Texas Death Row exoneree, Mr. Anthony Graves, testified that “the only sound I heard for four years was the sound of my own voice.” Mr. Graves used his voice last week to educate the Bay Area legal community on the life-changing ramifications of a justice system that continues to negligently overlook implicit and explicit racism. More than 300 friends and allies heard him speak at our Gala last week.

In McCleskey v Kemp, the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed that without evidence of conscious, deliberate bias by law officials, evidence of racial sentencing disparities in the death penalty was “an inevitable part of our criminal justice system.” Mr. Graves’s harrowing testimony of a wrongful murder conviction, and 18 years spent in Texas’s prisons and Death Row, affirmed that the consequences of McCleskey are real.

This summer, attorneys from the Equal Justice Society spent time in the South working with key litigation allies on our long-term strategy to reclaim the protections of the Fourteenth Amendment. At the end of our travels, we concluded that in addition to litigation, finding ways to help people understand that bias is alive and well in all our psyches – as well as working on ways that we can de-bias ourselves and our institutions – is critical to our efforts. In 2012, EJS will partner with an esteemed legal bias expert to educate attorneys and judges on how implicit bias affects their decision-making processes.

In addition to our Southern sojourns, we also continued litigation in Associated General Contractors of America v. Caltrans currently at the Ninth Circuit, strengthened the California Coalition for Civil Rights, wrote and signed on to more than half a dozen amicus briefs, and published an article, “Litigating Implicit Bias,” in the September/October issue of Race and Poverty. Your support enabled us to make great strides.

In 2012, EJS is considering filing an amicus brief at the U.S. Supreme Court in a fair housing case, Magner v. Gallagher, will present our litigation strategy at Yale Law School, and develop a series of bias workshops across the nation.

To fulfill our goals, we are planning to add an additional member to our Legal Department. Will you help us?

If you donate by December 31, 2011, your gift will be doubled thanks to a generous Matching Gift Challenge. Please renew your support as a sign of solidarity.

Stories like Mr. Graves’ are infuriating – but they also set fire to our courage to keep moving our strategy forward.

Onward and Upward!

Eva Paterson
President, Equal Justice Society

P.S. Don’t forget! As a result of our $100,000 Matching Gift Challenge, if you give online or mail a check to our offices by December 31st, your gift will be doubled. For example, if you donate $100 now, your gift will be matched by an additional $100 for a total of $200. Now, more than ever, is the time to invest in EJS’s legal strategy.

Miguel will launch an independent practice providing fundraising and leadership training. In the coming months, he will also serve as the interim executive director at the Grassroots Institute for Fundraising Training and as the interim development director at the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights of San Francisco.

Staff fundraiser Nicole Medeiros will serve as interim development director starting Oct. 17.

“Miguel has been such an incredible development director and member of our EJS family,” said Eva Paterson, EJS President. “One thing I’ve learned over the years is that great people move on, and as much as I would rather have him here at EJS, talented folks have to spread their wings and grow. I sing my highest praises of Miguel and know that he will continue to develop and excel as a nonprofit leader and community activist.”

EJS has achieved fiscal stability over the years in no small part to Miguel’s talents in developing and maintaining relationships with institutional and individual donors, and working in partnership with Eva and our staff to ensure that we have the resources we need to pursue our work as a national social justice strategy organization.

Miguel joined EJS as our development director in June 2005 and has been in the nonprofit sector for more than 20 years as a fundraiser, executive director, service provider and advocate. He has served groups dedicated to various causes, including youth development, sexual-reproductive health, community organizing, and action-research.

More than a development executive, Miguel continually brought to EJS the kind of leadership that excelled both up and down the organizational chart. He brought his experience as a former executive director of another nonprofit into leadership roles in our organization in a way that defied titles and roles. As a member of our management team, he counseled Eva and others on a wide range of issues, not just related to development, and served as a valuable resource to the other managers, as well as the staff he led in his department.

We’ll miss Miguel terribly and wish him the best in the next stage of his career.

You can reach Miguel at miguelgavaldon@gmail.com.

Allison Elgart, EJS's new Supervising Attorney, at the historic site where Rosa Parks protested bus segregation and sparked the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Allison was with Eva Paterson and the EJS legal team recently at a convening of anti-death penalty advocates in Montgomery, Ala.

The Equal Justice Society welcomes Allison Elgart as our new Supervising Attorney, effective October 4. Allison was formerly an associate in the San Francisco office of Lieff Cabraser Heimann & Bernstein, LLP where she primarily focused on consumer protection and employment class action litigation.

“We are delighted that Allison is joining us here at EJS,” said EJS President Eva Paterson. “She has all the qualities we need to move us forward in the area of law and policy and continues the tradition of excellence started by her predecessors Susan Serrano, Kimberly Thomas-Rapp, and Reggie Shuford.”

“I am thrilled to become part of the EJS community and to have the opportunity to focus on racial justice litigation and advocacy,” said Allison. “I am looking forward to collaborating with others doing this crucial work and to see where EJS can have an impact to move us towards the goal of overturning the intent doctrine.”

Allison previously clerked for the Hon. Robert P. Patterson, Jr., United States District Court, Southern District of New York. She was also a summer law clerk for Public Advocates in San Francisco, where she worked on education and housing litigation. Before law school, Allison worked as a Health Advocacy Fellow for the Medicare Rights Center in New York City, where she represented clients in appeals and coordinated Medicare policy trainings and the CityNET program to train professionals at community-based organizations serving underrepresented populations.

She was also an Immigration Legal Intern for AYUDA, Inc., of Washington, D.C., where she was responsible for managing a personal caseload of immigration cases, including family reunification, political asylum, naturalization, battered spouse waivers, and VAWA petitions.

Allison is a 2005 graduate of Harvard Law School, where she was the Editor-in-Chief of the Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review and worked as a student attorney at the Harvard Legal Aid Bureau, representing low-income clients in housing, domestic, immigration and benefits cases.

EJS President Eva Paterson will join a panel organized by Alliance for Justice on “The Corporate Court: Your Rights vs. Corporate Interests” and Keith Kamisugi and Taz Ahmed will co-chair the Asian American and Pacific Islander Caucus at the gathering.

Every year, the Netroots Nation convention provides progressive activists and candidates for office a forum to strengthen the online community and grow the progressive movement while inspiring action and growing new ideas to affect change.

EJS is proud to again invest in the success of this year’s Netroots Nation and support their efforts to advance progressive change.

Panel: “The Corporate Court: Your Rights vs. Corporate Interests”
Saturday, June 18, 10:30 a.m. to 11:45 a.m.
Room L 100 H in Minneapolis Convention Center

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, Nan Aron (Alliance for Justice), Dahlia Lithwick (Slate), Eva Paterson (Equal Justice Society) and Carl Pope (Sierra Club) will address the growing influence of corporations within the American judicial system, particularly in the Supreme Court.

Under Chief Justice John Roberts, an activist conservative majority on the Court has aggressively weakened or eliminated consumer protections and workers’ rights, while restricting the ability of everyday Americans to use the courts to find justice.

With several important Supreme Court decisions expected this summer, and with conservatives continuing their long-planned efforts to capture the judicial system, the panel will examine what’s at stake for the American people and our democracy, as well as the need for progressives to pay significantly increased attention to the courts and the selection of judges.

Here’s Facebook links to the panel, our AAPI Caucus and to Eva Paterson’s new Facebook page.

“We can’t be more proud of Reggie as he moves on to lead a state chapter of the ACLU, one of our nation’s most effective and respected organizations fighting for civil liberties and civil rights,” said EJS President Eva Paterson, a former vice president of the ACLU national board. “We are appreciative of Reggie’s help in advancing our efforts to reclaim the 14th Amendment.”

Reggie has been an able ambassador for EJS and helped lead efforts that led to significant progress towards the accomplishment of EJS’s mission to overturn the Intent Doctrine in equal protection jurisprudence. His writing, speaking and leadership of EJS’s legal program moved the organization closer to achieving that goal.

“It is an incredible honor to be given the opportunity to serve as Executive Director of the ACLU of Pennsylvania and to join the highly regarded team of advocates there in continuing the fight for racial justice, LGBT equality, reproductive freedom, immigrants’ rights, privacy and so many other critical issues,” said Shuford. “I was fortunate to have been part of a team of talented attorneys and advocates at EJS and look forward to seeing the results of our work together.”

Shuford joined EJS as Director of Law and Policy in May 2010. Before that, he was Senior Staff Counsel in the American Civil Liberties Union Foundation’s Racial Justice Program. He helped pioneer legal challenges to racial profiling practices nationwide and was the ACLU’s chief litigator in challenges to racial profiling, leading national litigation efforts and consulting with ACLU state affiliates and others in cases of “driving while black or brown,” airport profiling, and profiling related to the war on terror.

Shuford’s last day with EJS is June 30.