Just Justice

Just Justice

A podcast about criminal justice, punishment, redemption, and second chances.

Episodes

October 27, 2026 • 48 mins
For the first time, Just Justice goes international! Host Jessica Henry welcomes Priscillah Cherono from Kenya, whose extraordinary journey from prisoner to lawyer offers a powerful perspective on criminal justice and second chances beyond the United States.

Priscillah spent more than 14 years incarcerated in Kenya, including over nine years awaiting trial. While imprisoned, she experienced firsthand the harsh realities of horrifi...

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Context means everything. In this episode of Just Justice, Jessica Henry speaks with Elizabeth Vartkessian, author of the terrific new book The Deserving and founder of Advancing Real Change (ARC), about the power of mitigation evidence to reveal the life experiences and contexts in which people cause serious harm. Together they explore how childhood trauma, poverty, violence, and systemic failures shape lives, and what those histo...
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September 29, 2026 • 6 mins

Why do we so often respond to violence with calls for more violence? In this short solo episode, host Jessica Henry reflects on trauma, accountability, and what it means to hold people responsible for their actions without denying their humanity.

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Jennifer Sellitti, the Public Defender for the State of New Jersey, joins Just Justice to talk about holistic defense, client-centered representation, and the future of public defense. She explains how addressing needs such as treatment, mental health care, employment, and benefits can improve outcomes for clients and communities. We also discuss second chances, resentencing and parole -- and Sellitti’s unexpected role as a s...
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Emily Galvin Almanza has spent her career reimagining what justice can look like. A former public defender and co-founder and executive director of Partners for Justice, she joins Just Justice to talk about her acclaimed book, The Price of Mercy: Unfair Trials, a Violent System, and a Public Defender’s Search for Justice in America, and her new middle-grade novel, Andromeda Diaz and the Reasonable Doubt, out September 8. We t...

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In this episode of Just Justice, Jessica Henry speaks with law professor, innocence attorney, and former federal prosecutor Valena Beety about her new book, Pink Crime: Fighting the Criminalization of Motherhood, Pregnancy, and Queer Identity. The conversation explores how the criminal legal system judges mothers against impossible standards of “good motherhood,” how pregnancy outcomes and substance use c...

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Dawn Jackson survived years of sexual abuse and violence before being convicted in connection with the death of her abusive step-grandfather. Sentenced to 30 years, she spent more than 25 years at the Edna Mahan Correctional Facility for Women before receiving clemency from Governor Phil Murphy in December 2024..com

In this powerful conversation, Dawn discusses the trauma that shaped her case, the legal system’s failure to un...

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After more than a decade as a criminal defense attorney, Courtney Teasley saw the same problem over and over again: too many people entered the criminal legal system without a practical understanding of their rights or the systems shaping their choices. In this episode, Courtney explains why she sees legal, financial, and civic literacy as essential tools for disrupting pathways into mass incarceration. She also shares the mea...

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What happens when a woman’s survival is treated as a crime?

In this episode of Just Justice, Jessica Henry speaks with award-winning journalist Justine van der Leun about her new book, Unreasonable Women: Three Stories of Violence, Imprisonment, and Extraordinary Survival. Drawing on seven years of reporting and more than 1,000 accounts from incarcerated women, van der Leun examines how the criminal legal system responds when...

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After nearly 25 years in New York prisons, Mujahideen Muhammad, MPS came home in 2024 and went straight to work on criminal justice reform. In this episode of Just Justice, he talks with host Jessica Henry about the New York Second Look Act, how prison education transformed his life at Sing Sing, the book club he built around James Garbarino's Miller's Children, and the humanitarian crisis in New York's prisons — including th...

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In this episode of Just Justice, Jessica Henry sits down with Iris Eytan, founder of Protect Ethical Prosecutors (PEP), to examine prosecutorial misconduct and why it so rarely leads to consequences. Prosecutors hold more power than almost anyone in the American criminal legal system, yet broad legal immunity often shields them even after serious misco...

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On this episode of Just Justice, Damon "Sharuka" Venable, Community Affairs and Policy Specialist with the New Jersey Office of the Public Defender, shares his journey from a Newark childhood marked by poverty and street violence to spending 35 years in prison before being granted parole on his first attempt. Drawing from his memoir, A Beautiful Pain, Sharuka reflects on accountability, survival, education, and the long p...
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Nikki Mammano is the author of Breaking Good, a fast-paced memoir that traces her journey from suburban New Jersey to the drug underworld of Waikiki and back again, through addiction, arrest, prison, and ultimately recovery. Our conversation is both poignant and unexpectedly funny as we explore trauma and second chances in our criminal justice system. Wh...

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S3E11: Death by Incarceration: Felix Rosado on Life Sentences and Restorative Justice

Sentenced to life without parole at 18, Felix Rosado spent nearly 27 years in prison before his sentence was commuted. In this episode of Just Justice, Felix reflects on the moment he realized what a life sentence truly meant, what's wrong with "death by incarceration,"  and how restorative justice transformed his understanding of accoun...

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In this episode of Just Justice, host Jessica Henry speaks with April Barber-Scales, who was sentenced to life without parole in 1991 as a frightened, pregnant teenager.  After more than thirty years in prison, April received a rare commutation in 2022 from North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper. Since her release, April has devoted herself to advocating for people in prison and challenging extreme sentencing practices. ...

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In this powerful episode of Just Justice, writer, organizer, and abolitionist Emile Suotonye DeWeaver, author of Ghosts in the Criminal Justice Machine: Reform, White Supremacy, and an Abolitionist Future, draws on more than two decades of incarceration to offer a deeply personal and sharply analytical critique of the U.S. criminal legal system, along with a bold vision for what justice could look like beyond prisons. Emile reflect...

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December 23, 2025 • 5 mins
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Dr. Daphne Bryden joins this episode of Just Justice to explore trauma, transformation, and life after long-term incarceration. Drawing on over two decades of clinical and research experience, Dr. Brydon examines how people sentenced to life as children survive and grow in prison, and how they reclaim their identities and intimacy upon their release. She also tackles complex ideas about what a trauma-informed approach to justi...
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