Current Projects
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An effort to educate voters about the role that politics plays in the criminal justice system, research and analyze the backgrounds and policy positions of political candidates for criminal justice offices, support or oppose certain candidates for office, and develop accountability frameworks for elected officials.
Read: 2024 Denver DA Voter Guide and Candidate Analysis
Project Status: Launched
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The name speaks for itself: a collective of lawyers litigating cases carefully selected and designed to remedy and stop harmful practices by criminal justice agencies.
Project Status: Launched
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Through a combination of lawyer training and development of/support for strategic professional relationships, this project is designed to ensure access to counsel for victims in all appropriate cases.
Project Status: Project Design
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This research project will tackle the difficult work of examining the multiple causality of criminal conduct. By bringing together theoretical modeling and fact-based, jurisdiction-specific crime data, we will create a foundation for policymakers to create sensical criminal justice policy.
Project Status: Project Design
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This collaborative effort is designed to develop a rigorously researched and tested model for examining the voluntariness of plea bargains in the U.S. criminal justice system. Once developed, we will work with individual jurisdictions to implement this model both to evaluate past cases to determine whether post-conviction relief is warranted to correct a sentence obtained via coercive plea bargaining and to guide the negotiation of plea deals moving forward.
Project Status: Project Design
Past Projects
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In recent years, some prison administrators in the U.S. have advocated that we incarcerate people as they do in Norway. This PR campaign disregards the meaningful differences between the social, legal, and political structures of Norway as compared with the U.S. This research project examined whether there are any prosecutorial reforms to be developed and implemented in U.S. jurisdictions that are inspired by the Norwegian prosecution system. Follow the development of this research here.
Project Status: Completed (June 2023)
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This reading group invited anyone with an interest in learning more about the criminal justice system to join monthly meetings to discuss full- length books covering a range of crihinal justice topics. Participants had the opportunity to share their reflections about the book, while group leader Lisi Owen gave a brief presentation about relevant legal background. In many sestions, we engaged in a collaborative visioning exercise to problem-solve criminal justice issues.
Project Status: Completed For Now (November 2023)