the JustPod

Send us Fan Mail When a person is sentenced to death, the case is not over.  Some of the most critical legal work happens after the trial and direct appeals are finished. That’s where habeas attorneys step in, often years later, to uncover constitutional violations, investigate what was missed, and ask a fundamental question: did the system get it right?   John Hutchins has spent years representin...

Send us Fan Mail “White Collar Talks with Nina and Joe” episode features Lucian Dervan, discussing the upcoming 2026 Global White Collar Crime Institute, July 13-14, 2026, in Singapore. which will bring together senior practitioners, government officials, judges, and scholars to examine the evolving and increasingly complex landscape of international white collar crime. Hosts are Nina Marino and J...

Send us Fan Mail In 2007, FBI agents showed up at the home of Portia Louder and her husband Chad.  Their youngest of five children was just three months old at the time.  Seven years later, in August 2014, Louder pleaded guilty to wire fraud and conspiracy.  And on the morning of April 21, 2015, she and Chad left their home in Utah on a 14-hour drive to the facility where Louder would self-surrend...

Send us Fan Mail This being “Second Chance Month,” it’s a perfect time to share our discussion with Jessica Jackson and Erin Haney—respectively, Chief Executive Officer and Chief Policy Officer of the REFORM Alliance, the justice initiative founded by Philadelphia-born and Grammy-nominated rapper Meek Mill and others. When Mill was sentenced, in November 2017, to a term of two to four years in pri...

Send us Fan Mail Program Co-Chairs Maggie O’Donell and Aitan Goelman discuss the history of the ABA Criminal Justice Section’s White Collar Crime Institute and the upcoming 2026 program on March 10-13, 2026 in San Diego, CA.  "White Collar Talks" are hosted by Nina Marino and Joe Whitley. The ABA White Collar Crime Institute is the nation’s premier forum for insights, updates, and expert...

Send us Fan Mail Josh Hoe is Senior Policy Manager at Dream.org, and the host and creator of the Decarceration Nation Podcast.  Josh, who is himself formerly incarcerated, is the author of “Writing Your Own Best Story: Addiction + Living Hope.”  We connected to discuss Josh’s recent writing, in which he argues that the so-called “National Emergency on Crime” is not real, and why we should reject i...

Send us Fan Mail This is the first episode in our two-part discussion with Tom Hayes, who we first spoke with in April 2025.  At the time of our first discussion with Tom, recorded in Part 1 of this series, Tom was awaiting a decision of the United Kingdom’s Supreme Court on the appeal of his August 2015 conviction, arising from his work submitting rates on behalf of bank he worked for, which were...

Send us Fan Mail This is Part 2 of our two-part discussion with Tom Hayes, the now vindicated former English banker, who we first spoke with in April 2025.  At the time of that earlier discussion with Tom, in Part 1 of this series, Tom was awaiting a decision of the United Kingdom’s Supreme Court on the appeal of his August 2015 conviction, arising from his work submitting rates, on behalf of his...

Send us Fan Mail In the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, home to Philadelphia and its surrounding counties, the U.S. Attorney is David Metcalf.  We spoke shortly after the end of the government shutdown, at a time when the U.S. Department of Justice is under great scrutiny.  The job of U.S. Attorney is always challenging, and even more so in the current climate, so we appreciated U.S. Attorney Me...

Send us Fan Mail Mark Loughney’s art has been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art (“MoMa PS-1”), and published in The New Yorker and The Atlantic .  His black-and-white ink drawings evoke a mix of M.C. Escher and Salvadore Dali, with surreal landscapes and bizarre figures.  But Loughney is also well known for his series of prison portraits.  They’re prison portraits, not only because they depict...

Send us Fan Mail [For a complementary audio excerpt of Gary Tyler’s book, narrated by Cary Hite, describing the point when Tyler is considering accepting a government plea agreement, and starting life outside Angola, listen here .  Copyright © 2025 by Gary Tyler. Audio excerpt courtesy of Simon & Schuster. Audio read by Cary Hite, from the audiobook Stitching Freedom by Gary Tyler, published b...

Send us Fan Mail The honorable Mark W. Bennett is a retired U.S. District Court Judge, and the former Chief Judge of the Northern District of Iowa.  Judge Bennett retired from the federal bench in 2019, and is now Director Emeritus of the Institute for Justice Reform & Innovation at Drake University Law School.   Judge Bennett is known for his advocacy for sentencing reform—including his criti...

Send us Fan Mail Joseph De Gregorio was raised in a middle-class working family in Brooklyn, and comes from a line of hard workers.  His father regularly got up at 4am to work at a plant, where he was a machinist.  Joseph himself had the opportunity to get into finance, but the allures of Wall Street, gambling, and addiction, ultimately took him down a path toward fraud, and eventually a federal c...

Send us Fan Mail Joe Whitley (Womble Bond Dickinson) discusses the ABA Criminal Justice Section’s International White Collar Crime Institute (a special convening of the Global White Collar Crime Institute and the London White Collar Crime Institute) in Geneva, Switzerland on November 17-18, 2025, with Nina Marino (Kaplan Marino) and Lucian Dervan (Belmont University College of Law). Registration i...

Send us Fan Mail Elie Honig is CNN’s Senior Legal Analyst, and a former federal prosecutor.  He is the bestselling author of Hatchet Man: How Bill Barr Broke the Prosecutor's Code and Corrupted the Justice Department (published by HarperCollins in 2021), and Untouchable: How Powerful People Get Away with It (also published by HarperCollins, in 2023).  Elie is most recently the author of the r...

Send us Fan Mail Nina Marino, Joe Whitley and Brian McEvoy share in a meaningful discussion about the ABA Criminal Justice Section’s Annual Southeastern White Collar Crime Institute and what to expect at this year’s 11th conference next week at Chateau Elan, Georgia.  Registration is ongoing.

Send us Fan Mail What is the process for transferring a criminal defendant from U.S. custody to a foreign country?  We learn this and more from our discussion with Bruce Zagaris, a Partner in the Washington, DC Office of Berliner, Corcoran, and Rowe, who is an expert on international prisoner transfers.  Bruce is a widely known expert in the field of international criminal law, and is the co-autho...

Send us Fan Mail What do the Lubavitcher Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, zt”l, and the Chabad Chassidic movement have to do with criminal justice reform?  Find out in the latest episode of the JustPod, with our guest, Rabbi Yossi Bryski, the Director of Alternative Sentencing at the Aleph Institute.  Aleph was founded in 1981 at the Rebbe’s direction, and for over 40 years since, has serv...

Send us Fan Mail Please join co-hosts Joe Whitley and Nina Marino for an insightful discussion with our distinguished guest, Susan Bozorgi. Susan started her impressive career in the public defender’s office in Miami where she found her calling opposing the government in representing people accused of crime. She tried hundreds of jury trials which honed her skills as a formidable trial attorney. S...

Send us Fan Mail Gianna Toboni’s book, The Volunteer: The Failure of the Death Penalty in America and One Inmate’s Quest to Die with Dignity , is a morally provocative chronicle about Scott Dozier, a former Army Ranger, who was sentenced to death, and “volunteered” for the death penalty.  Dozier had been convicted of murder, sentenced to death, and ultimately demanded the state enforce its own pen...

Send us Fan Mail It was a pleasure to welcome Leonard Ambrose to the JustPod to discuss his representation of the notorious defendant Marjorie Diehl-Armstrong.  Ambrose obtained an acquittal of Armstrong after she shot her boyfriend six times as he lay on a couch in 1984.  But Armstrong is possibly more well known for her eventual murder conviction in the bizarre Pizza Bomber case in Erie, Pennsyl...

Send us Fan Mail What was it like to defend clients in prosecutions arising out of events at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021?  A discussion with defense counsel Rocco Cipparone and Angie Levy. Following the events at the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021, the federal government initiated one of the largest investigations and prosecutions in American history, ultimately charging nearly 1...

Send us Fan Mail In Philadelphia, a city known for great trial lawyers, our next guest stands out among them.  Brian McMonagle began his career in the Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office where in his twenties he became one of the youngest lawyers to prosecute high profile cases in the DA’s Homicide Unit.  Since then, Brian has gone on to represent actor Bill Cosby in a criminal trial, musical...

Send us Fan Mail Please join co-hosts Joe Whitley and Nina Marino for an insightful discussion with our distinguished guest, Karen Popp.  Karen, a partner at Sidley Austin, is a highly regarded and well-known leader in the field of white collar defense, internal investigations, crisis management, and compliance. Before joining Sidley, Karen served as Associate White House Counsel to the President...

Send us Fan Mail We are pleased to share with you our latest podcast with the Honorable Larry D. Thompson.   Thompson has had extensive leadership experience in both the private and public sectors.  He served as U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Georgia (1981-1986) and led major political corruption and drug trafficking prosecutions during his tenure at the Department.  Thompson also led...