Blog

The rate of evictions and homelessness in America have been exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. I began writing about the rate of evictions and their disproportionate impact on people of color starting last year on July 19, 2020 and additionally on March 7, 2021, Read more

In November 2020, I wrote a newsletter focused on the issue of cash bail and ways to reform pretrial justice. But until I read Emily Brazelon’s Charged: The New Movement to Transform American Prosecution and End Mass Incarceration I didn’t know about the role of prosecutors in pretrial detention for those...

The number of people incarcerated in the U.S. has quintupled since the 1980’s to a total of almost 2.2 million people. Our level of imprisonment is five to ten times higher than that of other liberal democracies—nine times Germany’s and seven times France’s. Our justice system has begun to operate as a system of injustice,...

Darnella Frazier, the 18-year-old teen whose video of Derek Chauvin kneeling on George Floyd's neck contributed to Chauvin's conviction, taught us all an important lesson: it isn't enough to be an innocent bystander. We are witnessing a spike in acts of disrespect, harassment and hate violence in this country. As citizens, we need to take a...

Last week I wrote about Critical Race Theory (CRT)—what it is, how it developed, the current debate about CRT, and the way teachers are being caught in the middle of a culture war. Following the killing of George Floyd last year, schools across the country have worked to address systemic racism and the systemic barriers that...

Image by Katty Huertas for The Washington Post

Newspapers, news shows, and the internet have been inundated with comments about critical race theory (CRT for short) in recent months. Detractors have claimed that the academic movement is “planting hatred of America in the minds of the next generation” and that it teaches children “to...

With the 2021 Olympic Games wrapping up today, I’ve watched more sports in the last two weeks than I have in the last two years. I revel at the mastery, courage, stamina, dedication, and determination of these international athletes, rooting primarily for the Americans. For decades, Black parents have told their children that in order to...

On June 29^th the Supreme Court ruled in a 5-4 decision that the eviction moratorium could be extended only to July 31^st to give the Treasury Department and the states time to disburse cash to landlords to cover back rent owed by tenants during the pandemic. The Court ruled that future extension of the moratorium would...

BACKGROUND - THE RIGHT TO COUNSEL

In June, 1961, Clarence Earl Gideon was charged with a felony for allegedly burglarizing a pool hall in Panama City, Florida. At his first trial, he was denied his request for a court-appointed attorney. Prosecutors produced witnesses who saw Gideon outside the pool hall near the time of the break-in,...

An 1851 poster warning of police acting as slave catchers

I’ve continued to read The New York Times magazine of August 18, 2019—The 1619 Project. One of the poems contained in the project is a redacted version of the first Fugitive Slave Act, signed into law on February 12, 1793 by George Washington. Below is a...