Brittany K. Barnett is an award-winning attorney and entrepreneur focused on social impact investing. She is dedicated to transforming...
Lee Rawles joined the ABA Journal in 2010 as a web producer. She has also worked for the Winston-Salem...
Brittany K. Barnett was a perfect fit for corporate law. As a certified public accountant who comes from a family with an entrepreneurial spirit, it made sense to fulfill her childhood dream and become a lawyer. But the same east Texas upbringing that gave her the ambition to succeed as a corporate attorney also wound up pulling her towards what her mother calls her “heart work”: clemency and sentencing reform.
In A Knock at Midnight: A Story of Hope, Justice, and Freedom, Barnett describes how the war on drugs preyed upon the community she grew up in. It eventually led to her mother, who was fighting a drug addiction, being imprisoned for two years when Barnett was a young adult. In this episode of the Modern Law Library, Barnett shares how formative experience changed her and made her identify strongly with Sharanda Jones, an incarcerated woman Barnett met during law school. Jones had been given a lifetime sentence without the possibility of parole for a first-time drug offense.
Barnett’s fight to free Jones expanded into a larger mission as she became involved in the Obama administration’s clemency project, and she continued that work after the Trump administration signed the First Step Act into law. Working with celebrities like Kim Kardashian West and Sean “Diddy” Combs has helped her bring needed attention to certain cases, she tells the ABA Journal’s Lee Rawles, but incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people can be tremendous advocates for themselves and should be the directing force behind the work. She also shares details about two non-profits she’s founded, the Buried Alive Project and Girls Embracing Mothers.
Notify me when there’s a new episode!
Published: | December 9, 2020 |
Podcast: | ABA Journal: Modern Law Library |
Category: | Access to Justice |
![]() |
ABA Journal: Modern Law Library |
ABA Journal: Modern Law Library features top legal authors and their works.
Can artificial intelligence increase firms' revenue while cutting down on billable hours? The authors of AI for Lawyers say it's possible.
In 'Watergate Girl,' Jill Wine-Banks battles obstruction and the era's sexism to bring Nixon and cronies to justice.
A different kind of wave of coronavirus cases will be coming to courts. Here's what you should know before you take a case.
In Let The Lord Sort Them: The Rise and Fall of the Death Penalty, Maurice Chammah shares how Texas became the country's capital punishment...
The rules surrounding what we wear can be unwritten social mores or codified in law. Dress Codes: How the Laws of Fashion Made History...
Most lawyers are cautious about change, but in The Modern Law Firm, Heinan Landa says technology adoption is key to getting and keeping clients.