SUMMARY

The protests against police killings during the summer of 2020 emphasized that race plays a critical role in understanding the nature of state-sanctioned violence. To date, much of the conversation regarding such violence has focused on Black and Latinx men. Nevertheless, there is much to be said about the topic as it relates to race and gender, particularly with respect to cis-women of color and trans women. Moreover, discussions regarding this issue often center around the actions of police, despite such violence also appearing in various law enforcement contexts such as, but not limited to, within prison walls and at border crossings.

To this end, the California Western Law Review is hosting a virtual symposium on March 24, 2022, for the purpose of facilitating a comprehensive discussion on the topic of state-inflicted race and gender violence against womxn in various law enforcement contexts. Ultimately, the goals of the symposium are to identify and bring awareness to critical legal issues underlying this topic and to consider the possibility of positive change for all womxn by adapting current law enforcement practices to incorporate features of restorative justice.

PANELS

Then and Now: Police Violence Against Black Womxn
•Dr. Delores Jones-Brown (Howard University & Randolph Macon College)
•Mary-Elizabeth Murphy, PhD (Eastern Michigan University)

The Use of Status Offenses as Raced and Gendered Exercises of State Violence
•Madalyn Wasilczuk, J.D. (University of South Carolina School of Law)
•Jyoti Nanda, J.D. (Golden Gate University)

Missing Black Women and the Chicago Police Department – A Case Study
•Chaclyn Hunt, J.D. (Invisible Institute at Chicago)
•Trina Reynolds-Tyler (Invisible Institute at Chicago)

KEYNOTE SPEAKER

Andrea Ritchie

Andrea Ritchie is a Black lesbian immigrant survivor who has been documenting, organizing, advocating, litigating, and agitating around policing and criminalization of Black women, girls, trans, and gender nonconforming people for the past three decades. She is the author of Invisible No More: Police Violence Against Black Women and Women of Color and co-author of  Say Her Name: Resisting Police Brutality Against Black Women, Queer (In)Justice: The Criminalization of LGBT People in the United States, and the forthcoming No More Police: A Case for Abolition. She co-founded the Interrupting Criminalization initiative with Mariame Kaba, as well as the In Our Names Network, a network of over 20 organizations working to end police violence against Black women, girls, trans and gender nonconforming people. She currently hosts the Invest/Divest Learning Communities at the Community Resource Hub, and supports dozens of organizations across the US working to divest from policing and invest in community safety. She has authored numerous research reports, articles, and opinion pieces on policing, criminalization, mass incarceration and immigration enforcement.

​She is a past member of the Movement for Black Lives Policy Table, and was a founding member of the Steering Committee of New York City's Communities United for Police Reform, a city-wide campaign to challenge discriminatory, unlawful and abusive policing practices in New York City led by grassroots community groups, legal organizations, policy advocates and researchers from all five boroughs. She was appointed to the New York City Council Young Women's Initiative in 2015, where she co-chaired the Anti-Violence and Criminalization Working Group. She was a 2014 Senior Soros Justice fellow, and a recent Senior Fellow at the Invisible Institute. 

​Ritchie was lead counsel in Tikkun v. City of New York, ground-breaking impact litigation challenging unlawful searches of transgender people in police custody, and drafted and negotiated sweeping changes to the NYPD’s policies for interactions with LGBTQ New Yorkers, and has since supported organizations and law enforcement agencies across the country in developing policies around police interactions with women and LGBTQ people. She also served as co-counsel to the Center for Constitutional Rights in Doe v. Jindal, a successful challenge to Louisiana’s requirement that individuals convicted of “crime against nature by solicitation” register as sex offenders, and Doe v. Caldwell, the class action filed to remove all affected individuals from the registry, resulting in relief for over 800 class members. In Adkins v. City of New York, she secured a groundbreaking ruling that law enforcement discrimination against transgender people is subject to heightened constitutional scrutiny. In addition to impact litigation, she maintained a small practice focused on challenging police profiling and brutality against women and LGBTQ people of color in New York City for 15 years.
 
Ritchie was also a primary author of In the Shadows of the War on Terror: Persistent Police Brutality and Abuse in the United States, a “shadow report” submitted on behalf of over 100 national and local organizations and individuals to the United Nations Committee Against Torture, the United Nations Human Rights Committee, and the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination. Additionally, as a consultant to the U.S. Human Rights Network, she coordinated the participation of over 200 local, state and national organizations in the 2008 review of the U.S. government’s compliance with the Convention on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination.
 
She also served as expert consultant, lead researcher and coauthor for Amnesty International’s 2005 report Stonewalled: Police Abuse and Misconduct Against Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender People in the United States, was a consultant for Caught in the Net, a report on women and the “war on drugs” published by the ACLU, the Brennan Center for Justice, and Break the Chains, and co-author of Education Not Deportation: Impacts of New York City School Safety Policies on Immigrant Youth, published by Desis Rising Up and Moving (DRUM).
 
She is a proud graduate of Howard University School of Law and had the privilege of clerking for the Honorable Emmet G. Sullivan on the United States District Court for the District of Columbia.

FEATURED PANELISTS

Mary-Elizabeth Murphy, PhD

Mary-Elizabeth Murphy is an Associate Professor of History and Department Member in Women’s & Gender Studies at Eastern Michigan University. Her research specialties include African American History, U.S. Women’s History, and U.S. Social and Political History. Her first book, Jim Crow Capital: Women and Black Freedom Struggles in Washington, D.C., 1920-1945 (University of North Carolina Press, 2018), examined the ways that working-class and middle-class black women in the nation’s capital waged an early civil rights movement focused on economic justice, legal equality, and safety from violence. Her current book project is a social history of interstate buses and racial politics, examining the hundreds of African Americans who rode buses in the era of the Great Migration and contested the color line through everyday resistance, newspaper exposes, and lawsuits before the landmark Supreme Court ruling, Morgan v. Virginia. Murphy teaches a range of undergraduate and graduate courses at Eastern Michigan University in U.S. Women’s History, the history of Sexuality, and research methods and methodologies.

Dr. Delores Jones-Brown

Delores Jones-Brown, J.D., Ph.D., is Professor Emerita on the doctoral faculty at the Graduate Center for the City University of New York (CUNY), an adjunct Professor in the Department of Sociology and Criminology at her undergraduate alma mater, Howard University and a scholar in residence at Southside Virginia Community College. In 2017, she retired from the Department of Law, Police Science, and Criminal Justice Administration at John Jay College of Criminal Justice where she also founded and directed the Center on Race, Crime and Justice. As Center Director, she was lead author on highly cited reports that exposed the unwarranted racial disparities in the stop-and-frisk practices of the NYPD. The 2010 report is cited in U.S. v. Griffin, decided by the 11th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals. Dr. Jones-Brown prides herself on being a scholar activist. Her research and legal commentary focus on race and the administration of justice, with special attention to policing, police-community relations, and the use of deadly force. In 2015 she was invited to give testimony before President Barack Obama’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing. Her remarks on community policing are published in the final report. In 2017, she was appointed by the DOJ to serve on the consent decree monitoring teams for Ferguson, Missouri and Newark, New Jersey. 

In addition to her role as an academic, she is a former assistant prosecutor in Monmouth County, New Jersey and has worked in both institutional and community-based corrections. Her book, Race, Crime and Punishment, won a New York Public Library award and became required reading for the New York City Public School System’s high school curriculum. 

Dr. Jones-Brown has been the recipient of many honors and awards, including the Rutgers medal for being a revolutionary thinker in celebration of the 250th Anniversary of Rutgers University from which she received her graduate and professional degrees. She currently serves as an invited contributor to The Criminal Law Bulletin where her 2020-2021 co-authored articles include: “Convicted: Do Recent Cases Represent a Shift in Police Accountability?: A Research Note,” “Hernandez v. Mesa and Police Liability for Youth Homicides before and After the Death of Michael Brown,” and “Am I My Brother's Keeper: Can Duty to Intervene Policies Save Lives and Reduce the Need for Special Prosecutors in Officer-Involved Homicide Cases?” (October 2021). Her most recent publication titled: “Why we should stop using the term ‘Black-on-Black crime’ an analysis across disciplines” appears in the Journal of Ethnicity in Criminal Justice and advocates for the elimination of racial categories from official crime statistics. 

Dr. Jones-Brown has provided media commentary on race and justice matters for many outlets including MSNBC, NPR, Mother Jones, Yahoo News, Newsy, The New York Times, The Boston Globe, Fox News, The Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post; and has made guest appearances on TV One’s documentary crime series “For My Man”.

Madalyn Wasilczuk, J.D.

Madalyn K. Wasilczuk is an Assistant Professor of Law at the University of South Carolina School of Law. Her work focuses on criminal legal system issues, including policing, race, extreme sentencing, and the prosecution and detention of children. She teaches the Criminal Practice Clinic and Interviewing, Counseling, and Negotiation.

Before joining the University of South Carolina faculty, Professor Wasilczuk taught at Louisiana State University Paul M. Hebert Law Center, where she directed the Juvenile Defense Clinic and taught courses on capital punishment and carceral abolition. Prior to that, she worked at the Cornell Center on the Death Penalty Worldwide, where she taught in the International Human Rights Clinic and Capital Punishment Clinic, and at the Defender Association of Philadelphia, where she was an Assistant Defender. She has also served as a fellow with the International Legal Foundation in Myanmar and Tunisia, where she mentored and trained local public defenders.

Professor Wasilczuk holds a B.A. in International Studies with Honors, summa cum laude, from American University and a J.D. from New York University School of Law, where she earned the Leonard J. Schreier Memorial Prize in Ethics. She is licensed to practice law in Louisiana, the U.S. Court for Middle District of Louisiana, the U.S. Court for the Eastern District of Louisiana, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, and Pennsylvania.

Jyoti Nanda, J.D.

Jyoti Nanda is Associate Professor of Law at Golden Gate University. She studies criminal law and juvenile law with a focus on how legal actors, institutions and doctrines have responded, or failed to respond, to the dramatic expansion of the carceral state. She is interested in the intersections of criminal law and social hierarchies shaped by race, age, gender, dis/ability, sexual orientation, gender identity, and immigration. Her research draws on her background in Ethnic Studies and her experience as a youth advocate and civil rights lawyer to provide a better understanding of the contemporary legal practices within the historical context of racial and economic inequality in the United States. Nanda is the American Bar Association (ABA) nominated Reporter/Author for the forthcoming Juvenile Justice National Standards, and her research and writing have been featured in national press in print, TV, and radio.

Before coming to GGU Law, Nanda was the Binder Clinical Teaching Fellow at UCLA Law School where she founded the Youth & Justice Clinic. Prior to that, she taught Legal Research & Writing, numerous public interest courses, a seminar on the criminalization of girls of color with Distinguished Professor Kimberlé Crenshaw and served as a lead faculty member in both the Critical Race Studies and Epstein Public Interest Law Programs. She started her career as a Skadden Fellow and civil rights attorney at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc. Nanda is a graduate of Northwestern Law and U.C. Berkeley. Born in Nairobi, she is a proud immigrant and the daughter of parents who were refugees and immigrants from Pakistan/India and Kenya.