Everyday Injustice

More than two decades after being wrongfully arrested as a teenager in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, Raymond Strawn has graduated from law school, overcoming years of trauma, financial hardship and discrimination that continued long after his acquittal. In Episode 344 of Everyday Injustice, Strawn returns to discuss his journey from being falsely accused of making terrorist threats at age 16 to earning his law degree in May 2026, and the lasting consequences of a criminal justice system that can devastate lives even when no conviction occurs.

Strawn, who moved from California to upstate New York shortly before the Sept. 11 attacks, recalled being the only Asian student at his high school when authorities began treating him as a potential terrorist. He spent 48 days incarcerated, endured what he described as abusive treatment and violations of his constitutional rights, and ultimately was found not guilty following a bench trial in 2002. Yet his acquittal did not erase the damage. Strawn described living with post-traumatic stress disorder, experiencing additional wrongful arrests and repeated police stops, and facing barriers to educational and employment opportunities because of an arrest record that never resulted in a conviction.

Despite those obstacles, Strawn returned to California to attend law school, graduating in the top 20% of his class while navigating financial instability, mental health struggles and the challenges of finding employment. He discussed the frustration of being advised to conceal his wrongful incarceration from prospective employers and his continuing interest in civil rights law, particularly cases involving wrongful arrests, police misconduct and abuses of government authority. His experience raises broader questions about the enduring consequences of arrest, the stigma attached to criminal legal system involvement and the barriers confronting people seeking to rebuild their lives.

Strawn is also working on an ambitious 10-book memoir series titled Surviving Rock Bottom, including a volume called 48 Days: The Time I Spent, which recounts his wrongful incarceration and its aftermath. He hopes the books will document not only the injustices he experienced but also his struggles with homelessness, depression and trauma, offering encouragement to others confronting seemingly insurmountable obstacles. As he awaits the results of the California bar examination and considers a future combining writing and civil rights advocacy, Strawn reflects on resilience, the meaning of justice and what it means to move forward when the system that harmed him has never provided an apology or meaningful remedy.

In Episode 343 of Everyday Injustice, host David Greenwald speaks with Laila Aziz of Pillars of the Community about CopStop SD, a new tool designed to document police misconduct complaints, track how authorities handle them and help San Diego residents navigate a police accountability system that Aziz argues has repeatedly failed the communities it is supposed to protect.

Pillars of the Community, a Southeast San Diego nonprofit focused on decriminalization and police accountability, developed CopStop SD after years of maintaining complaints through spreadsheets and receiving requests from public defenders searching for information about officers involved in their cases. Aziz explains that the organization wanted a system that could follow complaints from beginning to end while giving community members a practical tool for advocacy and organizing.

The conversation also examines stark racial disparities identified through the group's public records research. Aziz says Black San Diegans were nine times more likely to face standalone resisting-arrest charges, meaning no other criminal charge accompanied the allegation. She says many of those cases were ultimately dismissed or never pursued in court, raising questions about why the arrests occurred in the first place and what consequences they had for those arrested.

Aziz also describes how CopStop SD allows residents to report encounters and then connects them with police accountability organizers who help navigate the complaint process. The database enables Pillars to monitor what happens to complaints, including whether allegations receive independent review or are classified by the San Diego Police Department as "miscellaneous," a practice that Aziz says has prevented potentially serious misconduct complaints from receiving meaningful oversight.

In Episode 342 of Everyday Injustice, host David Greenwald concludes the podcast’s series on Represent Justice’s ambassador program with Cecilia Zavala, executive director of Nation Outside and creator of the short film What Grace Leaves Behind. Zavala discusses her journey from incarceration and the barriers of reentry to becoming a criminal justice reform advocate and filmmaker.

Zavala describes What Grace Leaves Behind as a poetic narrative following two women returning home from incarceration — one surrounded by family support and another, Grace, forced to navigate reentry alone. For Zavala, grace represents the opposite of judgment and illustrates how acceptance and community support can transform the lives of people attempting to rebuild after incarceration.

Drawing on her own experience, Zavala discusses the stigma and structural barriers that follow a felony conviction, including difficulty securing employment and housing. She recounts losing a nonprofit job nine months after being hired because of her felony record and argues that formerly incarcerated people too often face what she calls “perpetual punishment” long after completing their sentences.

The conversation also explores Zavala’s current work leading Nation Outside, a Michigan nonprofit employing formerly incarcerated and system-impacted people while providing peer-led reentry services and advocating for policy reform. Zavala reflects on how Represent Justice gave her the opportunity to tell her story through filmmaking, work through painful experiences with her daughters and demonstrate how lived experience can become a powerful tool for advocacy, healing and change.

On this episode of Everyday Injustice, host David Greenwald speaks with Represent Justice ambassadors Kenneth Webb and Cesar Garcia about how their experiences with incarceration, education and advocacy shaped two films examining reentry, surveillance, community and the meaning of public safety. Webb created The Weaver in a Haystack, while Garcia created Stopcopticon, using different stories and artistic approaches to challenge how society views people impacted by the criminal legal system.

Webb, a multidisciplinary artist who spent 16 years incarcerated after entering prison at 17, discusses how art became a path toward transformation and eventually filmmaking. His semi-autobiographical film explores the experience of returning to society after incarceration and the labels imposed on formerly incarcerated people, arguing that communities should invest in their success rather than create additional barriers to housing, employment, education and reintegration.

Garcia, a Chicano activist focused on technology and social justice, examines a different dimension of the justice system: the growing use of surveillance technology by law enforcement. Drawing on his experiences growing up near the U.S.-Mexico border, incarceration and subsequent education and advocacy, Garcia questions the assumption that more police data, cameras and surveillance automatically produce safer communities and argues that people most affected by those technologies need a voice in deciding how they are used.

Together, Webb and Garcia explore a broader question at the center of criminal justice reform: what communities choose to invest in when they talk about safety. Their conversation examines rehabilitation, education, mentorship, reentry, surveillance and the tendency to define people by institutional labels, while highlighting the potential of filmmaking to give system-impacted people the resources and platform to tell their own stories and imagine alternatives to punishment and exclusion.

Three filmmakers whose lives have been shaped by the criminal legal system join Everyday Injustice for a conversation about using storytelling to expose systemic injustice and advance meaningful change. In Episode 340, host David Greenwald speaks with Represent Justice ambassadors Marcus Kelly, Courtenie Jackson and Starling Thomas about their films, their personal experiences and the policies they hope to transform. Their projects examine the constitutional exception permitting involuntary servitude as punishment for a crime, the lifelong consequences of a criminal record and the treatment of pregnant women in custody.

Kelly, a Michigan organizer who served nine years following what he describes as a wrongful conviction, discusses his documentary, No Exception to the Promise, and his work to remove slavery and involuntary servitude from state and federal constitutions. He recounts organizing a prison hunger strike, experiencing solitary confinement and discovering the 13th Amendment’s punishment exception while incarcerated. Kelly argues that the exception continues to shape prison labor, economic exploitation and the treatment of incarcerated people, and he explains why he believes constitutional abolition is necessary to build a system rooted in care rather than punishment.

Jackson, an Oklahoma workforce development and reentry advocate, discusses Shackled in Freedom, a documentary examining how criminal records restrict access to employment, housing, civic participation and economic opportunity. Drawing on her experience as a mother who struggled to find work after becoming justice-involved, she describes how employment barriers can deepen economic desperation and undermine successful reentry. Thomas, a Houston-based filmmaker whose federal convictions were overturned on appeal, discusses Born Captive, a narrative film about a pregnant woman incarcerated after a probation violation involving unpaid fees. Inspired in part by her mother’s incarceration while pregnant, Thomas connects the history of Black women giving birth in bondage to contemporary prison births and argues for community-based alternatives that protect mothers and children.

The conversation also explores wrongful convictions, the pressure to accept plea agreements, the importance of preserving appeal rights and the role of directly impacted people in shaping public policy. Each filmmaker reflects on the support provided by Represent Justice and the opportunity to bring their work beyond traditional criminal justice audiences to employers, lawmakers and the broader public. Kelly says No Exception to the Promise is scheduled for release Sept. 14, while Jackson says Shackled in Freedom will be available beginning Sept. 15. Thomas explains that Born Captive remains in post-production and the film festival circuit, with viewing information available through Represent Justice and the film’s website.

In Episode 339 of Everyday Injustice, host David Greenwald speaks with Daniel Forkkio, director of Represent Justice, about the organization’s work empowering formerly incarcerated people to tell their own stories and use film as a vehicle for changing public perceptions of incarceration and the criminal legal system. Forkkio traces the organization’s origins to the national impact campaign surrounding Just Mercy, where he saw how people with lived experience could transform audiences’ understanding of prisons, punishment and mass incarceration.

Forkkio discusses Represent Justice’s Ambassador Program, which works with community partners around the country to identify formerly incarcerated people interested in developing their storytelling and leadership skills. The program receives roughly 75 applications annually and selects about 10 participants, producing 40 short films with 49 ambassadors over five years. He emphasizes that the process requires time, care and meaningful support because participants must retain ownership over how their experiences are portrayed.

The conversation also examines a central theme running through the ambassadors’ films: what Forkkio describes as “criminalized trauma and denied redemption.” The films explore mental health crises, abuse, reentry, employment and housing barriers, while challenging a culture that frequently responds to trauma and social problems through policing, incarceration and punishment rather than healing and community support. Forkkio argues that excluding people after incarceration not only denies their humanity but prevents them from contributing to their communities.

Forkkio and Greenwald ultimately explore why firsthand storytelling can be so effective at humanizing people whom society has often reduced to the label of “criminal.” Represent Justice is now shifting its focus toward mobilizing its growing network of ambassadors and films to engage audiences, influence institutions and build public demand for alternatives to punishment. For Forkkio, authenticity is crucial: formerly incarcerated people speaking for themselves can challenge assumptions about crime, redemption and justice in ways conventional political arguments often cannot.

On Episode 338 of Everyday Injustice, host David Greenwald speaks with filmmakers Julius Irving and Leigh Scott as part of the Represent Justice series “Pathways Beyond Criminalized Crises,” a collection of films created by formerly incarcerated people that examines what can happen when healing, care and restoration replace punishment. Irving directed “The Silent (R)evolution: Freedom From the Inside Out,” while Scott directed “Uncarcerated,” with both filmmakers drawing on their own experiences with incarceration and community advocacy.

Scott describes how a mental health crisis following the deaths of his wife and daughter ultimately brought him into the criminal legal system. After his release from prison in 2015, he began working in homeless services and justice-related spaces, where he saw connections between incarceration, poverty, mental health, substance use and the lack of adequate community support. His film examines those connections while exploring alternative first-responder programs and ways communities can respond to crises without relying primarily on police and incarceration.

Irving recounts his own experience returning to jail after being stopped while driving to work and discovering his license had been suspended, resulting in a probation violation. Despite community members, employers and a county commissioner advocating on his behalf, Irving was sentenced to 90 days in county jail — a period he argues can be enough for someone living near the poverty line to lose a job, vehicle, housing and financial stability. Rather than focus his film exclusively on the harms of incarceration, Irving said he wanted to examine the power of community and demonstrate how people can provide one another with forms of healing and restorative justice that punitive institutions often fail to provide.

The conversation also explores how filmmaking gave Irving and Scott a platform to transform lived experience into advocacy. Irving describes filmmaking as an opportunity to communicate his story to a larger audience, while Scott calls the project a “full circle moment” that allowed him to combine a lifelong interest in filmmaking with his work in homelessness and criminal justice reform. Both discuss the support they received through Represent Justice and the importance of giving formerly incarcerated people the resources and opportunity to tell their own stories rather than having those experiences interpreted exclusively by outsiders.

On Episode 337 of Everyday Injustice, host David Greenwald welcomes back Marc Bookman, legal director of the Atlantic Center for Capital Representation and author of Descending Spiral: Exposing the Death Penalty in 12 Essays, for a wide-ranging discussion about capital punishment at a moment when three executions were scheduled across the country on the same day. Bookman challenges the perception that the death penalty is undergoing a broad national resurgence, arguing that its continued use is increasingly concentrated in a small number of states, particularly Florida and other Southern states.

The conversation examines recent polling on capital punishment, including Bookman’s criticism of a Pew poll that asked respondents whether they supported the death penalty without presenting alternatives such as life without parole. Bookman argues that polling produces significantly different results when people are given actual sentencing alternatives, while expressing concern that some respondents support executions despite acknowledging both the possibility of executing innocent people and the lack of evidence that capital punishment deters crime.

Bookman and Greenwald also explore what decades of wrongful convictions, DNA exonerations, prosecutorial misconduct, inadequate defense representation and racial disparities have revealed about the reliability of the death penalty. Bookman argues for a broader understanding of wrongful convictions that goes beyond factual innocence to include cases in which evidence was withheld, lawyers performed inadequately or courts improperly tilted proceedings toward the prosecution. Those failures, he argues, become especially significant when the state is deciding whether a person should live or die.

The episode also turns to Bookman’s forthcoming novel, Albert’s Time, which confronts capital punishment without relying on innocence as the argument against execution. The novel centers on a person unquestionably guilty of a terrible crime and follows the defendant, his family, defense attorneys, prosecutor and judge as they confront questions of vengeance, punishment and forgiveness. Bookman describes the novel as a realistic meditation on whether even someone guilty of a horrific crime should be executed — forcing readers to confront the death penalty itself rather than the easier question of whether the system might execute an innocent person.

On Everyday Injustice Episode 336, host David Greenwald speaks with Valena Beety, a nationally recognized wrongful convictions litigator, former federal prosecutor and law professor, about how stereotypes surrounding gender and sexuality can contribute to innocent people being convicted and imprisoned. Beety, who has spent roughly 15 years representing people challenging wrongful convictions, explains how her own experience as a prosecutor led her to question whether the criminal legal system consistently protects victims, survivors or public safety.

Beety focuses on the intersection between wrongful convictions and the criminalization of women and LGBTQ+ people. She argues that prosecutors can exploit longstanding stereotypes portraying queer people as dangerous, deceptive or deviant, particularly when those assumptions are combined with faulty forensic evidence or tunnel vision about who committed a crime. Beety points to cases in which women and queer defendants were prosecuted even when she argues no underlying crime occurred, illustrating how identity can become part of the prosecution’s theory of guilt.

The conversation also explores Beety’s new book, “Pink Crime: Fighting Against the Criminalization of Motherhood, Pregnancy, and Queer Identity,” which examines what she describes as an accelerating criminalization of women and queer people following the Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade. Beety discusses women investigated following miscarriages, stillbirths or suspected abortions, along with the treatment of pregnant women behind bars and transgender people in prison. She describes inadequate medical care for incarcerated pregnant women, women giving birth without timely assistance and transgender prisoners being placed in prolonged segregation rather than housed in environments appropriate to their circumstances.

Beety also discusses cases involving discredited forensic evidence, including bite-mark testimony, and her earlier book, “Manifesting Justice: Wrongly Convicted Women Reclaim Their Rights.” Throughout the conversation, she emphasizes that proving innocence does not necessarily mean someone will quickly — or ever — leave prison, noting that reversing an existing conviction can be substantially more difficult than obtaining one. Despite those barriers, Beety ends on a measure of optimism, arguing that recognizing how women, pregnant people and LGBTQ+ people can be targeted through stereotypes may create common ground for challenging wrongful convictions and broader abuses within the criminal legal system.

In Episode 334 of Everyday Injustice, host David Greenwald speaks with Massachusetts criminal defense attorney Ernie Stone about the growing importance of trauma-informed criminal defense and why understanding clients’ life experiences is essential to effective representation. Drawing on nearly two decades of legal practice, Stone argues that what is often called “trauma-informed” lawyering should simply be considered good lawyering, emphasizing that attorneys must understand how trauma shapes communication, memory, decision-making, and trust.

The conversation explores the prevalence of trauma among people involved in the criminal legal system and the challenges attorneys face when clients struggle to tell their stories in a linear fashion or respond predictably under stress. Stone explains that criminal charges themselves can be traumatic events, particularly for individuals already facing housing instability, mental health challenges, substance use disorders, or other forms of adversity. He discusses how lawyers can better serve clients by recognizing trauma symptoms and adjusting their communication strategies accordingly.

Greenwald and Stone also examine the rise of holistic defense models that combine legal representation with social services, housing assistance, mental health support, and other interventions designed to address the root causes that often bring people into repeated contact with the justice system. While acknowledging resource limitations facing public defender offices across the country, Stone argues that investing in supportive services is both more humane and more cost-effective than relying on incarceration as a substitute for social policy.

The episode concludes with a broader discussion about empathy, legal education, and professional responsibility. Stone contends that understanding trauma should be viewed as an ethical obligation for attorneys, much like technological competence has become a professional requirement. For listeners interested in learning more, he recommends The Body Keeps the Score as an accessible introduction to trauma research. Together, Greenwald and Stone make the case that a more trauma-informed approach can improve outcomes not only for defendants, but for the justice system as a whole.