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 become a tenured professor at UC Davis. Listen as she discusses the importance of President Biden’s Sup...
Mar 07, 2022•36 min
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 the stakeholders on board and give them stake in his success. Listen as Savit talks about his accomp...
Feb 28, 2022•37 min
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 Justice Act which would allow people with past criminal convictions to challenge racial discriminat...
Feb 21, 2022•41 min
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 system and reduced punishment, overall 97 to 98 percent of all cases end not with a jury verdict but w...
Feb 14, 2022•45 min
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 though he had never left the states based on a partial match of fingerprint, that the science has more ...
Feb 07, 2022•31 min
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 and debt from which many cannot escape. The issue ironically caught the attention of Messenger and ...
Jan 31, 2022•43 min
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 system. In one case, a girl gets into a fight with her boyfriend, takes his cell phone and ends up char...
Jan 24, 2022•44 min
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 physically impossible because Ameen was not in Iraq at the time of the alleged murder. However, he remai...
Jan 17, 2022•42 min
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 – discussing topics like the DA, policing, and criminal justice reform.
Jan 10, 2022•38 min
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 circumstances,” even if the person did not kill anyone, nor intend for anyone to die. Under current law...
Jan 03, 2022•37 min
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 were simply switching seats. However, as she was explaining this, the complaint explained, Deputy M...
Dec 20, 2021•54 min
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.
Dec 13, 2021•46 min
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, including rape, Vanderhorst pleaded to when he was just 19. “The remarkable efforts made to overturn t...
Dec 06, 2021•46 min
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 fight against mass incarceration as well as discussing the need for transparency in prosecution.
Nov 29, 2021•43 min
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 forceful pressure on Shayne’s back, while Shayne was lying face down on the concrete, unarmed, handcuffe...
Nov 22, 2021•44 min
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 hate symbol. Leading the way in the battle over the noose was the young activist Lizzie Dubose. She i...
Nov 15, 2021•52 min
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 granted new trials to nearly two dozen people convicted by split juries, announced he would no longer oppo...
Nov 08, 2021•39 min
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.
Nov 01, 2021•40 min
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 fees, educate the community and change laws. They note: “Those who cannot immediately pay these cost...
Oct 25, 2021•43 min
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 lifelong Republican in a relatively conservative county. In a 2020 interview with the Vanguard, Salazar...
Oct 18, 2021•41 min
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 Appeals, she has claimed Insufficient Legal Representation. She was appalled that her defense attorn...
Oct 11, 2021•58 min
On September 15, 2021, Nakia Porter at a press conference spoke out publicly about her ordeal with Solano County police. Attorneys for Nakia Porter filed suit in Federal Court in Sacramento in August following an incident on August 6, 2020, where Porter and her father were driving from Oakland to their home in Sacramento. The vehicle was already stopped and in park when approached by Sheriff’s Deputies. She had stopped to take over driving for her father. At the press conference in August, attor...
Sep 16, 2021•20 min
Incumbent Alex Villanueva has become one of the most polarizing sheriff figures in the country. Now Eric Strong has emerged as a challenger to the incumbent. “Leadership. That crisis of leadership has interfered with a course of calls for a modern and more transparent LA County Sheriff’s Department. It has undermined our honorable profession’s ability to deliver on our promise of a more safe and a more just future for Los Angeles,” Strong said during his announcement speech a few weeks ago. Stro...
Sep 07, 2021•41 min
This week on Everyday Injustice featured women across the country whose loved ones were killed by police - whether it be sons, brothers, or partners. Marissa Barrera in 2017 lost her brother Michael in Woodland, California to a police incident. The DA cleared the officers of wrongdoing, but she and her family have taken the matter to civil court and video shows Michael Barrera at one point informing officers that he couldn’t breathe, as usual they discounted his complaint and he ended up going i...
Aug 30, 2021•1 hr 3 min
Family Outraged by Excited Delirium Diagnosis in Police Killing in Contra Costa County, California It may have been a scene reminiscent of George Floyd, but unless the California AG or Contra Costa DA step into this, the police may well get away with it after the coroner ruled accidental death in the death of 30-year-old Angelo Quinto, a Filipino male with a recent history of mental impairment. Quinto was grabbed from his mother’s arms and thrown to the floor in his home by Antioch police office...
Aug 26, 2021•50 min
Everyday Injustice Podcast Episode 121: Be the Jury - Pilot Would Pay Jurors $100 a Day To Serve One of the biggest problems in the criminal legal system is that the notion of being tried by a jury of one’s peers has been disgarded. A large number of people of color await trial in the system only to face a jury pool that is overly white, affluent, and retired. That is because working people and people of color are unable to serve on juries given the hardship caused by lost wages. AB 1452, author...
Aug 23, 2021•37 min
Cesar McDowell chronicles his journey from San Quentin to becoming, while still incarcerated, the co-founder and CEO of Unite The People Inc., a non profit organization that promotes social justice and offers affordable legal services throughout the state of California. After spending 20 years in prison and falling victim to the social inequality in our criminal justice system, McDowell founded his organization from his prison cell with the hope of saving all those who have been wrongly prosecut...
Aug 16, 2021•45 min
Alana Mathews is running for DA for the office currently held by Anne Marie Schubert, who is not seeking re-election (and running for California AG). She graduated from Spelman College in Atlanta, becoming the first person in her family to earn a college degree. She went on to receive her law degree from McGeorge School of Law while raising her three children. While serving as a Deputy District Attorney in Sacramento County, she worked her way up from misdemeanor jury trials to prosecuting perpe...
Aug 09, 2021•38 min
85 percent of those incarcerated will be released at some point. 7 in 10 people who are released will re-offend. If we are going to transform the criminal legal system, we need a better way to allow those who have been released to turn their lives around. Meet Leslie Robinson, Inventor of the Recharge Beyond the Bars Re-entry game, Leslie is a therapist in New York City, and she was a Consultant for the foster care system for twenty years. Leslie is the President of Beyond the Bars LLC, CEO and ...
Aug 02, 2021•40 min
On July 13, 2021, one of kind, radical attorney Tony Serra joined the Vanguard for a live webinar and podcast. At the age of 86, he is not only still practicing as an attorney but continues to have the drive and passion that has driven his long and storied career as an attorney. Listen as he discusses his career, some of the notable cases he has defended and the Chief Stankowitz case.
Jul 26, 2021•58 min
