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When a person is sentenced to death, the case is not over. Some of the most critical legal work happens after the trial and direct appeals are finished. That’s where habeas attorneys step in, often years later, to uncover constitutional violations, investigate what was missed, and ask a fundamental question: did the system get it right?
John Hutchins has spent years representing death row inmates in these high-stakes post-conviction proceedings. He’s also been active in the American Bar Association’s Death Penalty Representation Project, which focuses on improving the quality of legal representation in capital cases and addressing systemic gaps that can shape life-or-death outcomes.
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“White Collar Talks with Nina and Joe” episode features Lucian Dervan, discussing the upcoming 2026 Global White Collar Crime Institute, July 13-14, 2026, in Singapore. which will bring together senior practitioners, government officials, judges, and scholars to examine the evolving and increasingly complex landscape of international white collar crime. Hosts are Nina Marino and Joe Whitley.
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In 2007, FBI agents showed up at the home of Portia Louder and her husband Chad. Their youngest of five children was just three months old at the time. Seven years later, in August 2014, Louder pleaded guilty to wire fraud and conspiracy. And on the morning of April 21, 2015, she and Chad left their home in Utah on a 14-hour drive to the facility where Louder would self-surrender in order to commence her seven-year sentence.
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This being “Second Chance Month,” it’s a perfect time to share our discussion with Jessica Jackson and Erin Haney—respectively, Chief Executive Officer and Chief Policy Officer of the REFORM Alliance, the justice initiative founded by Philadelphia-born and Grammy-nominated rapper Meek Mill and others.
When Mill was sentenced, in November 2017, to a term of two to four years in prison for technical parole violations, the sentence was a catalyst for the criminal justice reform movement. In January 2019, Mill and fellow rapper Jay-Z together formed REFORM, following Mill’s release. Mill and Jay-Z were joined by a group of philanthropists and activists, several of whom, including Boston Patriots owner Robert Kraft, sit on REFORM’s Board of Directors.
Our guests, Jessica Jackson and Erin Haney, each have their own interesting stories to tell about their work in the criminal justice reform movement. It was a pleasure to welcome them to the JustPod.
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Program Co-Chairs Maggie O’Donell and Aitan Goelman discuss the history of the ABA Criminal Justice Section’s White Collar Crime Institute and the upcoming 2026 program on March 10-13, 2026 in San Diego, CA. "White Collar Talks" are hosted by Nina Marino and Joe Whitley.
The ABA White Collar Crime Institute is the nation’s premier forum for insights, updates, and expert analysis in the field of white collar crime. This annual event brings together leading practitioners, in-house counsel, judges, academics, and enforcement officials for an in-depth exploration of the most pressing legal, regulatory, and ethical issues impacting the white collar landscape today.
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Josh Hoe is Senior Policy Manager at Dream.org, and the host and creator of the Decarceration Nation Podcast. Josh, who is himself formerly incarcerated, is the author of “Writing Your Own Best Story: Addiction + Living Hope.” We connected to discuss Josh’s recent writing, in which he argues that the so-called “National Emergency on Crime” is not real, and why we should reject it.
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This is the first episode in our two-part discussion with Tom Hayes, who we first spoke with in April 2025. At the time of our first discussion with Tom, recorded in Part 1 of this series, Tom was awaiting a decision of the United Kingdom’s Supreme Court on the appeal of his August 2015 conviction, arising from his work submitting rates on behalf of bank he worked for, which were used to determine the London Interbank Offered Rate (or, LIBOR)—a benchmark rate, to which many other financial instruments were connected.
In Part 1, we hear from Tom about his fall from the high-end life of an international banker earning a handsome salary in Japan, and how it all came to a screeching halt on August 3, 2015. On that day, Tom was convicted by a jury, in the United Kingdom, of a conspiracy to defraud. The allegation was that Tom and others had submitted rates to benefit the financial institutions they worked for, instead of providing more accurate rates. For that conduct—what the prosecution characterized as a “manipulation” of LIBOR—Tom was sentenced to 14 years in prison, subsequently reduced to 11 years in prison, of which he ultimately served about 5.
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This is Part 2 of our two-part discussion with Tom Hayes, the now vindicated former English banker, who we first spoke with in April 2025. At the time of that earlier discussion with Tom, in Part 1 of this series, Tom was awaiting a decision of the United Kingdom’s Supreme Court on the appeal of his August 2015 conviction, arising from his work submitting rates, on behalf of his employer, a bank, that were used to determine the London Interbank Offered Rate (or, LIBOR)—a benchmark rate, to which many other financial instruments were connected.
The allegation was that Tom, and others, had manipulated their submission of rates to benefit the financial institutions they worked for. For that conduct—what the prosecution characterized as a “manipulation” of LIBOR—Tom was sentenced to 14 years in prison, subsequently reduced to 11 years in prison, of which he ultimately served about 5.
But a parallel prosecution in the United States against two other traders, brought by the U.S. Department of Justice, was dismissed, following a favorable decision of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in 2022. At the time of our discussion with Tom in Part 1, the United Kingdom remained the only jurisdiction that viewed Tom’s conduct as criminal. That is, until his conviction—and the conviction of another trader, Carlo Palumbo—were overturned by a unanimous UK Supreme Court on July 23, 2025. We caught up with Tom after this tremendous reprieve.
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In the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, home to Philadelphia and its surrounding counties, the U.S. Attorney is David Metcalf. We spoke shortly after the end of the government shutdown, at a time when the U.S. Department of Justice is under great scrutiny. The job of U.S. Attorney is always challenging, and even more so in the current climate, so we appreciated U.S. Attorney Metcalf generously sharing his time and thoughts with JustPod listeners.
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Mark Loughney’s art has been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art (“MoMa PS-1”), and published in The New Yorker and The Atlantic. His black-and-white ink drawings evoke a mix of M.C. Escher and Salvadore Dali, with surreal landscapes and bizarre figures. But Loughney is also well known for his series of prison portraits. They’re prison portraits, not only because they depict prisoners, but also because they were drawn when Loughney himself was serving a 10-year sentence as an inmate at Pennsylvania State Correctional Institution – Dallas. That is where Loughney’s portraiture blossomed, and his exhibitions began.
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[For a complementary audio excerpt of Gary Tyler’s book, narrated by Cary Hite, describing the point when Tyler is considering accepting a government plea agreement, and starting life outside Angola, listen here. Copyright © 2025 by Gary Tyler. Audio excerpt courtesy of Simon & Schuster. Audio read by Cary Hite, from the audiobook Stitching Freedom by Gary Tyler, published by Simon & Schuster Audio, a Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc. Used with permission from Simon & Schuster, Inc.]
In 1974, at the age of 16, Gary Tyler, who is African American, and was born in St. Rose Parish, Louisiana, was convicted by an all-white jury of a crime he did not commit: the murder of a white teenager. Tyler was sentenced to death. He was sent to Louisiana’s infamous Angola prison, where he was the youngest person on death row in the United States. A song by the British reggae band, UB40, titled in his name, “Tyler,” captures the injustice.
But Gary Tyler survived to tell the tale, and to write a magnificent book about his life experience: Stitching Freedom: A True Story of Injustice, Defiance, and Hope in Angola Prison, written with Ellen Bravo, and published by Simon and Schuster.
Gary Tyler was released from custody in 2016, having spent four decades in prison. Despite the compelling evidence of his innocence, he has never been exonerated. We had the honor of recording our discussion with Gary on October 6, the day before his book’s release, and the October 7 anniversary of his arrest, decades later.
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The honorable Mark W. Bennett is a retired U.S. District Court Judge, and the former Chief Judge of the Northern District of Iowa. Judge Bennett retired from the federal bench in 2019, and is now Director Emeritus of the Institute for Justice Reform & Innovation at Drake University Law School.
Judge Bennett is known for his advocacy for sentencing reform—including his criticism of the federal sentencing guidelines and statutory mandatory minimum sentences—for his research on implicit bias, and, unusually, for his prison visits to check up on hundreds of the defendants he sentenced. For some of those inmates, Judge Bennett has written, he is the only visitor they have ever had. Equally unusually, Judge Bennett has often met with the families of those he’s sentenced, at their request, to explain his sentences.
We were honored to discuss with Judge Bennett his own quest for justice, his experience sentencing thousands of federal criminal defendants, and so much more.
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Joseph De Gregorio was raised in a middle-class working family in Brooklyn, and comes from a line of hard workers. His father regularly got up at 4am to work at a plant, where he was a machinist. Joseph himself had the opportunity to get into finance, but the allures of Wall Street, gambling, and addiction, ultimately took him down a path toward fraud, and eventually a federal criminal conviction and a term of imprisonment. Today, as the founder of JN Advisor (www.jnadvisor.com), Joseph shares his own experience as a consultant to defendants facing criminal charges and the threat of imprisonment. He’s learned a lot along the way, and we were fortunate to hear some of his lessons on this episode of the JustPod.
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Joe Whitley (Womble Bond Dickinson) discusses the ABA Criminal Justice Section’s International White Collar Crime Institute (a special convening of the Global White Collar Crime Institute and the London White Collar Crime Institute) in Geneva, Switzerland on November 17-18, 2025, with Nina Marino (Kaplan Marino) and Lucian Dervan (Belmont University College of Law). Registration is ongoing at Criminal Justice Section Events.
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Elie Honig is CNN’s Senior Legal Analyst, and a former federal prosecutor. He is the bestselling author of Hatchet Man: How Bill Barr Broke the Prosecutor's Code and Corrupted the Justice Department (published by HarperCollins in 2021), and Untouchable: How Powerful People Get Away with It (also published by HarperCollins, in 2023). Elie is most recently the author of the recently released book When You Come at the King: Inside DOJ's Pursuit of the President, from Nixon to Trump, a history of the Office of Independent Counsel and Special Counsel investigations. We recorded a lively discussion with Elie shortly before the book’s release.
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Nina Marino, Joe Whitley and Brian McEvoy share in a meaningful discussion about the ABA Criminal Justice Section’s Annual Southeastern White Collar Crime Institute and what to expect at this year’s 11th conference next week at Chateau Elan, Georgia. Registration is ongoing.
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What is the process for transferring a criminal defendant from U.S. custody to a foreign country? We learn this and more from our discussion with Bruce Zagaris, a Partner in the Washington, DC Office of Berliner, Corcoran, and Rowe, who is an expert on international prisoner transfers. Bruce is a widely known expert in the field of international criminal law, and is the co-author of International Criminal Law: Cases and Materials (now in its 4th edition), as well as International White Collar Crime: Cases and Materials (in its 2nd edition). Bruce is also the Founder and Editor of the International Enforcement Law Reporter.
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What do the Lubavitcher Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, zt”l, and the Chabad Chassidic movement have to do with criminal justice reform? Find out in the latest episode of the JustPod, with our guest, Rabbi Yossi Bryski, the Director of Alternative Sentencing at the Aleph Institute.
Aleph was founded in 1981 at the Rebbe’s direction, and for over 40 years since, has served individuals of all backgrounds and faiths in prison programs, reentry programs, alternative sentencing programs, and in advocacy, while providing services for the families of inmates, including summer camps for the children of inmates.
Rabbi Bryski and his team work with defense counsel to craft alternative sentencing proposals for offenders. And as a result of their work, federal and state courts across the country have accepted Aleph’s creative alternative sentencing proposals. You’re just a click away from stories and experiences that are both heartwarming and inspiring.
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Please join co-hosts Joe Whitley and Nina Marino for an insightful discussion with our distinguished guest, Susan Bozorgi.
Susan started her impressive career in the public defender’s office in Miami where she found her calling opposing the government in representing people accused of crime. She tried hundreds of jury trials which honed her skills as a formidable trial attorney.
Susan is the founder of Bozorgi Law PLLC based in Miami. She is known for her persistence and perseverance and regularly wins cases that objectively have little chance of success. She is also a champion of women as her blog “Women Criminal Defense Attorneys” highlights the successes of women in the criminal justice space, and she is a leader in the Women White Collar Defense Association, the global premiere women white collar defense organization.
Susan’s passion for her work shines through in this interview. She is nothing short of a trailblazer for young lawyers and an inspiration for all, as she has broken barriers and torn down ceilings and achieved significant success and respect.
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Gianna Toboni’s book, The Volunteer: The Failure of the Death Penalty in America and One Inmate’s Quest to Die with Dignity, is a morally provocative chronicle about Scott Dozier, a former Army Ranger, who was sentenced to death, and “volunteered” for the death penalty. Dozier had been convicted of murder, sentenced to death, and ultimately demanded the state enforce its own penalty.
What unfolds in Toboni’s book is a story not just about death, but also about the bureaucratic, moral, and psychological theater that surrounds it. As the book makes clear, Dozier was not a hero or a martyr. Nonetheless, in Dozier’s story Toboni has put a magnifying glass on the contradictions of a system that claims to value life, even while enforcing the ultimate penalty, death.
Toboni is an Emmy-award winning journalist and documentary film maker. The Volunteer, her debut book, was published by Simon and Schuster in April 2025. We’re grateful she included the JustPod among other notable stops (including The Daily Show and Comedy Central!) on her first book tour.
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