison for 63 months away from her husband and children. Her husband, also a doctor is facing a one-year sentence himself. In mixed verdict, she was convicted of fraudulent billing -as her attorney explains, without any evidence of wrongdoing or intent. The story as she and her attorney tell has so many layers. In her arguments to the Court of...