Nora Carroll is a public defender, National Lawyers Guild member and co-founder of the Parole Preparation Project. Nora is a graduate of Northeastern University School of Law in Boston and she worked for over three years defending accused parole violators at the Rikers Island jail complex as part of The Legal Aid Society’s Parole Revocation Defense Unit. Since then she has been working at Legal Aid’s trial office in Brooklyn.

Paul Cates is the communications director of the Innocence Project. He previously worked at the American Civil Liberties Union as a Senior Communications Strategist and as Director of Public Education for the LGBT & AIDS Project. Before beginning his career in communications, Paul was a criminal defense attorney for the Legal Aid Society in Brooklyn. He is a graduate of the University of Georgia and the University of Georgia School of Law. He is the co-author with Leslie Cooper of the second edition of the ACLU publication, Too High a Price: The Case Against Restricting Gay Parenting.

Jose DiLenola was sentenced to 26 years-to-life for second-degree murder at the age of 16. He served 18 of those years in Attica Correctional Facility and other prisons. While incarcerated he worked as a rehabilitation peer educator in relapse prevention, anger management, and mental health, and mentored at-risk youth diversionary programs. Jose co-founded and served as President of the Attica Lifer's Organization and consulted several organizations. Jose was released from prison in December 2021 and is now working on clemency and parole reform in New York State. Currently, he is the full-time Clemency Campaign Director for the Release Aging People in Prison (RAPP).

Issa Kohler-Hausmann is an Associate Professor of Law at Yale Law School and Associate Professor of Sociology at Yale. She joined the Yale Law School faculty in 2014. Her primary research interests are in criminal law, criminal procedure, empirical legal studies, tort law, sociology of law, and legal theory. Before coming to Yale, she was a Law Research Fellow at Georgetown University. Admitted to the New York Bar in 2009, she previously worked in solo practice and has been an associate with Ilissa Brownstein & Associates. Kohler-Hausmann has been most recently published in the Stanford Law Review, the American Journal of Sociology, and has work represented in many other journals and books. Her most recent publications focus on misdemeanor arrests in New York City and their use as a form of social control, and she has won awards for her writing from the American Sociological Association and the Law and Society Association. Born and raised in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, she holds degrees from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Northwestern University, Yale Law School, and New York University.

Martha Rayner has been a clinical teacher at Fordham since 1998. She co-directs the Criminal Defense Clinic, which defends clients at the trial level, takes on the civil consequences of arrests, represents incarcerated persons seeking clemency, parole and in post-conviction matters, and engages in broad-based advocacy and litigation on behalf of clients indefinitely detained without charge by the United States military at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.  She began practicing law as a public defender at the Legal Aid Society and went on to be one of the founding members of the Neighborhood Defender Service of Harlem, a community-based, model public defender office that redefined public defense from the traditional notion of working within the span of arraignment to conviction, to a broader demarcation of pre-arrest to post-disposition “after care.” At NDS, she developed a special unit that provided representation to clients facing the civil consequences of criminal accusations.  Areas of practice included family law, housing, civil rights, immigration, and forfeiture, from trial to appellate level. She is a proud member of the first graduating class of City University of New York School of Law and has taught in Fordham Law School’s Summer Ireland Program.

Alejo Rodriguez is a formerly incarcerated person and a former applicant of the Parole Preparation Project. He served 32 years in prison and was released in June 2017. Today, Alejo is the Mentor and Alumni Coordinator at the Prisoner Reentry Institute at John Jay College. Alejo’s previous criminal justice experience includes peer education, community organizing and mentoring. He was also the former vice-president of the Otisville Correctional Facility’s Lifers & Long Termers Organization. He enjoys supporting the success of formerly incarcerated college students and looking for creative ways to engage students in community building relationships as the Mentor Alumni Coordinator. Alejo received his Bachelors of Liberal Arts degree from Syracuse University and Masters of Professional Studies degree from New York Theological Seminary.

Roslyn D. Smith is a Program Manager for V-day, a nonprofit organization that has vowed to end violence against women, girls and the planet. She is using her personal experience from long term incarceration as a vehicle for her work as a criminal justice reform advocate. Roslyn obtained her bachelor’s degree while incarcerated and created curriculum and taught parenting classes for and with other mothers in prison. She has written blogs on her experiences and been a featured speaker to individuals and groups in academic and business settings. She has collaborated in brainstorming sessions with the Osborne Association, Columbia University, the Brooklyn District Attorneys Reentry Program and various other criminal justice reform groups. She has also been featured in a documentary film titled “What I Want My Words to Do To You” from a writing workshop at the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility for Women, conducted and led by the playwright and author V formerly known as Eve Ensler. Her current projects include co-founding a writing group “Right/Write to Heal” for incarcerated and formerly incarcerated women. Since her release after serving 39 years, she has devoted her time between her daughter and her advocacy work.

Jason D. Williamson is executive director of the Center on Race, Inequality, and the Law at NYU School of Law. Prior to assuming his current role in June 2021, Jason spent more than 10 years as a staff attorney and deputy director with the ACLU’s Criminal Law Reform Project, where he focused primarily on Fourth Amendment, police practices, and public defense reform litigation. Prior to joining the ACLU, Jason worked as a litigation associate at the law firm of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP in New York, and served as a law clerk for Judge Sterling Johnson, Jr. in the Eastern District of New York from 2007-2008. He began his legal career in New Orleans in the months following Hurricane Katrina, first as a staff attorney for the Juvenile Justice Project of Louisiana, and later as a staff attorney and founding member of Juvenile Regional Services (now called the Louisiana Center for Children’s Rights), which provides legal representation for indigent youth in Orleans Parish Juvenile Court. Jason also serves as an adjunct clinical professor at New York University School of Law. He received his Bachelor’s Degree from Harvard University in 1998, his MA from University of Chicago in 1999, and his JD from NYU Law in 2006. Jason is a devout Rastafarian, loving husband, and proud father of 14-year-old twin daughters.

Isaac Zaur is a commercial litigator and a partner in the firm Clarick Gueron Reisbaum LLP. Isaac works primarily on disputes arising from major transitions in the corporate life-cycle, such as securing control of critical start-up assets, the departure of a co-founder or senior executive, the aftermath of a merger or acquisition, or a bankruptcy. Isaac believes that, as a lawyer who practices in and benefits from the civil court system, he has a special responsibility to the experience of those impacted by the closely adjacent criminal courts.

Professor Steven Zeidman, Director of the Criminal Defense Clinic at CUNY School of law, has spent the last 30 years working in the area of criminal defense. A graduate of Duke University School of Law, he is a former staff attorney and supervisor at the Legal Aid Society. He has taught at Fordham, Pace, and New York University School of Law and was awarded the NYU Alumni Association's Great Teacher Award in 1997 and CUNY’s Outstanding Professor of the Year honor in 2011. Professor Zeidman is a member of the New York State Appellate Division Indigent Defense Organization Oversight Committee and the American Bar Association’s Criminal Justice Section Council, and serves on the Board of Directors of Prisoners' Legal Services and the Parole Preparation Project. He is also a member of an Advisory Council created to implement the remedial order in the Floyd v. City of New York federal court stop-and-frisk litigation. His published work has been cited in many law reviews and journals, as well as by the New York Court of Appeals.