More About Me or, Qualifying as an Expert Witness in an RJA Case in California.

I recently had to submit my qualifications, once again, as an expert witness for a RJA hearing in a California court. I thought I’d share a few of the answers I gave as a good way to start off this blog and as one of the simplest ways to give a sense of who I am. I’m going to present it in a question and answer format to make it readable and to keep it close to the format I’d use if I were giving testimony in a courtroom.

For an explainer on the The California Racial Justice Act of 2020 click here to go to this excellent explainer post by Hoang Pham and Amira Dehmani at the Stanford Law School Blog

What is my field of Expertise?

I am a cultural anthropologist specializing in race and the criminal justice system in the US. Within that, specifically California and the Bay Area. I had to pass two qualifying exams on a series of topics in the third year of my program to be accepted as a full PhD student (before that, we’re called ‘candidates'). The term ‘exams’ is a little misleading here because studying for these exams took up the better part of my entire third year in the program. Under the direction of academic experts I created reading lists of hundreds of books and articles about race, criminal justice, kinship (more on this later) and the US. I was expected to understand each book and article not only as an independent work with its own data, argument, and disciplinary conventions, but also as a single part of a larger body of scholarship and be able to explain it within the debates and history of that body of scholarship. My project was fundamentally interdisciplinary, engaging scholarship and topics in legal theory, history, sociology and criminology, studies of race and racism, psychology, and of course anthropology.

In my program we were expected to divide our exams, and reading lists, between a geographic region and a specialist topic. For me, the geographic region was the US, focusing on California and particularly the Bay Area. Of course, the US is far too large a place to cover everything written about it, so I refined my focus to the historical and contemporary patterns of race and racism here. For my specialist topic, I chose the criminal justice system and kinship (the study of familial relations) but again, with a focus on race and racism within both of those areas. In other words, the overlap between race and racism, the criminal justice system, and familial relations. I passed my qualifying exams in 2016.

Even before passing my exams I was engaged in preliminary fieldwork, working with the children of incarcerated parents to begin to understand how families were being affected by mass incarceration and how US society in general was affected by our over-reliance on criminal justice as a panacea for all social ills. Once I was finished with my exams I began my fieldwork proper. I continued working with children of incarcerated parents while opening up another field site in the San Bruno Jail (a San Francisco County jail). While there I sat in on classes, held focus groups, conducted hundreds of hours of interviews and took hundreds of pages of ethnographic field notes. I also visited prisons and spoke to incarcerated people there, interviewed and visited with with family members of men in the jail, interviewed jail employees and employees of various city agencies, attended court dates, and read innumerable pages of manuals, syllabi, social media posts, laws, court proceedings, reports, policy briefs, news articles and other texts for secondary textual analysis. 

Starting while conducting my field work, but continuing for several years afterwards, I wrote a dissertation based on my research, grounded in a huge body of other academic research in criminology, theory of race and racism, and anthropology. My dissertation was an ethnography of family, race, and the dynamics of responsibility under mass incarceration. I passed another oral exam on that dissertation and had the text of my dissertation accepted by a panel of 4 professors, including eminent criminologists and anthropologists, in 2020.

What was my educational background to prepare for that field of study?

I earned an undergraduate degree in Anthropology from UCL, where I wrote a final project on gangs and criminalization. Also, on the way to my Ph.D. at Stanford I earned a Masters in cultural anthropology from Stanford. Since completing my Ph.D., I have been part of a 3-year teaching fellowship program at Stanford, which I left in spring 2024. During my program I won 16 grants and fellowships and one prize for my project, teaching, contributions to the discipline, and my scholarship, including 5 large fellowships to support my dissertation research and writing.

Have you taught any classes on the subjects of race, racism, and/or the criminal justice system?

I’ve taught many classes on those subjects, all at Stanford University, and have been teaching about those subjects for over 6 years. I have taught classes on race and racism; on implicit bias, systemic racism, and the psychology of racism; on Critical Race Theory; on the history of the criminal justice system; and on racism in the criminal justice system. For every class I teach I not only develop materials to help me better explain those concepts, I also review the theory and update my knowledge of developments in the field and deepen my understanding of the concepts.

What is your current employment? 

Since June of 2024 I’ve been a freelance forensic expert witness and consultant on RJA motions and racial justice legal issues. I have provided expert opinion in more than 10 cases, ranging from racial profiling in pretextual stops and racial stereotypes in prosecutorial language to larger projects on disproportionate charging and systemic racism in a city police department.