Soffiyah Elijah

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Jill Soffiyah Elijah is an American lawyer, author and social justice activist.

Contents

Education

Elijah holds a Bachelor of Arts degree from Cornell University and a Juris Doctor degree from the Wayne State University Law School in Detroit, Michigan. [1] [2]

Career

Following law school, she worked as a supervising attorney at the Neighborhood Defender Service in Harlem, New York, and in the juvenile rights division of the New York Legal Aide Society. [2] [3] Beginning in 1992, she taught in the defender clinic at CUNY School of Law. [2] She was a clinical faculty member and the director of the Criminal Justice Institute at Harvard University. [4]

Elijah was the first black director of the Correctional Association of New York, a position she held for five years. [5] At the Correctional Association, she worked with the Marshall Project to prosecute several guards Attica Prison for brutality against inmates. [6] [7] In 2016 she founded the Alliance of Families for Justice, an American organization that advocates for those with family members in prison. [8] [9] As a lawyer she has represented Marilyn Buck and Sundiata Acoli in court. [10]

In 2018 she was honored with the Spirit of John Brown Freedom Award. [11]

As an author she has written opinion pieces for the New York Daily News, [12] The Hill, [13] Democracy Now!, and the New York Times. [14] [15]

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References

  1. ↑ "The League - Jill Soffiyah Elijah Alumni Spotlight". theleagueonline.org.
  2. 1 2 3 Karlin, Rick (20 February 2012). "Capital Profile: J. Soffiyah Elijah". Times Union.
  3. ↑ "Soffiyah Elijah". The Center for the Humanities.
  4. ↑ Esquivel, Adolfo Perez (September 2008). Let Freedom Ring: A Collection of Documents from the Movements to Free U.S. Political Prisoners. PM Press. ISBN   978-1-60486-149-5.
  5. ↑ McMahon, Lisa. "Niagara University's Transformative Visions Presidential Series Discusses Criminal Justice, Policing, and Prisons". news.niagara.edu.
  6. ↑ Tatusian, Alex (15 November 2019). "Happy Birthday to The Marshall Project". The Marshall Project.
  7. ↑ "Finalist: Tom Robbins of The Marshall Project and Michael Schwirtz and Michael Winerip of The New York Times". www.pulitzer.org.
  8. ↑ "New Yorker of the Week: Soffiyah Elijah". www.ny1.com.
  9. ↑ Gorce, Tammy La (23 April 2021). "How a Leader in Criminal Justice Reform Spends Her Sundays". The New York Times.
  10. ↑ Sullivan, Bobby (4 December 2018). Revolutionary Threads: Rastafari, Social Justice, and Cooperative Economics. Akashic Books. ISBN   978-1-61775-697-9.
  11. ↑ Virtanen, Michael (April 30, 2018). "John Brown celebration at the farmstead". Adirondack Explorer: 1.
  12. ↑ Elijah, Soffiyah. "'No new jails' means same old jails". nydailynews.com.
  13. ↑ Charles, J. B. (14 May 2017). "Honoring mothers on both sides of the bars on Mother's Day". TheHill.
  14. ↑ "Opinion | The Horror at the Attica Prison". The New York Times. 3 March 2015.
  15. ↑ "New York Ordered to Vaccinate Incarcerated People; Will Gov. Sign Bill Curbing Solitary Confinement?". Democracy Now!.
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