Alameda County s first Black public defender is trying to fix the problem with juries
FacebookTwitterEmail
1of2
Alameda County Public Defender Brendon Woods, sitting on the steps of the county courthouse, is leading a local effort to make jury selection more representative.Yalonda M. James / The ChronicleShow MoreShow Less
2of2
Since being appointed Alameda County’s first Black public defender in 2012, Brendon Woods has been outspoken on a number of issues of criminal justice reform, including America’s history of discriminatory jury selections.Yalonda M. James / The ChronicleShow MoreShow Less
Brendon Woods started banging the drum for jury reform in 2018.
That was the year Alameda County’s first Black public defender spoke out against a Superior Court effort that would force residents to appear for jury duty at any courthouse in the county rather than the one closest to them. Woods said this would make jury participation harder for low-income Black and brown residents
The Atlantic
In Evanston, Illinois, a Black parent and school-board candidate takes on a curriculum meant to combat racism.
April 3, 2021
Mark Edward Atkinson / Christian Monterrosa / Bloomberg / Getty / The Atlantic
Ndona Muboyayi wants to improve the education that public-school children, including her son and daughter, receive in Evanston, Illinois, where her mother’s family history goes back five generations.
As a candidate for the school board in District 65, which educates children up until eighth grade, she wants to close the academic-achievement gap separating Black and brown students from white ones, help children who need special education, and address what she sees as a lack of support for students whose first language isn’t English. That agenda would be ultra-progressive in many communities. In Evanston, however, Muboyayi is challenging not the right, but the left.
Cook Co. aims to disrupt conviction-to-deportation pipeline
CARLOS BALLESTEROS of Injustice Watch
April 3, 2021
FacebookTwitterEmail
CHICAGO (AP) Alejandra Cano thought she was in the clear.
It had been five years since she got sober after a decades long struggle with drug addiction. She racked up several misdemeanors when she was using, mostly for shoplifting. But that was another life. In this one, Cano, 46, was a working single mom who lived in a comfortable first-floor apartment on the West Side of Chicago with her two teenage sons. And after almost 20 years of not seeing her dad or her homeland, Cano decided to fly to Chile in August 2019.
First-Grader’s Kind Gesture Toward Only Black Student in Class Leads to 50-Year Friendship
An act of kindness from a first-grader to her classmate on the first day of school changed everything for one terrified Texas student.
This was in the 1970s, when young Kimberly Patman’s household was the first black family to enroll in the Cedar Hill school district in Dallas. She still remembers the moment a little girl tapped her on the shoulder during recess at Bray Elementary. It was an offer of friendship from fellow first-grader LeeAnn Polster.
Fifty years on, the pair are still inseparable.