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Open Society-U.S.’s Soros Justice Fellowships fund outstanding individuals to undertake projects that advance reform, spur debate, and catalyze change on a range of issues facing the U.S. criminal legal system.
We are taking a moment to pause and analyze the future of our three U.S. based fellowship programs. This means we will not be issuing a call for proposals for 2025 fellows, as we would have done this fall.
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Andrea Keilen
2004Keilen will research and expose prosecutorial misconduct in the Texas criminal justice system and produce a comprehensive evaluation of statistical and anecdotal evidence of deliberate attempts by prosecutors to circumvent the law. -
Andrea Marsh
2004To protect indigent defense in Texas by monitoring the state's Fair Defense Act, which requires judges to meet certain minimum standards when appointing qualified counsel. Through outreach and public education, Marsh will work with county... -
Arwen Bird
2004Bird, paralyzed in a car crash caused by a drunk driver, will mobilize crime survivors in Washington state and Nevada to break down the dichotomy between victims and offenders, and to work towards safer communities and a more humane, effective... -
Cheryl Graves
2004To work with community and juvenile court leaders to organize, train, educate, and advocate for juvenile justice reform in two high-crime urban areas in Chicago. -
Clive Stafford Smith
2004To organize a coalition to promote enforcement of constitutional and human rights in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba (home of a U.S. military base and prison); to produce a best-practices manual for litigating the cases before military commissions; and to... -
David Dent
2004To write a book about his elementary school classmate who is serving a life sentence in a New York state prison. Dent will explore how underfunded mental health services in middle and low-income minority communities impact crime rates, the... -
David Feige
2004To write and record a series of commentaries on National Public Radio and to complete a book about indigent defense drawing on the voices of public defenders and low-income defendants. -
Emily Bazelon
2004To write articles about the shifting balance of power among judges, juries, and prosecutors in sentencing defendants to make federal sentences more punitive. -
Ernest Drucker
2004To develop a public health model for understanding the deleterious impact and social consequences of mass incarceration, particularly on urban communities throughout the United States. -
Kerry Cook
2004Cook spent 22 years on death row in Texas for a crime he did not commit. In 1999, he was exonerated with DNA evidence. He will write a memoir detailing his experience as an innocent person wrongfully convicted and the critical need for national... -
Leslie Neale
2004To complete and conduct outreach around her documentary film Juvies, about juveniles being prosecuted, convicted, and sentenced to adult prisons in California. -
Margaret Love
2004To research state and federal procedures for the restoration of rights after criminal convictions. She will analyze how effective these policies are and will lay the groundwork for a national effort to eliminate legal barriers to prisoner re-entry... -
Mary Beth Pfeiffer
2004To investigate the growth of the mentally ill prison population in various states and to examine treatment options and opportunities for reform. -
Maurice Emsellem
2004To help educate and engage labor unions impacted by the spread of employment screening for criminal records after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks–a trend that increasingly denies jobs to formerly incarcerated people. -
Melissa Bradley
2004To integrate employment programs for formerly incarcerated people into mainstream economic development and to encourage investments from the business community to meet the employment needs of the over 600,000 people returning home from prison each year. -
Neelum Arya
2004To address through investigation, direct legal advocacy, and mobilizing youth and their families California's law that funnels young people into the adult criminal justice system (a result of Proposition 21). Arya will work to prevent youth... -
O. Grace Bankole
2004To organize parents to reduce the number of imprisoned children in Louisiana, to advocate for their incarcerated children, and to train a group of Parent Advocates that serve as statewide resources for other families involved in the justice system. -
Richard Leo and Tom Wells
2004To complete a study on a multiple-false-confession murder case in Virginia that led to the wrongful conviction of four innocent men. -
Richard Schmechel
2004To further educate defense attorneys in the District of Columbia to fully understand DNA technology with the goal of bringing reliable science into the courtroom to better protect the innocent. -
Roberta Franklin
2004To conduct a public education campaign and mobilize grassroots groups in four cities in Alabama around sentencing reform, improved conditions in corrections facilities, and alternatives to incarceration. -
Steve Liss
2004To document, through photography and audio recordings, the experiences of incarcerated children, their families, and correction facilities staff members. -
Alexander Lee
2003Alexander Lee will alleviate the abuse of transgender and gender variant prisoners in California by providing alternative sentencing and mitigation services to those detained in the San Francisco Bay Area. -
Andrea Keilen
2003Andrea Keilen will research and expose prosecutorial misconduct in the Texas criminal justice system and produce a comprehensive evaluation of statistical and anecdotal evidence of deliberate attempts by prosecutors to circumvent the law. -
Andrea Marsh
2003Andrea Marsh will protect indigent defense in Texas by monitoring the state's Fair Defense Act (FDA), which requires judges to meet certain minimum standards when appointing qualified counsel. Through outreach and public education, Marsh will work... -
Arwen Bird
2003Arwen Bird, paralyzed in a car crash caused by a drunk driver, will mobilize crime survivors in Washington state and Nevada to break down the dichotomy between victims and offenders and work towards safer communities and a more humane, effective...
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