Premal Dharia is the recipient of the 2024 Albert J. Krieger Champion of Liberty Award.
Premal Dharia is the executive director of the Institute to End Mass Incarceration at Harvard Law School and coeditor in chief of the online publication Inquest. Previously, she spent nearly 15 years representing people charged with criminal offenses in three different places: the Public Defender Service in Washington, D.C., the Office of the Federal Public Defender in Baltimore, Maryland, and the military commission at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. In 2014, she was selected for a three-month fellowship to help build out and train three new public defender offices in the West Bank. She brought these years of experience to Civil Rights Corps, where she was the Director of Litigation. In 2019, she received a fellowship through the Reflective Democracy Campaign, which investigates the demographics of, and works to dismantle structural barriers around, political power. During that time, she started the Defender Impact Initiative, which focused on the role public defenders can play in the broad movement to end mass incarceration. The work and ideas of DII have been incorporated into the Institute to End Mass Incarceration.