Criminal justice reform advocates, including a San Diego assistant district attorney, a former attorney general for the District of Columbia, a plea bargain researcher, a mass incarceration expert and an associate law dean, will be honored for their efforts to end systemic injustice in the criminal system during the American Bar Association 40th White Collar Crime Institute in Miami.
February 17, 2025 Criminal Justice Section
ABA to honor 5 criminal justice reform advocates
The 2024 awards will be presented by the ABA Criminal Justice Section during a reception at 5:30 p.m. EST on March 7 at the Hyatt Regency Miami. The honorees:
Lucian E. Dervan, professor of law and director of criminal justice studies at Belmont University College of Law, will receive the Charles R. English-Sonnett Award. He is the founding director of the Plea Bargaining Institute, which works to make research and case law related to plea bargaining more accessible to policymakers, advocacy organizations, practitioners and academics. Dervan currently serves as chair of the ABA Global White Collar Crime Institute, which he founded in 2012. He has previously served on the ABA Board of Governors (2020-2023) and as chair of the ABA Criminal Justice Section (2018-2019) and the ABA Commission on the American Jury (2019-2020). While serving as chair of the Criminal Justice Section, he created a task force to examine the role of plea bargaining in the criminal justice system. The ABA House of Delegates adopted the task force’s 14 principles to provide a path toward a more just system of criminal adjudication in resolution 502 in August 2023.
Premal Dharia, executive director of the Institute to End Mass Incarceration at Harvard Law School, will receive the Albert J. Krieger Champion of Liberty Award. 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 and the military commission at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. In 2014, she was selected for a 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. She is a co-chair of the Pretrial Justice and Sentencing Committee of the ABA Criminal Justice Section.
Samuel V. Jones, associate dean at the University of Illinois Chicago School of Law, will receive the 2024 Raeder-Taslitz Award. He formerly practiced law at Hughes & Luce (now known as K&L Gates) and later served as senior counsel at AT&T Corp. and as corporate counsel for Blockbuster Inc. He is the recipient of the John Marshall Legal Scholarship Award and UIC’s Black History Maker award. He was voted Faculty Adviser of the Year in 2022. A former Marine infantryman and retired JAG officer, Jones has served as an instructor for Illinois state judges and conducted sexual violence training for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. He currently serves as a co-chair and commissioner on the Evanston Civilian Police Review Commission and was crucial to legislative efforts to pass criminal justice reform in Illinois.
Karl Anthony Racine, a partner at Hogan Lovells, will receive the Livingston Hall Juvenile Justice Award. Racine formerly served as the first elected and independent attorney general for the District of Columbia. As attorney general, he championed innovative solutions to address some of the most pressing problems facing D.C. residents, including prioritizing data-driven juvenile justice reform and introducing measures to advance democracy. He was the first prosecutor in the country to launch an in-house restorative justice program, the first agency leader in the district to implement a community-based violence interruption program and made the District of Columbia the first jurisdiction in the country to sue a major ghost gun manufacturer. Prior to serving as attorney general, Racine was the first African American managing partner of a top 100 law firm, an associate White House counsel during the Clinton administration and a public defender in the District of Columbia.
Dwain W. Woodley, assistant district attorney in the San Diego County District Attorney’s Office, will receive the Curtin-Maleng Minister of Justice Award. He joined the office in 2001 as a deputy district attorney. During his tenure in the office, Woodley helped develop and lead the Community Partnership Prosecutors program, which has been successful in connecting the public with much-needed services around domestic violence, child abuse and hate crimes. He is also part of the San Diego Judicial Memorial Committee, a member of Gov. Gavin Newsom’s Local Judicial Selection Committee and part of the Bench-Bar Committee.
Related links:
- ABA House of Delegates Resolution 604, “ABA Ten Principles to Reduce Mass Incarceration”
- ABA CJS Plea Bargaining Task Force
- ABA Criminal Justice Section: Plea Bargain Task Force Report
- ABA Journal