Emily Bazelon, a staff writer for the New York Times Magazine and senior research fellow at Yale Law School, first became interested in the subject of criminal justice in the 1990s, when she met with a conservative district attorney in California.
At the time, the prosecutor was thinking of reforming a three-strikes law responsible for giving a homeless man a life sentence for unscrewing the door of a food pantry. Although the district attorney was focused on changing the law, Bazelon wondered if the homeless man’s case would have gone differently if it had landed on the desk of a different prosecutor.
This theme of the prosecutorial role in justice reform was central to a discussion held at Fordham Law on October 29 titled “Charged: The New Movement to Transform American Prosecution and End Mass Incarceration.”
Read the full story in Fordham Law News.
