This month at GJP, I have felt most surprised when I realized exactly how close the office was to the MLK Historic Site. While shooting a short video about GJP on the back porch of Martin Luther King’s house, I saw the roof of the Georgia Justice Project.
Regina Sullivan (N.B. not our client’s real name) planned to be the chain-breaker, the one who wasn’t afflicted by the generational curse. “I thought, ‘there’s no way I’d ever let a man get me there,’” she says, still seemingly baffled. She was smart, college-educated, and the mother of a daughter she adored. And she was headed to jail on a domestic violence charge.
Celebrating eleven years clean, and Antoine Stevens still calls himself a newcomer (N.B. Antoine Stevens is not our client’s real name).
This was a mistake. It had to be. He’d been at home all night, drinking and partying with friends in a neighborhood not far from where he’d grown up. “I’m thinking I’m about to get out,” says Ernesto, “that it must be a joke,” because what else could it be?
Eric Foley’s outcome sounds like a perfect end to an otherwise harrowing experience.…except that he served eight months in jail…except that he dropped out of college because he was arrested…except that it took 2 years to get his case dismissed… except that the police had no basis on which to arrest him in the first place…Unfortunately cases like Mr. Foley’s are often not the exceptions in Georgia but the rule.