Alex Bunin is the Chief Public Defender for Harris County, Texas, an office he established in 2010. Previously, he was the Federal Public Defender for the Northern District of New York. In 1999, he was appointed by the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit to establish Federal Public Defender offices in the Districts of Northern New York and Vermont and he was twice reappointed to additional four-year terms. He sits on the Advisory Board of THE CHAMPION magazine and the CRIMINAL JUSTICE MAGAZINE of the American Bar Association. He served on the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers’ Board of Directors (2012-15), Executive Committee (2013-14), and committees on Federal Rules, Forensic Sciences, and Fourth Amendment Advocacy. He is Vice-Chair of the Texas Criminal Defense Lawyers Association’s Public Defender Committee and a Senior Fellow of the American Leadership Forum. As well as having written law review articles on federal sentencing and the death penalty, he is co-author of O’CONNOR’S FEDERAL CRIMINAL RULES & CODES (Jones McClure 2016).

Brendon Woods is the first African American Public Defender in Alameda County history. Woods leads 160 attorneys, investigators, and support staff, operating out of five branches throughout the County, to provide superior legal defense in more than 3,300 new files monthly. In 2013, his office was named Law Office of the Year by the Alameda County Bar Association. Brendon is a nationally recognized leader and innovator in public defense. He was recently sworn in as the President of the California Public Defenders Association and was honored with the Harvard Law School Wasserstein Public Interest Fellowship for his outstanding public service accomplishments. He shares his expertise at speaking engagements around the country and is considered an expert on many subjects associated with public defense, including holistic representation, racial profiling, community empowerment, police reform, and models of immigration representation.

James Forman Jr. is J. Skelly Wright Professor of Law at Yale Law School. He attended public schools in Detroit and New York City before graduating from the Atlanta Public Schools. After attending Brown University and Yale Law School, he worked as a law clerk for Judge William Norris of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals and Justice Sandra Day O’Connor of the U.S. Supreme Court. After clerking, he joined the Public Defender Service in Washington, D.C., where for six years he represented both juveniles and adults charged with crimes.
During his time as a public defender, Professor Forman became frustrated with the lack of education and job training opportunities for his clients. So in 1997, along with David Domenici, he started the Maya Angelou Public Charter School, an alternative school for school dropouts and youth who had previously been arrested. A decade later, in 2007, Maya Angelou School expanded and agreed to run the school inside D.C.’s juvenile prison. That school, which had long been an abysmal failure, has been transformed under the leadership of the Maya Angelou staff; the court monitor overseeing D.C.’s juvenile system called the turnaround “extraordinary.”
Forman taught at Georgetown Law from 2003 to 2011, when he joined the Yale faculty. At Yale, he teaches Criminal Law and a seminar called Inside Out: Issues in Criminal Justice, in which Yale law students study alongside men and women incarcerated in state and federal prisons.
Professor Forman teaches and writes in the areas of criminal procedure and criminal law policy, constitutional law, juvenile justice, and education law and policy. His particular interests are schools, prisons, and police, and those institutions’ race and class dimensions. Professor Forman’s first book, Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America, was on many top 10 lists, including the New York Times’ 10 Best Books of 2017, and was awarded the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction.

Jonathan Rapping is a nationally renowned criminal justice innovator and 2014 MacArthur Foundation “Genius” Fellow, who moved from Washington, D.C. to Atlanta, because he found the injustice within our criminal justice system – particularly in the South – to be unacceptable. In 2007, Rapping founded Gideon’s Promise and began an initiative to change the public defense landscape across America by grooming a generation of public defenders – many of whom are often so overwhelmed by crushing caseloads that they are unable to provide their clients the representation the Constitution demands – to rise up and fight against the injustice within our justice system. In his quest to train and equip public defenders with the resources necessary to ensure all citizens receive their Constitutional right of “equal justice for all,” Rapping and his organization have become symbols of a new civil rights movement.

Josie Duffy Rice is a journalist and lawyer whose work is primarily focused on prosecutors, prisons, and other criminal justice issues. Currently, she is President of The Appeal, a news publication that publishes original journalism about the criminal justice system. Josie co-hosts the podcast Justice in America with Clint Smith. She is a 2019 Type Media Fellow, and a Civic Media Fellow at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg Innovation Lab. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Appeal, Slate, Gawker, Ebony, and Spook Mag, among others.

Khalil A. Cumberbatch currently serves Chief Strategist at New Yorkers United for Justice. He previously served as Associate Vice President of Policy at the Fortune Society, a reentry organization whose goal is to build people and not prisons; as well as Manager of Trainings at JustLeadershipUSA, a national non-profit dedicated to cutting the US correctional population in half by year 2030. He is also a lecturer at Columbia University School of Social Work. In December 2014, after being held for five months in immigration detention, Khalil was one of two recipients to receive an Executive Pardon from NYS Governor Andrew Cuomo to prevent his deportation from the United States.

Lara Bazelon is a writer and associate professor at the University of San Francisco School of Law, where she is the director of the Criminal Juvenile Justice and Racial Justice Clinics. A 2016 MacDowell Fellow and a 2017 Mesa Refuge Langeloth Fellow, she is the former director of the Loyola Law School Project for the Innocent. Bazelon is also a nonresident fellow with Brandeis University's Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, Atlantic, Washington Post, Politico, and Slate, where she is a contributing writer and has a long-running series about wrongful conviction cases.

Meenakshi "Meena" Ashley Harris is an American lawyer, tech-policy expert, political activist, and entrepreneur. On International Women's Day, March 8, 2017, she launched the Phenomenal Woman Action Campaign, a grassroots fundraising initiative that benefits women's organizations like Planned Parenthood and EMILY's List.

Rabia Chaudry is an attorney and a partner at the Chaudry and Anwer Immigration Law Firm based in Northern Virginia, where she supervises asylum cases and immigration appeals. She is well known as the co-host and co-producer of the hit criminal justice podcast Undisclosed and the political podcast The 45th, with nearly 300 million downloads combined. She is also the author of the NY Times Bestselling book, "Adnan's Story,” and Executive Producer of the Emmy-nominated HBO docuseries "The Case Against Adnan Syed".

Raj Jayadev is a community organizer creating a model of grassroots collective action that gives individuals facing incarceration, their families, and their communities an active role in their defense. Jayadev’s work in criminal justice reform has grown out of his social activism work with Silicon Valley De-Bug (De-Bug), an organization he co-founded in 2001. De-Bug began as a magazine about issues affecting low-wage manufacturing, temporary workers, and it has since evolved into a multidimensional platform for community organizing, social justice advocacy, and multimedia storytelling by low-income, minority, incarcerated, and other disenfranchised communities.

Samuel Sinyangwe, 27, is a policy analyst and data scientist who works with communities of color to fight systemic racism through cutting-edge policies and strategies. Samuel co-founded Mapping Police Violence to support activists across the country to collect and use data to fight police violence and co-founded Campaign Zero to advocate for local, state, and federal policy solutions to end police violence. Samuel has been featured on MSNBC, CNN, BBC, LA Times, the Forbes 30 under 30 and The Root 100. Previously, Samuel worked at PolicyLink to support a national network of 61 Promise Neighborhoods communities to build cradle-to-career systems of support for low-income families.

Soledad O’Brien is an award-winning journalist, speaker, author and philanthropist who anchors and produces the Hearst Television political magazine program “Matter of Fact with Soledad O’Brien.” O’Brien, founder and CEO of Starfish Media Group, also reports for HBO Real Sports, the PBS NewsHour, WebMD and has authored two books. She has appeared on networks, Fox and Oxygen and anchored and reported for NBC, MSNBC and CNN. She has won numerous awards, including three Emmys, the George Peabody award, an Alfred I DuPont prize and the Gracie. Newsweek Magazine named her one of the “15 People Who Make America Great.” With her husband, she is founder of the PowHERful Foundation that helps young women get to and through college.