The Appeal
Channel Details
The Appeal
The Appeal is a podcast, hosted by Adam Johnson, on criminal justice reform, abolition and everything in between. Each week we will feature fascinating interviews with those covering, working in, and most affected by the American criminal system; from lawyers to activists to reporters to the formerl...
Recent Episodes
65 episodes
Episode 65: The Cruel Rise of 'Drug Induced Homicide' Prosecutions
In 2014, then-23 year-old Morgan Godvin sold a small amount of heroin to her friend and fellow drug user Justin DeLong who subsequently overdosed and...
Episode 64: Documenting the Death Penalty
Despite hundreds of people being put to death in the United States since the Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976, surprisingly little d...
Episode 62: Police Abuse In American Schools
In recent years, the number of police in American schools has skyrocketed as social services have been cut. As of 2016, 1.7 million students are in sc...
Episode 62: Locking Up Women For Killing Their Rapists
In 2018, Brittany Smith was assaulted and raped by a man in her Alabama home. Later that night, when the same man attacked both her and her brother, S...
Appeal Podcast: Reexamining the Science of Shaken Baby Syndrome
Shaken Baby Syndrome (SBS) bas been the subject of countless news specials, TV drama plots, and shocking tabloid headlines––horrific tales of child ab...
Episode 60: Substandard Healthcare in American Prisons
The only people in the United States the government is required by law to provide healthcare for are the incarcerated. But what constitutes a baseline...
Episode 59: The Regressive Pseudoscience of Our "War on Opioid Addiction"
On our last episode of the year we're doing something a little different: Joining us to co-host this week is Appeal contributor Zach Siegel, who’s a j...
Episode 58: The Cruel Roadblocks to Getting Innocent People Out of Prison
Last month, 106 legal scholars signed a brief supporting St. Louis prosecutor Kim Gardner's efforts to get a new trial for Lamar Johnson, a man convic...
Episode 57: Imagining a Post-Incarceration World
To those tasked with radically reimagining the U.S. legal system and moving it away from the current carceral, hyper-punitive model, the logical quest...
Episode 56: States Turn To Nitrogen Gas For Executions, Despite Doctors' Concerns
Facing legal challenges and a shortage of drugs for lethal injections, Oklahoma was the first state to announce a plan to use nitrogen to execute pris...
Episode 55: When Criminal Justice Reform Preserves The Status Quo
There’s a growing acceptance of the idea that we need to overhaul our system of mass incarceration. But methods for doing so vary enormously––and some...
Episode 54: When Police Officers Double as Prosecutors
In nine states, police officers are permitted to act as prosecutors and arraign people for misdemeanor charges. In Rhode Island, the practice is the n...
Episode 53: A Lack of Basic Rights for Incarcerated Workers
Many states pay incarcerated workers just 20 or 30 cents per hour--and some don't pay them at all. But incarcerated workers also have virtually no lab...
Episode 52: The Problem With Jailhouse Informants
Jailhouse informants are a fixture of pop culture, helping TV prosecutors secure convictions in exchange for leniency or other favors. But the public—...
Episode 51: U.S. Prisoners on Death Row Endure Permanent Solitary Before Execution
In addition to being unique among Western nations in executing people, the U.S. keeps many of its death row prisoners in prolonged solitary confinemen...
Episode 50: The War on Drugs Continues In Family Court
As cannabis use is legalized in more and more jurisdictions across the country, child protective systems aren't always keeping pace. Allegations of dr...
Episode 49: Chesa Boudin and the Meaning of 'Reform'
Progressive prosecutors have swept into office across the country, winning district attorney seats in Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Illinois, and beyon...
Episode 48: The Rise of Registries
Earlier this year, lawmakers in New York proposed a bill that would bar people convicted of multiple sex offenses from ever using New York City’s subw...
Episode 47: The Media's Misguided Fentanyl Hype
In recent years, lawmakers and the media have dusted off the 1980’s War on Drugs script to respond to an uptick in overdoses caused by a new, potent,...
Episode 46: Pleading Guilty Just to Go Home
Approximately half a million people are currently in jail awaiting trial across the United States, the vast majority because they are unable to pay ba...
Episode 45: Qualified Immunity, A Roadblock to Reform
Efforts to hold police accountable for violating civil rights frequently come up against a legal roadblock known as "qualified immunity." Invented by...
Episode 44: What's Changed Since The 2018 Prison Strike?
In August and September of last year, there were prison strikes in at least 17 states marked by work stoppages and hunger strikes. But what’s happened...
Episode 43: American Cities' Growing Reliance on Surveillance
In an effort to meet public demand to reduce the size of the brick and mortar prison population, some jurisdictions are doing so but reinvesting manpo...
Episode 42: Criminal Justice Reform Hits Roadblock in Arizona
Dozens of states have reformed their drug laws in recent years, but Arizona remains a stubborn outlier. In Maricopa County, for example, a recent repo...
Episode 41: Reframing The Bronx 120 Raid
In April 2016, the NYPD, in concert with the FBI, ATF, DEA, and Homeland Security, descended onto the South Bronx, arresting scores of people in what...
Episode 40: Generational Harm, A Hidden Cost of Mass Incarceration
On this podcast––and in other coverage of the criminal legal system––we tend to focus, understandably, on the people behind bars and on parole. But in...
Episode 39: NYPD-SVU's Low Clearance Rate for Sexual Assault
Despite having more than 35,000 officers and a massive budget of over $5 billion a year, the NYPD––and its Special Victims Unit––have a high rate of...
Episode 38: Privacy and Prescription Drug Monitoring Programs
Prescription Drug Monitoring Programs (PDMPs) have exploded in popularity. In 2000, thirteen states used PDMPs; today, they exist in every state and W...
Episode 37: The Baltimore Police Department's Troubled Homicide Unit
A recent lawsuit accused the Baltimore Police Department's homicide unit of a long pattern of questionable police work. Our guest, Appeal contributor...
Episode 36: The Long, Troubled History of Gravity Knife Prosecution
For decades, the New York Police Department has arrested people, the vast majority people of color, for carrying so-called gravity knives, meant to op...
Episode 35: The Risks of Risk Assessment
As more and more states seek to abandon cash bail, a system widely seen as unjust and discriminatory, a question has emerged: What should replace it?...
Episode 34: Pushing for Police Accountability in Sacramento
In March 2018, police in Sacramento, California killed Stephon Clark, an unarmed 22-year-old, in his grandparents' backyard. A year later, District At...
Episode 33: The Backlash Against Expanding Voting Rights
States throughout the U.S. have recently expanded voting rights to millions of people with felony records previously barred from participating in elec...
Episode 32: Mayor of Jackson Faces Uphill Battle for Police Accountability
Elected in 2017 to much fanfare from progressives, Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba promised to transform Jackson, Mississippi, into the “most radical city...
Episode 31: Prisoners With Disabilities Fight for Equal Rights
In the public mind, incarcerated people are often better left in the dark––unseen and unconsidered. That's especially true when it comes to prisoners...
Episode 30: How Police Unions Are Fighting California's New Transparency Law
A primary demand of the Black Lives Matter movement is more transparency into police misconduct. When an officer improperly arrests, unduly harms, sex...
Episode 29: A Pattern of Jail Deaths in Upstate New York—and Across the Country
About 1,000 people die in U.S. jails every year. But Erie County, New York, is an outlier, with 24 such deaths since Timothy Howard took over as sheri...
Episode 28: Debunking the ‘Fake News’ About Federal Prisoners’ Steak Dinners
As the government shutdown drags on, a number of media outlets––from NBC News to USA Today to the Washington Post––have run stories claiming that fede...
Episode 27: Promise and Letdown in Post-Alton Sterling Baton Rouge
Following the Alton Sterling shooting in the summer of 2016, the national media briefly turned its attention to Baton Rouge—a city marked by a long hi...