Appleseed Staffer Attends Chicago Movement Lawyering Retreat

On July 15th and 16th, I was lucky enough to participate in a “Movement Lawyering Retreat” for Chicago attorneys and activists. The retreat was a small collection of lawyers and organizers brought together by two dedicated individuals: Candace Moore and Quinn Rallins. Their idea is to ultimately bui...
July 27, 2016

ACS Report on Judicial Diversity

The American Constitution Society recently released a report, The Gavel Gap, on the demographics of state court judges, highlighting the discrepancies among the demographics of our communities, law school graduates, and judges on the bench. Overall, the report finds that courts are not representativ...
July 21, 2016

Field Testing in Drug Arrests

Earlier this month, both The New York Times and The Marshall Project ran excellent stories on how a roadside field tests for drugs can return false positives that send innocent people to jail or even cause them to plead guilty when they did not possess drugs. The articles highlighted alarming uses o...
July 13, 2016

Chicago Appleseed at NACM 2016 presenting on Criminal Justice Reform

At this year's National Association of Case Management (NACM) conference in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (July 10-14) Ali Abid, Senior Criminal Justice Policy Analyst at Chicago Appleseed Fund for Justice and Peter Coolsen, Court Administrator for the Criminal Division of the Circuit Court of Cook Count...
July 11, 2016

New Book Looks at Racial Injustice in the Cook County Courts

On May 11th, Nicole Gonzalez Van Cleve spoke at University of Chicago’s School of Social Service Administration about her new book, Crook County: Racism and Injustice in America’s Largest Criminal Court. (Stanford Law Books). Before a packed auditorium, Van Cleve, a Temple University criminal justic...
June 8, 2016