Almost half of all African American men have been arrested by age 23. One in three have a felony conviction. More than 500,000 are currently incarcerated. Professor Paul Butler knows this, because as a former federal prosecutor, it was his job to lock up black men. But Butler, a black man, is well aware that his own resume (which also includes Georgetown Law professor and a J.D. from Harvard) hasn’t insulated him from police bias.
When James Forman Jr., a former Georgetown Law and current Yale Law faculty member, was working as a public defender in Washington, D.C., in the 1990s, he represented a 15-year-old client named Brandon who had pled guilty to gun and marijuana possession. Forman was requesting probation; the prosecutor wanted Brandon sent to Oak Hill, D.C.’s now-notorious juvenile facility. The judge chose Oak Hill — to Forman’s fury. The same racial injustice that motivated him to become a public defender, he realized, was being used to lock his client away.
It was the latest roll call for 18 Washington, D.C., Metropolitan Police Department officers and civilian personnel participating in a pioneering Georgetown Law-MPD joint fellowship program — and the first for 26 more set to walk the new beat.
In 1776, as British forces were landing in New York during the Revolutionary War, Harvard University moved classes to Concord, Massachusetts, and Yale moved to Hartford County.
Michael Brown. Eric Garner. Tamir Rice. Walter Scott. Freddie Gray. Sam DuBose. Alton Sterling. Philando Castile. Terence Crutcher.
“[These] are just some of the names on a long list of unarmed black boys and men who were killed by police officers…
Sonja Sohn, who played a Baltimore police detective in the HBO series “The Wire,” spent a lot of time filming in that city. After Freddie Gray died from the injuries he received in police custody in 2015, Sohn wanted to do something to help the community…
For the 50th anniversary of the landmark 1967 Supreme Court decision, Georgetown Law Professor Sheryll Cashin has published Loving: Interracial Intimacy in America and the Threat to White Supremacy (Beacon Press).
Loving v. Virginia, popularized in…
Paul Butler, the Albert Brick Professor at Georgetown Law, is in the spotlight with a book published by The New Press on July 11. We sat down with Butler, a former federal prosecutor with scholarly expertise in criminal law and racial justice, to discuss…
First study focused on “adultification” of black girls shows significant bias toward girls starting at age 5, younger than in previous research on black boys
Laura Moy — deputy director of Georgetown Law’s Center on Privacy & Technology — began a landmark conference at Georgetown Law on U.S. government surveillance of immigrants by reading from the Ninth Circuit’s recent decision striking down the…
