Blog of Rights
Ezekiel
Edwards
As both director and previously as staff attorney, Edwards has worked directly on cases and campaigns on a wide variety of issues, including ending overincarceration and excessive sentencing, challenges to juvenile life without parole sentences, reforms of unconstitutional police practices and drug law reform, including defending medical marijuana laws. Before joining the ACLU, Edwards was a staff attorney at the Innocence Project and leading national expert on eyewitness identification reform, a public defender at the Bronx Defenders, a Criminal Justice Fellow at the Drum Major Institute of Public Policy and an investigator at the Capital Defender Office in New York.
 
Edwards earned his J.D. at the University of Pennsylvania, where he was a Public Interest Scholar, and his B.A. with honors at Vassar College.

 

04/26/2012
Drug Law Reform

Hundreds of Economists: Marijuana Prohibition Costs Billions, Legalization Would Earn Billions

By Ezekiel Edwards, ACLU Criminal Law Reform Project & Rebecca McCray, ACLU Criminal Law Reform Project at 4:29pm

Over 300 economists, including three Nobel Laureates, recently signed a petition that encourages the president, Congress, governors and state legislatures to carefully consider marijuana legalization in America. The petition draws attention to an article by Harvard economist Jeffrey Miron, whose findings highlight the substantial cost-savings our government could incur if it were to tax and regulate marijuana, rather than needlessly spending billions of dollars enforcing its prohibition.

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10/04/2012
War on Drugs

The House I Live In: Documentary Goes Inside the Failed War on Drugs

By Ezekiel Edwards, ACLU Criminal Law Reform Project & Rebecca McCray, ACLU Criminal Law Reform Project at 4:33pm

In 1971, Richard Nixon declared a war, couched in terms that suggested that the onslaught of attacks would target and eliminate the presence of drugs in our country. But the so-called War on Drugs, it turned out, was given a deceiving title. Nixon had instead initiated a full-fledged war on the American people, one that has continued in full force for more than four decades, systematically targeting, punishing and marginalizing hundreds of thousands of our citizens – predominately people of color and in poverty. In recent years, critics of this misguided war have become increasingly vocal, spurring an outpouring of calls to end the government’s harmful, needless and costly battle on American citizens. Now, the tragic complexity of this failed war has been captured on film by director Eugene Jarecki in his award-winning documentary, The House I Live In, making its debut in theaters this Friday. The film compellingly documents the wasteful War on Drugs from numerous critical angles by bearing witness to the stories of prison guards and prisoners, judges and police officers, and the families left behind after their loved ones were thrown in prison.

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09/05/2012
Overincarceration

It's Time to Discuss Criminal Justice Reform

By Vanita Gupta, Center for Justice & Ezekiel Edwards, ACLU Criminal Law Reform Project at 2:51pm

Presidential election season is prime time for predictions. One sure bet is this: neither candidate is likely to make criminal justice a stump issue.

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06/22/2011
Juvenile Life Without Parole

Lift Children Out of the Criminal Justice System – Don't Lock Them Away

By Ezekiel Edwards, ACLU Criminal Law Reform Project & Tanya Greene, Advocacy and Policy Counsel, ACLU at 5:17pm

What kind of person looks into the face of a child and sees no hope? What kind of society locks up children as if they were adults — and sometimes even throws away the key? Unfortunately, ours does. As a case in point, Kansas City prosecutors are currently mulling over whether to charge a five-year-old child for the murder of an 18-month old. Just think — murder charges for a little girl who has not yet even entered first grade!

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06/21/2012
Fair Sentencing Act

ACLU LENS: Supreme Court Rules Fairer Sentences Apply to More Drug Cases

By Ezekiel Edwards, ACLU Criminal Law Reform Project at 3:28pm

The Supreme Court ruled today that the Fair Sentencing Act of 2010 (FSA), which reduced the disparity in federal sentencing between crack and powder cocaine, applies to people whose offenses pre-date the law but who were sentenced after its passage. Read the opinion here.

The FSA was passed to correct the problems with the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986, which created an unfair sentencing scheme that unequally punished comparable offenses involving crack and powder cocaine — two forms of the same drug – and resulted in racially biased sentencing. To remedy the fact that the 100:1 ratio was without penological or scientific justification, and that it resulted in black defendants suffering significantly harsher penalties than white defendants, Congress passed the FSA and reduced the ratio from 100:1 to 18:1. As we’ve written before, the new ratio is a step in the right direction, although the only truly fair and empirically sound ratio would be 1:1.

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03/18/2013
Gideon: Unfulfilled at 50

Too Many Still Wait to Hear Gideon's Trumpet

By Vanita Gupta, Center for Justice & Ezekiel Edwards, ACLU Criminal Law Reform Project at 11:38am

Fifty years ago, 52-year old drifter Clarence Earl Gideon was prosecuted, convicted, and sentenced without a lawyer to five years imprisonment for stealing bottled drinks and vending machine coins...

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12/22/2011
Fair Sentencing Act

Will the Supreme Court Render the Fair Sentencing Act Less Fair?

By Emma Andersson, Criminal Law Reform Project & Ezekiel Edwards, ACLU Criminal Law Reform Project at 5:58pm

(Also posted on ACSBlog.)

The Fair Sentencing Act of 2010 (FSA) is actually only kind of fair. The passage of the 2010 law, which reduced the crack to powder mandatory minimum ratio in federal cocaine sentences from 100:1 to 18:1, was a significant step in the direction of fairness. While we applaud this change, we also look forward to the day when Congress adopts the actually fair ratio of 1:1. In the meantime, the Supreme Court has granted certiorari on two FSA cases, Hill v. United States and Dorsey v. United States, both out of the Seventh Circuit. In these cases, the Court will decide whether people whose offense predates the enactment of the FSA but who were sentenced afterwards should be sentenced based on the old 100:1 ratio or the new 18:1 ratio. If the Court rules the wrong way, a sizeable class of people will be excluded from Congress’ attempt to restore fairness and racial neutrality to federal cocaine sentencing, and the kind-of-Fair Sentencing Act will become even less fair.

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03/15/2012
Medical Marijuana

Should We Deny Ill People on Probation Access to Medicine?

By Ezekiel Edwards, ACLU Criminal Law Reform Project & Emma Andersson, Criminal Law Reform Project at 4:58pm

In 2000, Colorado voters approved an amendment to their state constitution that allows patients suffering from conditions like cancer, glaucoma and HIV/AIDS to use medical marijuana when a doctor has advised them to do so. The amendment to the Colorado constitution provides that these patients "may engage in the medical use of marijuana" and that they will have an affirmative defense against state criminal charges relating to their use of medical marijuana.

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08/05/2011
Stop-And-Frisk

Bloomberg Gives With One Hand; Takes With the Other

By Ezekiel Edwards, ACLU Criminal Law Reform Project & Rebecca McCray, ACLU Criminal Law Reform Project at 5:20pm

This week, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced that he would invest $30 million from his own pocket to uplift the young black and Latino men who are most excluded from New York’s civic, educational and economic life. While this proposal is generous, it fails to address the fact that the Bloomberg administration has supported policies that have led to staggering racial disparities in New York’s corrections system. While funding job recruitment and education programs is indeed important, there’s a critical missing piece in this grand plan: ending NYPD’s widespread aggressive stop and frisk policies that target communities of color at skyrocketing rates and contribute markedly to the marginalization of the very same communities Bloomberg now aims to help.

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