John Cusick serves as a Litigation Fellow at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc. (LDF), where he primarily works on police misconduct, criminal justice, and voting rights cases and advocacy. John uses litigation, policy, public education, and other advocacy to advance racial justice.
John is part of a litigation team representing organizations and individual plaintiffs in Gruver, et al. v. Barton et al., a challenge to provisions within Florida’s enactment of legislation that undermines the historic Amendment 4 ballot initiative that restored the right to vote to 1.4 million people with felony convictions. He also represents a student organization and students at a historically Black university in Texas who have been denied access to on-campus early voting in Allen, et al. v. Waller, et al. John is actively engaged in the monitoring process in Davis, et al. v. City of New York, et al., a federal class action lawsuit challenging the New York City Police Department’s racially discriminatory and unconstitutional trespass-enforcement practices against Black and Latinx residents in public housing. John also co-led LDF’s 2018 Prepared to Vote initiative, which is a non-partisan election protection and preparedness campaign, as well as led efforts in certain states.
In September 2017, John joined LDF as an Equal Justice Works Fellow. In that role, he primarily focused on challenging the criminalization of youth of color and law enforcement’s use of artificial intelligence technologies, which remains a core part of his work.
John received his J.D. from New York University School of Law and B.A. in Humanities and Justice from John Jay College of Criminal Justice. Before school, John worked in New York City government. He is a member of the New York State Bar.
John Cusick joins the show to discuss the current state of voting rights.
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