Atteeyah Hollie

Atteeyah Hollie is a senior attorney at the Southern Center for Human Rights (SCHR), whose mission is to achieve equality, dignity, and justice for people impacted by the criminal legal system in the Deep South. SCHR was founded in 1976 by ministers and activists outraged by injustices and horrendous conditions in the criminal legal system and by the Supreme Court’s reinstatement of the death penalty that year. With fearless lawyers like Atteeyah, SCHR is doing extraordinary work fighting the criminalization of poverty, the death penalty, and mass incarceration.

Reflecting on the outrage and civil unrest on American streets today, Atteeyah sees “not a new moment but a current moment in the battle to destroy the structural racism that infects every single aspect of our country’s criminal legal system. This drives everything we do at SCHR.” This is actually a second journey at SCHR for Atteeyah, who left the Bay Area in California 22 years ago and started working for SCHR in Georgia after college, first as an intern and later an investigator working on cases surrounding the right to counsel and the treatment of children in one adult prison. She recalls interviewing many of these young people to build support for contempt proceedings.

I saw young people in daily fear for their lives, serving a minimum of 10 years without the possibility of parole up to life imprisonment, knowing on their 17th birthday they would be moved “across the yard” to the general adult population and the daily threat of brutal physical and sexual assault.

This was one of the many experiences at SCHR that “made [her] want to do civil rights work in the Deep South.”

This clarity of purpose brought Atteeyah back to SCHR after graduating law school from Berkeley in 2010.  She has litigated cases challenging the denial of the right to counsel for children and poor Georgians, illegally closed courtrooms, inhumane prison conditions, and the denial of utility services because of court debt. She is a leader in the battle to end extreme sentences for nonviolent drug offenses in Georgia and is also working on resentencing proceedings on behalf of people serving juvenile life without parole sentences. As the COVID-19 pandemic rages on, Atteeyah is working to put protocols in place for detained children in Georgia as the state rushes to “reopen.”  

Atteeyah is also a graduate of Gideon’s Promise and helps that organization train public defenders and fulfill the mandate of the Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Gideon v. Wainwright. She was named a 2017 “On the Rise” Georgia lawyer in the local Fulton County Daily Report. Her rise continues, as Atteeyah works fearlessly to disrupt and end structural racism in the criminal legal system. 

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