by Raj Jayadev (This piece originally ran in the Huffington Post)

Kalief Browder

To call the death of 22-year-old Kalief Browder a suicide is not the full truth. Kalief Browder may have hung himself, but he was killed by the brokenness of our court system.

The story of his short life, told by Jennifer Gonnerman in The New Yorker last year, chronicles the horrors of a 16-year-old who was charged for a stealing a backpack, sent to the isolation and brutality of Rikers Island prison for three years, only for the charge to eventually be dropped by the prosecutor. Follow up articles report that Kalief was so profoundly haunted from his mental and physical abuse inside that upon his release, he was hospitalized and told his mother, “I can’t take it anymore.” Ultimately, he hung himself with an air-conditioner cord at his home this June.

The ubiquity of his name online is a different sort of morbid hashtag. It seems social media adds a new name every week of an African-American killed by police, with a hashtag prefix added on. The names we are familiar with — #MichaelBrown, #TamirRice, #FreddieGray — point to obvious culprits and have fueled a new national movement for police accountability and reform. But the #KaliefBrowder name points to a less talked about, yet as his case shows, equally lethal injustice. Continue reading →

Check out the latest piece by Jonathan Rapping of Gideon’s Promise…

As the nation finally awakens to the reality of our broken criminal justice system, a long overdue conversation about how to reform it has emerged. But the solutions being proposed are destined to fall short, as they focus exclusively on changing policies while the challenge demands a transformation of hearts and minds. Until we recognize the need to tackle the problem of culture, and focus on how we can build a movement to change it, equal justice will remain an illusion.

The assumptions driving our current criminal justice system have been forged by a narrative honed over four decades that has cast poor communities of color as dangerous and persuaded us to adopt policies that made it easier to monitor, control, and punish these other-ized populations. Continue reading →

We were very grateful for David Bornstein’s thoughtful and comprehensive article on the growth and potential of participatory defense. His New York Times column is called “Fixes, which looks at solutions to social problems and why they work.” Check it out!

Guiding Families to a Fair Day in Court
By DAVID BORNSTEIN, NEW YORK TIMES

…Today, Jayadev says, when a loved one is arrested, the most that many families feel they can do is hope for a good lawyer. Participatory defense expands their sense of agency. And if the goal is to build the political will to end mass incarceration, he says, “This seems like the most natural mass movement building approach — because it is about people seeing their own power in their own communities, as intimate as the fate of their own families.” CLICK HERE TO READ MORE>>>

In case you missed it, De-Bug/ACJP was featured in a front page story in the New York Times for our social biography video concept. Check it out:

A Flattering Biographical Video as the Last Exhibit for the Defense
By STEPHANIE CLIFFORD, NEW YORK TIMES, MAY 24, 2015

GILROY, Calif. — About 3,000 miles from New York, members of a camera crew gathered around Anthony Quijada, trying to do for their not-famous, not-rich client what some high-priced lawyers are doing for theirs in New York courts: Make a video that can keep him out of prison.

Lawyers are beginning to submit biographical videos when their clients are sentenced, and proponents say they could transform the process. Defendants and their lawyers already are able to address the court before a sentence is imposed, but the videos are adding a new dimension to the punishment phase of a prosecution.

Judges “never knew the totality of the defendant” before seeing these videos, said Raj Jayadev, one of the people making the video of Mr. Quijada, who lives in this Northern California city of about 52,000 people. “All they knew was the case file.” CLICK HERE TO GO TO FULL NEW YORK TIMES ARTICLE>>>