Jill Pasquarella

Jill Pasquarella is a storyteller. Now the legal director at the Louisiana Parole Project in Louisiana, she has devoted her career to shining a light on the lives of those serving extreme sentences for crimes committed as youth. She believes that, as an advocate, digging into a person’s past to understand why he or she has gotten to the point of being involved in crime gives her the ability to humanize her clients for prosecutors and decisionmakers. She describes her approach to understanding the whole client as her “standard of care,” and it is what makes her such an effective advocate.

Jill began her legal career as a student in two clinics—one focused on immigration and the other on juvenile justice—at Georgetown University Law Center, where she was a public interest law scholar. In those clinics, she learned what it meant to be a good and diligent lawyer. After graduation, she became a public defender in Louisiana, carrying the lessons from the Juvenile Justice Clinic into her adult work. “In juvenile court, you are trained to look at all aspects of the child’s life,” she says. “The juvenile court system actually gives you space to identify where the child needs intervention and offers resources other than secure care or jail. Part of what drew me to do adult public defense was the desire to create that kind of space in the adult context as well.”

After nearly six years as a public defender, Jill turned to focus her work on ending juvenile life without parole and other extreme sentences for children in Louisiana and is now the legal director at the Parole Project, an organization founded by those formerly incarcerated with extreme sentences, including juvenile lifers. The organization has been expanding rapidly, focusing not only on legal representation, but also on re-entry support, including housing, education, and jobs so that clients can transition successfully once released.

Jill was drawn to working with individuals serving juvenile life without parole sentences after the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Miller v. Alabama offered the chance for many to re-argue their sentence. With Miller, there was now some space for advocates to tell their clients’ stories, dig into the details of their lives, and have a more meaningful conversation about what punishment should look like. “The work that we are doing for Miller clients is what we should be doing for all children,” she says, “working with a mitigation specialist and fact investigator, reviewing records from doctors’ visits and school, and getting to know the family. When you do that level of work, the pieces all fall into place, and it becomes easy to make that person’s life story relatable prosecutors and decisionmakers.”

In addition to representing individuals, Jill has made great strides on a policy front toward abolishing juvenile life without parole in Louisiana. Although the sentence still exists within the state, thanks in large part to her advocacy, youth convicted of murder are now eligible for parole after 25 years. This change in the law impacted many people who were sentenced in the 90s, who have now been released and are making a difference in their communities. When speaking of her proudest moments, she describes telling the legislature about a juvenile lifer who deserved a second chance, and then just a few years later watching him tell the legislature himself about what he has done with that second chance.

“That moment was really beautiful,” she said. “We still have a ways to go, but it feels like progress.”

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