Defend(H)ers

Premal Dharia grew up the child of Indian immigrants in Mingo County, West Virginia, a former coal mining town where her family's food, accents, and visible difference set them apart. A move to the Washington, D.C. suburbs in high school reframed everything: for the first time she saw how interconnected, resourced communities worked, and how disconnected her hometown had been by comparison. In this conversation with Meghan Skelton, she traces the line from that shift, through a jarring college internship investigating cases at the Neighborhood Defender Service in Harlem, to a nearly fifteen-year career as a public defender in three different places: the D.C. Public Defender Service, the federal public defender's office in Maryland, and the military commission at Guantanamo Bay.

Premal talks about what it meant to stand next to clients facing sentencing, the deliberate ways she worked to make judges and prosecutors see her clients as people rather than case files, and the surreal, disorienting experience of representing detainees at Guantanamo, where officers avoided using prisoners' names and instead used their ISN numbers. She describes why she eventually left criminal defense for civil impact litigation, challenging bail systems and the fines and fees that trap poor defendants in cycles of punishment, and why that work ultimately felt incomplete in a way criminal defense had not.

That search led her to found a project bridging public defenders and community organizers, work that became the Institute to End Mass Incarceration at Harvard Law School, where she is now executive director. She talks about the Institute's current focus on aging prison infrastructure as an opening for bigger questions about incarceration, and on model legislation to protect incarcerated people who report on conditions inside, inspired in part by the documentary The Alabama Solution. Asked what she would change about the criminal legal system if she could change only one thing, she answers without hesitation: punishment itself. She closes by reflecting on the privilege of being able to push back against that system, in small ways, every day.

Denny LeBoeuf spent 13 years bartending in the French Quarter before going to law school at Tulane, a path she returned to a decade later when a bar regular told her philosophy was a good prelude to a law degree. In this conversation with Sonya Pfeiffer, she traces that unlikely route into capital defense: a clinic case in her third year of law school that was already a homicide retrial, and a first capital case she took on straight out of school because, as the woman who recruited her put it, she was better than nothing.

Denny talks about what it meant to practice as one of the only women in Louisiana courtrooms in the late 1980s and 90s, including a federal arraignment where a judge addressed every man as "gentlemen" until he caught himself, and a St. Tammany Parish judge who called every white man "mister" and called every woman and every Black man by their first name. She describes what she did with the rage those moments produced, and how Hurricane Katrina exposed and then forced a rebuild of a public defender system that had let private cases crowd out capital ones.

She also covers her work founding the ACLU's John Adams Project, representing capitally charged detainees at Guantanamo, and what it took to get military lawyers and the human rights bar to recognize the cases needed capital-qualified counsel. Denny talks about Scharlette Holdman's invention of mitigation work, her decades-long friendship with Sister Helen Prejean, and why she still believes the death penalty is wrong "all the way up and all the way down." She closes with her advice to young women considering the work: come aboard.

JoEllyn L. Jones grew up in Gouldtown, New Jersey, a South Jersey community she describes as one of the first free Black communities in the country. In this conversation with Molly Parmer, she talks about the neighbors and teachers who raised her there, a school curriculum centered on African American history, and the second-grade T-shirt that said she wanted to be a lawyer.

On December 29, 1998, her brother, Robert "RJ" Jones, was shot and killed, six months before she graduated from high school. JoEllyn describes sitting through arraignments and hearings as a family member, the anger she carried through the case, and what she needed that the process did not give her. She tells Molly why she first decided against becoming a lawyer, how she applied to Widener while raising her daughter as a single mother, and what happened in her first years of practice, including a cancer diagnosis when her daughter was nine. She went on to contract work for the public defender's office and then six years on staff there.

Years after her brother's death, JoEllyn walked up to Ryan Young, the man who killed him, in a restaurant and told him she thought they should work together. She describes the diner meeting with her mother that followed, the questions she was finally able to ask, and how the two of them now speak together about gun violence and restorative justice. She also talks about what audiences ask her about forgiveness.

JoEllyn and Molly also cover her mentors, including Terry Stomel, Heather Pinckney, Brandi Harden, and Lisa Wayne, and the group texts she keeps with defense lawyers around the country. She talks about serving on New Jersey's Clemency Advisory Board, which began in 2024 and reviewed close to 1,500 applications, and what that work changed in her thinking about consecutive sentences, life sentences, and the difference between punishment and accountability. Her advice to young women entering criminal defense: find your circle before you need it, set boundaries, and make donuts.

Teny Geragos has had a run that would be difficult to make up. She delivered the opening statement in the Sean Combs trial, cross-examined the complainant in Harvey Weinstein's retrial, represented the Alexander brothers, and gave birth to her second child along the way. She heard every verdict a jury can return — acquittal, conviction, mistrial.

In this conversation with Melinda Sarafa, Teny goes back to the beginning: watching her father defend Scott Peterson when she was 14, and how the pretrial media crush convinced her she wanted to fix the narrative problem — from inside a newsroom, not a courtroom. She went to NYU for media and communications, interned at network shows, and then went to law school anyway. The background didn't go to waste.

They cover the Combs case in depth — the Cassie Ventura video, how the defense discovered CNN had sped the footage up by 30%, the TikTok strategy, and what it takes to separate a domestic violence charge from a sex trafficking charge when the public has already merged the two. Plus: her approach to cross-examination, why being a woman in that chair mattered, and her one piece of advice for young women considering criminal defense.