There is growing recognition that decarceration cannot be achieved without reckoning with the huge number of people in this country serving long sentences for violent crimes. States across the country are passing legislation to allow incarcerated people to seek a “second look” at their sentences. Second Look advocacy sits within in the broader decarceration movement, one that seeks to dismantle the carceral paradigm that systemic racism helped construct.
This panel will address the role of law school clinics in the growing movement to dismantle mass incarceration through challenging excessive sentences. Panelists will discuss recent Second Look legislative reform and consider how law school clinics can help implement those reforms and develop other reforms. Panelists will draw on the experiences of the Child Advocacy and Juvenile Justice Clinic at Minnesota Law, and the Legal Assistance to Minnesota Prisoners at Mitchell Hamline to explore the potential and challenges of Second Look advocacy work.
Topics to explore include strategic case selection, an effective clinical pedagogy of storytelling, reckoning with violent crime, outreach to prosecutors and victims, and how clinics can provide reentry support to released clients, as well as big picture questions about confronting structural racism and inequity in the context of Second Look work.
Second Look work offers law students the opportunity to seek sentencing relief for people who have served extraordinarily long sentences, and in so doing engage with some of the most important criminal law policy questions facing the nation. For clinicians, this work demands innovative pedagogy and raises difficult questions about how individual client work may risk reinforcing the very norms we seek to subvert. This panel will engage with these questions and invite the audience to consider similar themes in their own clinical practices.