What’s Really at Stake By now, it should be clear that in Texas, turning 17 changes everything. The same behavior, the same circumstances, the same child—placed in a different system, with different consequences. But for some children, the consequences don't stop at the courtroom door. I represented a 17-year-old who is not a U.S. citizen.… Continue reading The Case Doesn’t End in Court
A Brief Pause from the Trenches
Some weeks, the work doesn't leave much room for writing about the work. This is one of those weeks. The clients are real. The cases are moving. Court dates, phone calls, files that don't stop growing — this is the rhythm of indigent defense. You show up because someone has to. You keep moving because… Continue reading A Brief Pause from the Trenches
When Childhood Stops Counting: A Shoe, a Sleepover and the School-to-Prison Pipeline
Every parent knows how quickly a simple disagreement among kids can escalate. Take, for example, a recent case involving my client, a 17-year-old girl at a sleepover. She and another girl started arguing over a boy. Tempers flared, and in a moment of frustration, my client threw a shoe. The hosts asked her to leave.… Continue reading When Childhood Stops Counting: A Shoe, a Sleepover and the School-to-Prison Pipeline
Women Behind Bars: Seen, Named and Not Yet Free
This month we have shed light on women. And illuminating, if we are not careful, can become its own way of looking without seeing. When Michelle Alexander sat down to write what would become one of the most important books of our generation, she did so in the shadow of a historic moment. A Black… Continue reading Women Behind Bars: Seen, Named and Not Yet Free
Beyond Mercy
Women, the Death Penalty and a Story We're Just Starting to Tell We talk about capital punishment as if it has always been a man's story. The numbers suggest otherwise — but only if you know where to look. In 1632, Jane Champion became the first woman executed in the new colonies. She wasn't a… Continue reading Beyond Mercy
Women, Motherhood, and the State
The Punishment of Care: How Motherhood Shapes Women’s Experience in the System Motherhood is traditionally celebrated as care and nurturing. Yet within the criminal legal system, it paradoxically becomes a source of punishment and control. The system weaponizes motherhood to regulate women’s bodies, identities, and behavior, reinforcing social hierarchies and perpetuating systemic inequality. The system… Continue reading Women, Motherhood, and the State
The Gendered System
When a Courtroom Built for Men Tries to Process Women Every March, we celebrate Women’s History Month by lifting up women who shaped movements, broke barriers, and carried communities on their backs. Yet there’s a group of women whose stories rarely make it into commemorations — the women living inside the criminal legal system. Their… Continue reading The Gendered System
Black Resistance, Black Resilience, Black Care: The Future We’re Building Together
After three weeks of naming the harm — the design, the extraction, the quiet violence baked into the system — it would be easy to believe the story ends there. But Black history has never been only a record of what was done to us. It’s also a record of what we built anyway. What… Continue reading Black Resistance, Black Resilience, Black Care: The Future We’re Building Together
The Modern Courtroom: Chains You Don’t See
When Freedom Costs More Than a Conviction Last week, I wrote about what happens when mental illness and Blackness collide inside a jail — how crisis becomes criminalized, how symptoms become charges, how the system responds with punishment instead of care. But the exploitation doesn’t stop at the jail door. It follows people into the… Continue reading The Modern Courtroom: Chains You Don’t See
Treatment Denied, Arrest Delivered
When Mental Illness Meets Blackness Behind Bars When I wrote through January, I kept coming back to the same truth: so many of the in‑custody deaths we see begin long before anyone steps into a jail. They start with untreated mental illness, with crises that get met by police instead of clinicians, with families calling… Continue reading Treatment Denied, Arrest Delivered
On (In)justice 