Earlier this month,
Montgomery County Chief Public Defender Keir Bradford-Grey was invited to an Innovation Showcase during the American Bar Association’s National
Summit on Innovation in Legal Services in California to discuss her department’s
efforts to develop a community -oriented indigent defense program.
Montgomery County Courthouse |
I spoke with Bradford-Grey
last week about her experience.
“The summit was more than I
expected,” said Bradford-Grey, adding she left the summit with information
about the “creative ways” groups are providing access to justice for
under-served communities. “They were leveraging technology in ways that I never
believed was possible and as a result I came back with so much more of an open
mind about the possibilities of making our system more efficient, more
effective and more accessible.”
Bradford-Grey collaborated
with Raj Jayadev, coordinator of the Albert Cobarriubius Justice Project,
Silicon Valley De-Bug, who developed the so-called “participatory defense”
concept that involves families and communities of those facing criminal charges
in the defense process with the hope of gaining fairness and better outcomes
from the justice system. The defense concept, which Jayadev developed through
his community organization based in San Jose, Calif., is gaining national
attention.
“About seven years ago we started
an organizing model that we call participatory defense and what it is is an
organizing methodology for families whose loved ones were facing criminal
charges or their communities, meaning their churches and neighborhood
associations, about how they can have an impact on the outcome of cases of
their loved ones that were going through the court process,” Jayadev told me
during a recent interview. “Secondly, also have a broader impact on the
landscape of power of the court.”
Jayadev started with weekly
meetings, which Jayadev described as “half support group, half strategy
sessions,” where families learned how to become extensions of the legal defense
team for their family member going through the court system. The meetings are
often held in churches.
“We kind of crafted and honed
this practice that we developed from scratch and it started having a lot of
impact where we were seeing felonies reduced to misdemeanors, we were seeing
families help public defenders beat cases at trial or get charges totally
dismissed. We saw sentences being reduced dramatically,” Jayadev recalled,
adding families learned that by using their power, rather than sitting idly by
on the sidelines, they had a role they could play “and that actually there’s a
great potential partnership with public defenders who were often
under-resourced and overworked with caseloads.”
“We found what we think is a
really powerful collaboration between impacted communities and public defenders
to reduce incarceration and also allow families and communities to be a new
actor, to even hopefully, change policies in how local courts work,” Jayadev, a
community organizer, added.
Raj Jayadev/ Photo courtesy of Raj Jayadev |
While Jayadev said the idea
was independently developed by the AC Justice Project in California the
organization developed a partnership with the local public defender’s office in
San Jose.
“The background of the name,
the reason why I came up with ‘participatory defense,’ was I was going to a
number of indigent defense, public defense gatherings, and it was clear that
there was an ambition or a hope by public defender offices, the new guard so to
speak, to find a better way to deliver their services,” Jayadev, who is not a
lawyer, explained, adding over the years there have been advances in public
defense concepts like “holistic and client-centered” defense.
“But what I saw as a critical
missing part and where I thought our work could help reciprocate some of that
energy, as all of those advancements were about the behavior and activities of
the attorney, and as an organizer my question was how do we identify the
activities and the energies that could come from the families, the non-lawyers
themselves, who want to engage if only they knew how. So that’s why I called it
‘participatory defense,’” Jayadev said.
Jayadev now shares the participatory
defense approach with public defender offices nationwide at various
conferences. That’s how Bradford-Grey learned about participatory defense
several years ago and she reached out to Jayadev to assist her in devising a version
of the participatory defense model for Montgomery County.
“The notion of it all is based on what he was doing,” Bradford-Grey said. “I think he is an inspirational person because he is a champion in his own right. He really just wanted to help people. I really have a tremendous amount of respect for him.”
Montgomery County Chief Public Defender Keir Bradford-Grey Photo by Carl Hessler Jr. |
Earlier this year, Jayadev
attended a forum at Arcadia University where Bradford-Grey and her staff
unveiled her participatory defense plan to community organizations and civic
leaders.
“We had the forum and he
spoke to the people we invited,” Bradford-Grey said.
In addition to collaborating with Bradford-Grey in Montgomery County, Jayadev has worked on developing a pilot program in Birmingham, Ala. Other cities that have shown an interest in the principles of the participatory defense concept include St. Louis, Mo., and Lexington, Ky., Jayadev said.
Jayadev recently co-wrote a
law research paper with several scholars that examines the participatory
defense concept and justice reform.
“It sort of caught fire. The
legal community has really responded,” Jayadev said.
Jayadev said “people were
receptive” to the participatory defense concept he and Bradford-Grey discussed
during the summit.
“There’s interest. I think it
was exciting for people to see a truly unique collaboration,” said Jayadev,
between a forward-thinking public defender’s office and the organization that
developed the methodology.
Jayadev sees a great future
for participatory defense.
“I think what this idea is on
track to do is radically change criminal justice as we know it and in turn
dramatically reduce mass incarceration by introducing a new actor in the
discussion, which are families and communities of loved ones going through the
court process,” Jayadev said. “They’re the one agent that has never been asked
to participate and by inviting their participation I’m convinced that they have
the power to change criminal justice.”
It was interesting to learn more about this powerful public defense concept. I’ve covered the courts for more than 20 years and participatory defense is one of the most innovative concepts I've seen in criminal defense in a long time.
Kudos to Jayadev for his
innovative approach. I’ll continue to monitor Bradford-Grey’s plan and the grassroots
movement’s development here in Montgomery County.
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