Name: Abigail (Gail) Pena
Social Justice Group: Prisons: The Death Penalty (C)
Date of Fieldwork: January 29, 2025
Name of Organization and person (people) with whom you met and their title(s):Lauren Roberts
What I did and what I learned about my topic, activism, social justice work or civil and human rights work from this fieldwork:
On January 29, I had a zoom interview with Lauren Roberts, a lawyer from California who works to get people out of death penalty. Lauren has been working for almost 8 years at an organization funded by the state. She told me about what she does, and her experience from working with many clients. For example, there was one client she had named “Bill” (the real name is classified). He’s now in his 40s, and was arrested when he was 19 for a car robbery that went wrong and killed a woman. While he was the one who planned it, he took no part in actually committing the crime. Lauren did manage to get him out of death row. There are other types of cases where her clients claim that they are innocent, but the most that they usually get is a reduction of their sentence. Lauren has only had 2 cases where her clients were found factually innocent.
During the interview, Lauren also gave me a lot of facts about incarceration in general. Some things I learned was that California has the most people on death row today. However, no one’s been executed since 2006. There are other countries that do execute people regularly such as Texas, Florida, and Missouri. I also learned that the majority of prisoners in the U.S. are Black/Latinx men. Shockingly, the majority of people on death row in the U.S are white men.
I also asked Lauren about what people are trying to do to remove injustice in the court system. One thing she told me about is the Racial Justice Act. It was passed in 2020, and its purpose is to prohibit racial bias in leasing and jury trials. Another law was passed called Elder Parole, where incarcerated people over 50 who have been in prison for over 20 years can automatically be put on Parole. Overall, I learned a lot of important things from my interview, and it was fun talking with Lauren.
