M. Chris Fabricant, Derecka Purnell & Margaret Burnham: A Conversation

Derecka Purnell is a human rights lawyer, writer, and organizer. She received her J.D. from Harvard Law School and works to end police and prison violence by providing legal assistance, research, and training to community-based organizations through an abolitionist framework. She is also a columnist at The Guardian, and her work and writing have been featured in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Boston Review, Harper’s Bazaar, Cosmopolitan, The Appeal, Truthout, on Slate and NPR, and in many other publications. For more than a century, activists in the United States have tried to reform the police. From community policing initiatives to increasing diversity, none of it has stopped the police from killing about three people a day. In Becoming Abolitionists: Police, Protests, and the Pursuit of Freedom (Astra House), Purnell draws from her experiences as a lawyer, writer, and organizer who was initially skeptical about police abolition. The book revisits lessons learned from Ferguson to South Africa and from Reconstruction to contemporary protests against police shootings, and in it she argues that the police cannot be reformed. But abolition is not solely about getting rid of the police – it’s about a commitment to create and support different answers to the problem of harm in society.

M. Chris Fabricant is the Innocence Project’s director of strategic litigation, a leading expert on forensic sciences and the criminal justice system, and has been featured in the Netflix documentary The Innocence Files. A former public defender and clinical law professor, his public commentary has been published in virtually every major media outlet. Fabricant brings to his writing more than two decades of experience, including litigating death penalty cases in the Deep South to misdemeanors in New York’s South Bronx. CSI to Forensic Files to the celebrated reputation of the FBI crime lab – forensic scientists have long been mythologized in American popular culture as infallible crime solvers, and innocent people have been executed as a result. Junk Science and the American Criminal Justice System (Akashic Books) chronicles the fights to overturn wrongful convictions and end the use of the “science” that’s destroyed lives. In this true crime narrative that includes courtroom battles from Mississippi to Texas to New York City, Fabricant lays bare a broken, racist system of justice and the role forensic science plays to keep it that way. His insider view of the American criminal justice system includes stories of wrongful executions, corrupt prosecutors, and quackery masquerading as science.

Margaret A. Burnham is the founding director of the Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project at Northeastern University and has been a staffer for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, a civil rights lawyer, a defense attorney, and a judge. A law professor, she was nominated by President Joe Biden and confirmed by the U.S. Senate to serve on the Civil Rights Cold Case Records Review Board. In By Hands Now Known (W. W. Norton & Company), Burnham challenges our understanding of the Jim Crow era by exploring the relationship between formal law and background legal norms in a series of harrowing cases from 1920 to 1960. She maps the criminal legal system in the mid-20th-century South, from rendition – the legal process by which states make claims to other states for the return of their citizens – to the outsized role of local sheriffs in enforcing racial hierarchy. In doing so, she traces a vivid line from slavery to the legal structures of this period and through to today. Drawing on an extensive database exceeding 1,000 cases of racial violence, Burnham reveals the true legal system of Jim Crow, and captures the memories of those whose stories have not yet been told.