In May, the US Supreme Court granted Richard Glossip a stay of execution after the Attorney General of Oklahoma has gone to believe like many others that Glossip’s conviction is fatally flaw, “unsustainable” and “a new trial imperative.” Many have argued that new evidence discovered in independent investigations along with problems with the state’s prosecution and the destruction of evidence leads to the conclusion that there was not enough evidence to warrant a conviction, let alone a death sen...
Jun 04, 2023•34 min
This week on Everyday Injustice features Marvin Zalman, a retired professor from Wayne State University in Detroit. Zalman talked about his role in establishing statewide sentencing guidelines and how it inadvertently paved the way for the tough on crime era. He also discussed how the tough on crime era helped lead to high levels of wrongful convictions. Listen as Professor Zalman discusses his work and how that work led to mass incarceration.
May 29, 2023•39 min
Eric Genuis is a Canadian composer and pianist who now lives in Louisville, Kentucky, U.S. He is noted for his Concerts for Hope. He performs his original compositions more than a hundred times a year. This week on Everyday Injustice, Eric Genuis describes how he came to perform for incarcerated people – including condemned men on death row – hundreds of times each year and the impact of his music on those people. He talked about the power of music to lift and heal. Listen as Eric Genuis discuss...
May 22, 2023•34 min
David Dow went from a death penalty supporter to founding the Texas Innocence Network and running a death penalty clinic. He has since written a number of books, including “Executed on a Technicality.” This week on Everyday Injustice, David Dow explains the various injustices within the death penalty system. As he writes in his book, “I simply conclude that the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments cannot tolerate the infliction of a sentence of death under legal systems that permit this unique penal...
May 15, 2023•45 min
The recidivism rate for those who get a masters while incarcerated is zero. For years, in an effort to become more punitive, prisons have cut back on programming including education – and they have done that to their and to society’s detriment. The pendulum has swung back in the direction of carceral education as we have learned that it is one of the most effective ways to reduce recidivism. This week on Everyday Injustice, we speak with Matthew Luckett, a professor at Cal State Dominguez-Hills,...
May 08, 2023•26 min
At the age of 17, Sean Wilson was incarcerated and spent 17 years in prison. Since his release six years ago, he has dedicated his life to reforming the system. Sean Wilson is the Organizing Director of Dream.Org. Wilson brings an advantage and insight into a system he believes to be broken and in need of reform. Before joining the Dream.Org JUSTICE team, Wilson was the ACLU of Wisconsin’s Smart Justice Campaign Manager, where he managed the campaign to reform probation and parole. His mission i...
May 01, 2023•46 min
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 presentations that often include a highlighted or circled object in a person’s hand, slowed-down vid...
Apr 24, 2023•32 min
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 school more than half have an interest in going into public interest law, but that falls to about fi...
Apr 17, 2023•34 min
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, the prosecutors and police focus on Veronica rather than her boyfriend who is the more obvious susp...
Apr 10, 2023•39 min
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 attorneys and post-sentence advocates across the country working on behalf of incarcerated individuals s...
Apr 03, 2023•32 min
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 offenders frequently receive divergent outcomes.” From there we discuss efforts to correct some of thes...
Mar 27, 2023•35 min
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 Representation in Philadelphia and has followed this case, he laid out a number of the concerns about this cas...
Mar 21, 2023•35 min
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. Pennsylvania continues to be a state caught in limbo. In February, newly elected Governor Josh Shapiro announce...
Mar 13, 2023•31 min
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. Pennsylvania continues to be a state caught in limbo. In February, newly elected Governor Josh Shapiro announce...
Mar 13, 2023•31 min
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 Michelan and Jeffrey Deskovic, who played an important role in the exoneration, but was not an attorney on ...
Mar 06, 2023•30 min
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 Public Defender Trial Clinic and the Death Penalty Representation Clinic. Professor O’Brien se...
Feb 27, 2023•45 min
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 people. The prison expansion that commenced in 1973 reached its peak in 2009, achieving a seven-fold inc...
Feb 20, 2023•29 min
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, they are disproportionately having their vehicles searched. When they have their vehicles searched, t...
Feb 13, 2023•39 min
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 and the role overall of racism in the death penalty, judges who execute despite the jury ruling for ...
Feb 06, 2023•46 min
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 herself in the process. Even after progressive DA George Gascon was elected in 2020, his office has refu...
Jan 30, 2023•35 min
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. A false allegation of assault is invented to resolve a custody dispute. Perhaps a false allegation o...
Jan 23, 2023•38 min
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 government enforces a variety of laws ostensibly to achieve certain policy goals, like reducing drug abus...
Jan 16, 2023•41 min
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 Oscar Grant, Aisha Wahab who became the first Muslim and Afghan American to be elected to the California...
Jan 09, 2023•18 min
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 and look at policy areas like fines and fees, where just about every state is failing to produce act...
Jan 02, 2023•35 min
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 minor participants and the death occurred at the hand of another and was not foreseeable. Under ref...
Dec 26, 2022•31 min
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 in law enforcement. Following the killing of Stephon Clark in March 2018 and the release of finding...
Dec 19, 2022•35 min
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 color and the poor get wrongly convicted. As one review of the book noted: “this book forces us to consi...
Dec 12, 2022•43 min
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. We also discussed her book, Change From Within: Reimagining the 21st-Century Prosecutor. Krinsky de...
Dec 05, 2022•51 min
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 Justice and led to the pausing the appointment of Jennifer Louis as police chief until after an independen...
Nov 28, 2022•36 min
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 mechanisms now in place to allow for a reconsideration of those overly harsh sentences. In 2018, Governo...
Nov 21, 2022•40 min
