A New Breed Of Judges?

Public Defenders are experts in rehabilitation — just what California law now calls for

In 2022, Ketanji Brown Jackson was sworn in as the first federal public defender to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court, and here in LA County, Holly Hancock became the first Black public defender to be elected as a superior court judge. She ran as part of a slate called “The Defenders of Justice,” launched by La Defensa, Ground Game LA and criminal justice reform organizers. This year, three more public defenders are running as Defenders of Justice — Ericka Wiley, La Shae Henderson and George Turner. Their emphasis — shifting from a one-size-fits-all, punishment-based model to an individualized, rehabilitative model — is aligned with statewide and local changes over the past decade that have received strong majority support at the polls, but have yet to be fully felt in courtrooms where harmful, counter-productive life-altering decisions routinely continue to be made.

“Over the past 50 years, California has constructed 23 prisons and only three colleges,” Turner’s website notes. “However, a growing number of individuals, including myself, believe that we need to break free from the cycle of custody.”

It’s a shocking statistic, and here’s another: California’s prison population increased 900% from the 1970s to its 2010s peak. It’s come down since, as new laws have redefined or eliminated certain criminal offenses, reduced sentences, expanded opportunities for pretrial diversion and release, and dedicated funding to community programs and alternatives to incarceration. Underlying all these changes is a shift away from a one-size-fits-all, punishment approach, which took over in the 1970s, to a modern version of the individual-specific, rehabilitative approach, which had been California policy and law for more than 50 years before then. But while the law has changed significantly, too many judges have not.

“The law has changed a lot,” Turner told Random Lengths. “But when you walk into the average courtroom things haven’t changed. And I think that part of the reason why things haven’t changed is because you have bench officers who think of mass incarceration as the way of the world.”

In part, it’s a matter of background: 78% of LA County judges are former prosecutors, whose experience is radically different from public defenders. All combined, Wiley, Henderson and Turner have more than half a century of experience doing the kind of work that’s become increasingly central to California’s new criminal justice policy. In November 2020, for example, LA County voters passed Measure J, mandating 10% of locally-generated unrestricted funds be allocated to community investments and alternatives to incarceration. Implementation has been held back by a lawsuit before it was upheld by an appeals court last July.

A 2021 survey of 724 LA County crime victims found that even they supported such a shift in focus at the prosecutorial level. When asked specifically, “Which of the following should be a prosecutor’s primary goal?” only 25% said “Prosecuting crimes to get as many convictions and prison sentences as possible,” while 69% said, “Solving neighborhood problems and stopping repeat crimes through prevention and rehabilitation, even if it means fewer convictions.” So a similar shift in orientation by judges is clearly what the public wants. And it’s precisely what the Defenders of Justice have years of experience with.

“I’ve been doing criminal justice reform before it really had a name. This has really been my entire career working on behalf of individuals to improve their lives, so that they can get out of this system better and not worse,” Wiley told Random Lengths. “Even on days when I would be denied 20 times in a row, I always advocated for, in the appropriate case, for programs for mentally ill clients, programs for drug-addicted clients, options for housing for my unhoused clients. It’s the work I’ve been doing for 20 years.”

The majority of public defender clients fall into one or more of these categories. “Being able to identify the circumstances that bring someone before a court and then changing those circumstances is key,” Turner underscored.

“We have seen as a society that the old ways of doing things hasn’t made anything better for any of us — certainly not criminal defendants, and victims are not made whole or better by putting people in cages, who return to our society untreated,” Wiley stressed.

“I’ve seen what works for clients in terms of getting mental health treatment, in terms of getting help with their drug addiction, in terms of putting in place systems that address their homelessness. These things work. Mass incarceration has not. So that’s really what my experience has taught me, and I why I am seeking to expand the work that I’ve done to work for the community as a Superior Court judge.”

The Defenders’ Vision

But while the laws have changed significantly, courtroom practice has lagged, which is why candidates like Turner, Henderson and Wiley can play such an important, life-changing role. While their stories and personalities differ, they share a common orientation of coming from the communities they wish to serve, and a history of giving back to them.

Henderson has a particular orientation toward youth that springs in part from her family history. Public defenders first deal with misdemeanors, then felonies, then juvenile cases. Here, she recalled, “You’re seeing what they’re going through. My heart really goes out to them…. I lost my parents at a very young age. So, my brother went through the court system, and he was having mental health issues, so I have a lot of passion for children,” she explained. “So then I worked as a youth minister, because I thought, ‘You know what? Why don’t I get ahead of this before they come to court? Why don’t I talk to them and encourage them to stay out of the system, and find out what they’re going through, encourage them to get help ahead of time?’” After five years as a youth minister, she returned to juvenile court work at the public defender’s office for another five years.

“The focus that I have as a PD is making sure that every client is treated with fairness, that they get quality representation, that their voice is heard,” Henderson explained. “So I would take a lot of time with each client to see what their background is, to see if I need to have an expert appointed, is there a program that they qualify for, or are there any programs that are out there that could help them? Is there a way for me to get them on diversion? So each client I take time with and really cultivate the case.” Two large-scale multi-decade studies — one in Texas, the other in Massachusetts — have found that simply declining to prosecute misdemeanor cases actually reduces the likelihood of further criminal activity. So providing programs like Henderson works to clearly benefit society as well as her individual clients.

Wiley’s background story is somewhat different. “I was raised in south-central Los Angeles by a single mother who was a fighter and did everything she could to protect, educate and grow children who would give back to the community,” she said. She was one of six children, including a younger sister who’s a surgeon, and a brother, Kehinde Wiley, who’s the artist who painted Barack Obama’s portrait that hangs in the Smithsonian institute.

Wiley attended college at Fisk University, a historically Black university in Nashville, Tennessee, and then law school at the University of Cincinnati, after which, following her mother’s values, she took a volunteer position with the Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles, doing eviction defense, and community economic development, and then a supplemental part-time job at a residential facility for teen mothers “who were part of either delinquency or a dependency system here in Los Angeles … and this is where my interest for helping individuals in court day by day really took root.” She would transport them to their court hearings, “And I was really struck to see decisions being made about these young women’s lives in an instant. It seemed like there was very little information that the judge or even the attorneys on either side had about the young girl in that moment, but they made life-changing decisions, and that’s where it became very clear to me that people in our court system — marginalized communities, marginalized people — needed someone on their side.”

Which is why she became a public defender — first, for a year in Merced County, then back in LA after a hiring freeze was lifted. “I love this work. … This work has allowed me to advocate on behalf of people, to see the causes of crime, what worked in our criminal justice system and what has not,” she said. “The system of mass incarceration, which has been embedded in our system for many years, in my experience has not and does not work. I spent the first 10 years of my career with the public defender here in LA begging for judges to not send my indigent, mentally ill, drug addicted and often homeless clients — who make up the largest population, those three categories make up the largest population of my clients — to prison for life or multiple double-digit years for crimes like petty theft, possession of small amount of cocaine or crack cocaine.”

At the time, the law “made it really difficult for judges who even wanted to do the right thing to do that,” so she would never have considered becoming a judge. “But I’ve seen a change in LA County, I’ve seen a change of voters [who] want to see thoughtful criminal justice reform. We’ve recognized that putting people in cages for the last several years has not made us any safer,” nor has it “inspired confidence in our court system,” she noted. “So I see a change. … I want to be a part of that change.”

Personal Histories and Professional Paths

“The most important thing” about Turner’s background, he said, “Is that I’m born and raised in Inglewood, California during the height of mass incarceration, and that I have direct experiences, both personal and professional with it.” In contrast to Wiley going to Fisk, “I chose to go to UCLA right on the cusp of Proposition 209,” which “effectively ended affirmative action in public schools in California,” Turner recalled. He was one of less than 100 Black male students, not on athletic scholarships, out of a class over 3000. “So I went there to fight and organize and be that front line of defense for us,” he explained.

There, “Cheryl Harris, who wrote Whiteness As Property, very famous scholar in race and class, was my freshman seminar professor,” and “It was amazing to me. … I took a bunch of the classes with her, and I studied race, class and gender extensively with her,” and then went on to UCLA law school, “the only school in the country at the time that had a critical race studies program.” But once he got there it was a shock. “I went to law school to change society, to change the world, and when I sat in on the first set of classes, it was like, ‘No. We are going to tell you why the world, why it’s fair that the world is the way it is. We’re going to normalize inequity.’”

Turner was considering quitting law school when he met a public defender at a lawyer panel on criminal law. “He said, ‘You know, you ever see kids who have, you been driving down the street, and saw the police pull over two young people of color and they have them sitting on the side of the road? Well, I’m the person who represents those people.’ And I thought ‘My God, I’ve been the person who’s been sitting on the side of the road. I’ve had that experience often. And I’d love to be the one who’s fighting for them, and being a zealous advocate for them.’”

That’s what led him to finish law school and become a public defender, after which, “I’m always working in and around communities where I’m very familiar. I’ve worked in Inglewood, Compton, Airport. These are all courthouses that I could almost see from my house,” he recounted. “This is not my neighborhood in theory, I’m not helping the community in theory, I’m literally helping my community.”

Most recently, he’s headed a 12-person unit of public defenders called the homeless mobile unit. “Our specific edict is to clear the criminal records of our unhoused neighbors,” he explained. Originally the model was to go to encampments, but that wasn’t very effective, so “Now what we do is we go to community-based programs where unhoused folks come get resources, whether it be the drivers license, or toiletries, or shower, or some food, or some clothes. … At our table, we have printers, wireless modems, our laptops, and we do everything at the table.” Previously there were all sorts of barriers to clearing criminal records, which in turn were a barrier to employment and housing — a barrier keeping them unhoused. Now almost all those barriers have been dropped, but “It is a huge challenge, because we’re talking about, you know, conservatively 65,000 people in Los Angeles County who are unhoused and it’s about 12 of us. So, we also work with community-based organizations who are also doing this expungement work.”

Priorities for Change

Turner lists three “top priorities” if elected. First is “Expanding the breadth and depth of alternatives to incarceration,” bringing a wider range of community-based organizations that provide alternatives into the system, and giving them “more of a say in the everyday running of these sort of programs.”

His second top priority is “To faithfully apply the law, including those that are aimed at decreasing the number of those incarcerated,” starting with pre-trial release or detention depending on public safety, rather than cash bail, then rehabilitative alternatives to incarceration, and finally clearing criminal records.

His third priority is “Reforming the judiciary: updating court procedures,” which might sound utterly boring, but is really quite crucial, from the slow speed of court proceedings — “the fact that we are still using paper in 2024 as opposed to doing electronic filings” — to the underfunding of experts needed to do evaluations. “You know we have the same number of experts that we’ve had since the ’90s,” Turner explained, “And this is despite the fact we have increases in the number of alternatives to incarceration. So you would think that now that mental health has become a huge issue, you’d have more psychologists, more psychiatrists and we have the same number.”

Implementing Reform

In a sense, it’s all a matter of belatedly bringing the system into the 21st century.

“I would say our lower-level cases, there’s been a lot of changes,” Henderson reflected. “What’s not working is that we have these old ideologies and people are stuck in their ways. …. There’s a lot of systematic things that are not working,” she said. “We also need to pour into the lives of the litigants that come in on criminal cases, encourage them that they can rebuild, that this is a village. This is not something where we’re ostracizing them, that this is an opportunity for them to heal and change. So we have the laws on the books, but we need the courtrooms to start implementing them on a more standard basis.

As an example, she cited a case where a woman had five misdemeanor charges for violating a restraining order. “The facts basically were that she was going back to this family member’s house, but she was very mentally ill. That was the last person she remembered. So she kept going back. So I had to talk to the court and say ‘You know it makes no sense to put her on probation on five cases and this woman is not healthy.’ So I worked with the mental health worker and she found a program for her.” In the end, “The judge in that case dismissed the four other cases and just put her on probation in that one case and gave her the program.”

It’s eminently sensible when you let the facts be your guide, Henderson argues. “Each case really needs to be examined with what’s needed and if we can get the person help, then they won’t be back with a felony,” she said. “Because, you see, if you get a misdemeanor and you’re mentally ill and they just push you out. Then you come back again and now it’s a felony because now you’re fighting this now. You’re becoming more aggressive because you were not able to process the emotions you have, and it starts to escalate over time.”

That’s precisely the kind of counter-productive cycle that’s been so pervasive for far too long. And that’s just what the Defenders of Justice are determined to end.