NACDL - National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers

Past Webinars

• Race and the Criminal Legal System: Race + Prosecution
  
  The discussion featured Professor Angela J. Davis, Distinguished Professor of Law, American University Washington College of Law (moderator); Akhi Johnson, Acting Director, Reshaping Prosecution, Vera Institute of Justice; and Wesley Caines, Chief of Staff at The Bronx Defenders.

  Related Resources

  • Ramsey County Attorney, police leaders announce plans to reduce non-public-safety traffic stops, Office of the Ramsey County Attorney, September 2021.  

  • The Rage of Innocence: How America Criminalizes Black Youth, Kristin Henning, September 2021.  

  • The Case for a Presidential Task Force on 21st Century Prosecution, Fair and Just Prosecution, August 2021. 

  • Race and Prosecutorial Diversion: What we know and what can be done, Florida International University and Loyola University Chicago, July 2021.

  • Racial Disparities and Prosecutorial Discretion: An analysis of felony cases accepted for prosecution by the Denver District Attorney’s Office in the City and County of Denver, University of Denver Colorado Evaluation and Action Lab, March 2021.

  • A Smarter Approach to Measuring Prosecutorial Success by Anthony Thompson and Miriam Krinsky, Law 360, 2020.  

  • 21 Principles for 21st Century Prosecutors, Fair and Just Prosecution, Brennan Center for Justice, and The Justice Collaborative, 2018.  

  • Blueprint for Police Accountability and Reform: A New Vision for Policing and the Justice System, Fair and Just Prosecution. 

  • Prosecutorial Performance Indicators, Florida International University and Loyola University Chicago.  

  • The Prosecutor’s Ethical Duty to End Mass Incarceration, Angela J. Davis, 2016.

  • Arbitrary Justice: The Power of the American Prosecutor, Angela J. Davis, 2009.

  • Motion For Justice

  • Fair and Just Prosecution

• Race + the Criminal Legal System: Racially Charged Misdemeanors
  
  Lisa Wayne, Past President of NACDL and the current President of the NACDL Foundation for Criminal Justice, moderates a discussion around Brave New Films’ recently released documentary Racially Charged: America’s Misdemeanor Problem. This short film traces America’s modern misdemeanor system back to the post-civil war period, unpacking the criminalization of certain conduct as a means for social and economic control over Black Americans. Panelists include Bernice Corley, Executive Director of the Indiana Public Defender Council, and Alexandra Natapoff, the Lee S. Kreindler Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and author of Punishment Without Crime: How Our Massive Misdemeanor System Traps the Innocent and Makes America More Unequal.

  Related Resources

  • The Public Safety Benefits of Not Prosecuting Low-Level Crimes, Marilyn Mosby and Rachael Rollins, The Boston Globe, May 2021.
  • Misdemeanor Prosecution, Amanda Y. Agan, Jennifer L. Doleac and Anna Harvey, March 2021,
  • Alexandra Natapoff on how our massive misdemeanor system makes America more unequal, Harvard Law Today, January 2021.
  • “Racially Charged: America’s Misdemeanor Problem,” Brave New Films, 2020.
  • Misdemeanor Enforcement Trends Across Seven U.S. Jurisdictions, Data Collaborative for Justice at John Jay College, October 2020.
  • Misdemeanors by the Numbers, Sandra Mayson and Megan Stevenson, Boston College Law Review, March 2020.
  • Punishment Without Crime: How Our Massive Misdemeanor System Traps the Innocent and Makes America More Unequal, Alexandra Natapoff, December 2018.
  • The Scale of Misdemeanor Justice, Megan Stevenson & Sandra Mayson, Boston University Law Review, January 2018.
  • Misdemeanor Decriminalization, Alexandra Natapoff, Vanderbilt Law Review, May 2015.
  • Minor Crimes, Massive Waste: The Terrible Toll of America’s Broken Misdemeanor Courts, NACDL, April 2009.
• Race + Criminal Legal System: Collateral Consequences Part II
  
  In Part I of our discussion on Race and Collateral Consequences, we heard from our featured panelists just how the collateral consequences of a conviction – the specific legal barriers, generalized discrimination, and social stigma – have become more numerous and severe. Much like the Jim Crow Laws that relegated African Americans to a permanent and multi-generational underclass, collateral consequences stemming from criminal conviction can be an individual’s most serious punishment, permanently relegating a person to second-class status. In Part II of this discussion, we take a deep dive into how a past criminal conviction can impact an individual’s ability to participate in certain industries, e.g. the legal profession, the cannabis industry, and other business and entrepreneurship opportunities.

  Second Chance Month

  This webinar features Robert Patillo, Executive Director of the Rainbow PUSH Atlanta Peachtree Street Project (moderator); Kassandra Frederique, Executive Director of Drug Policy Alliance; Kevin Garrett, Fellow at the Texas Jail Project; and Tracey Syphax, Author and Entrepreneur, From the Block to the Boardroom, LLC. Join us for this important discussion and hear from our speakers how over policing and over incarcerating communities of color, and using prior convictions to effectively restrict access to these professional opportunities serves to prevent the accumulation of wealth and power, thus continuing to marginalize these communities.

  Related Resources

  • Applying for SBA COVID-19 relief with a criminal record in 2021, Collateral Consequences Resource Center (March 2021)
  • Two significant new occupational licensing laws enacted in 2021, Collateral Consequences Resource Center (February 2021)
  • The Road to Cannabis Industry Equality, The Hoban Minute Podcast, Episode 91, featuring Jason Ortiz (July 2020)
  • Formerly Incarcerated Businessowners Sue SBA for Denying Them COVID-19 Emergency Loans, The Appeal (June 2020)
  • Equity Must Be at the Heart of Marijuana Legalization, ACLU (June 2019)
  • From Prohibition to Progress: A Status Report on Marijuana Legalization, Drug Policy Alliance (January 2018)
  • Deborah Rhode, Virtue and the Law: The Good Moral Character Requirement in Occupational Licensing, Bar Regulation, and Immigration Proceedings, 43 Law & Social Inquiry 1027 (2018)
  • Prison to Proprietor: Entrepreneurship as a Re-Entry Strategy, FIELD at the Aspen Institute (September 2016)
  • The Crippling Effect of Incarceration on Wealth, Prison Policy Institute (April 2016)
  • Steven Slivinski, Turning Shackles into Bootstraps: Why Occupational Licensing Reform Is the Missing Piece of Criminal Justice Reform, Center for the Study of Economic Liberty at Arizona State University no. 2016-01 (November 2016)
  • From the Block to the Boardroom by Tracey Syphax
  • 2020 JCMH Summit: Lived Experience Expert featuring Kevin Garrett, Texas Judicial Commission on Mental Health (January 2021)
  • Kevin Garrett at Texas Jail Project, Texas Jail Project (January 2021)
  • Chris Vaughn, Good will of others puts Fort Worth native, 44, on path to redemption, Fort Worth Star Telegram (July 2011)
  • Peer Voices, Texas Jail Project (2019-2020)
  • Barriers to Rapidly Growing Professions State Fact Sheets, National Employment Law Project (December 2020)
  • Fair Chance Licensing Reform: Opening Pathways for People with Records to Join Licensed Professions, National Employment Law Project (December 2019)
• Race + Criminal Legal System: Collateral Consequences Part I
  
  As Michelle Alexander observed in The New Jim Crow, “It is legal today to discriminate against individuals with criminal records in nearly all the ways that it was once legal to discriminate against African Americans. Once you’re labeled a felon, the old forms of discrimination, housing discrimination, denial of the right to vote, denial of education opportunity, denial of food stamps and other public benefits, and exclusion from jury service—are suddenly legal."

  Much like the Jim Crow Laws that relegated African Americans to a permanent and multi-generational underclass, collateral consequences stemming from criminal convictions have decimated entire communities. The vast array of consequences imposed on those with criminal records has hit communities of color the hardest, largely due to disproportionate policing and prosecutorial practices within the criminal legal system.

  Second Chance Month

  This webinar features Cynthia W. Roseberry, Deputy Director for the National Policy Advocacy Department for the ACLU (moderator); Rob DeLeon, Vice President of Programs for The Fortune Society; David Singleton, Executive Director for the Ohio Justice & Policy Center; and Quintin Williams, Program Officer for the Gun Violence Prevention and Justice Reform Program at The Joyce Foundation.

  Related Resources

  • Conviction, Imprisonment, and Lost Earnings: How Involvement with the Criminal Justice System Deepens Inequality, The Brennan Center for Justice (September 2020)
  • Williams, Q., & Rumpf, C., What’s After Good?: The Burden of Post-Incarceration Life, 8 J. of Qualitative Crim. Just. & Criminology 3 (2020)
  • David Singleton, Restoring Humanity by Forgetting the Past, 81 Ohio St. L.J. 6 (2020)
  • Report to the United Nations on Racial Disparities in the U.S. Criminal Justice System, The Sentencing Project (April 2018)
  • Collateral Consequences of the War on Drugs, The ACLU (January 2003)
  • Words From Prison: The Collateral Consequences of Incarceration, The ACLU
  • Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bronx by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc (The New Yorker book review by Anna Altman and Katia Bachko)
  • Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson
  • Halfway Home: Race, Punishment, and the Afterlife of Mass Incarceration by Reuben Jonathan Miller (NPR book review by Ericka Taylor)
• Race + Criminal Legal System: Public Defense
  
  A discussion with Matthew Clair, PhD of Stanford University as we dissect his recent book Privilege and Punishment: How Race and Class Matter in Criminal Court (Published by Princeton University Press, November 2020), moderated by Travis County Chief Public Defender Adeola Ogunkeyede and joined by Porsha-Shaf’on Venable, Supervising Attorney at the Bronx Defenders and Director of Membership for the Black Public Defender’s Association.

  Related Resources

  • Privilege and Punishment: How Race and Class Matter in Criminal Court by Matthew Clair
  • Matthew Clair and Amanda Woog, Courts and the Abolitionist Movement, 110 Cal. L. Rev. (forthcoming 2022)
  • Unequal Before the Law: How did we end up with our current system of public defenders? by Matthew Clair, The Nation (December 14, 2020)
  • Alexis Hoag, Black on Black Representation, 96 NYU L. Rev. (forthcoming 2021)
  • Shaun Ossei-Owusu The Sixth Amendment Façade: The Racial Evolution of the Right to Counsel, 167 U. Pa. L. Rev. 1161 (2019)
  • Do Public Defenders Spend Less Time on Black Clients?, by Maurice Chammah, The Marshall Project (May 2, 2016) (there are some studies, etc. within this article to look at as well)
  • Andrea Lyon, Racial Bias and the Importance of Consciousness for Criminal Defense Attorneys, 35 Seattle U. L. Rev. 755 (2012)
  • L. Song Richardson and Phillip A. Goff, Implicit Bias in Public Defender Triage, 122 Yale L.J. (2013)
  • Gonçalves, Walter, Narrative, Culture, and Individuation: A Criminal Defense Lawyer’s Race-Conscious Approach to Reduce Implicit Bias for Latinxs, 18 Seattle J. Social Just. 333 (2019)
  • Race Matters: The Impact of Race on Criminal Justice (2017) (free video content)
  • Race Matters II: The Impact of Race on Criminal Justice (2019) (free video content)
  • Race Matters III: The Intersection of Race and Criminal Justice (2020) (recorded CLE product)
  • Black Public Defender Association, follow on Twitter: @BPDA_Justice
  • Principles for Creating Sustainability in Public Defense, National Association for Public Defense (March 2021)
• Policing Black Bodies II: Race and Pretrial Practices
  
  An important discussion on the ways in which systemic racism manifests itself in the pretrial process and how we can work towards change.

  Presented by sociologists Dr. Angela Hattery and Dr. Earl Smith; Cherise Fanno Burdeen, Executive Partner, Pretrial Justice Institute; Vincent Southerland, Executive Director, Center on Race, Inequality, and the Law, NYU School of Law; moderated by attorney Robert Patillo

  More Resources

  • Mapping Pretrial Injustice: A Community-Driven Database
  • "Machine Bias" by Julia Angwin, Jeff Larson, Surya Mattu and Lauren Kirchner, ProPublica (May 23, 2016)
  • Speech by Mitch Landrieu Addressing Removal of Confederate Statutes, May 19, 2017
  • Confederacy: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, Oct. 8, 2017
  • Black Lives Matter Statement, Pretrial Justice Institute, 2020
  • Updated Position on Pretrial Risk Assessment Tools, Pretrial Justice Institute, Feb. 7, 2020
  • A Racial Equity Transformation: PJI's Rationale, July 2019
  • See more attached

  Books

  • Policing Black Bodies: How Black Lives are Surveilled and How to Work for Change (2018)
  • The Process is the Punishment by Malcolm M. Feeley (1979)
  • Pulled Over: How Police Stops Define Race and Citizenship by Charles R. Epp, Steven Maynard-Moody, and Donald P. Haider-Markel (2014)
  • Predict and Surveil by Sarah Brayne (2020)
  • Misdemeanorland by Issa Kohler-Hausmann (2018)
  • Are Prisons Obsolete by Angela Y. Davis (2003)
  • Crook County: Racism and Injustice in America's Largest Criminal Court by Nicole Gonzalez Van Cleve (2016)
• Policing Black Bodies: A Discussion on Race and the Criminal Justice System
  
  This conversation examines the ways in which the chattel slavery system of America’s early history manifests itself in the variety of ways in which Black people are literally and symbolically policed today.

  Presented by sociologists Dr. Angela Hattery and Dr. Earl Smith, moderated by attorney Robert Patillo

  Resources

  • Policing Black Bodies: How Black Lives are Surveilled and How to Work for Change by Drs. Angela Hattery and Earl Smith
  • White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack by Peggy McIntosh
  • See more attached