Seeking your next great read? Convo with thought-provoking authors? Fun projects and performances for kids? Grab a “Smashing Pumpkin” from Gregory’s Coffee on Court St. and visit the 2024 Brooklyn Book Festival! A digital guide to this weeklong Festival (Sept. 22 – 30, 2024) will be available through the free Bloomberg Connects arts and culture app.
Everyone can be a part of Virtual Festival Day on Sunday, Sept. 22, 2024 (noon – 5 pm). Whether you seek a new food book (panel: Memory & Flavor: An Expansive Vision of Food & Recipe Writing) or a recent book from an international author (program: Who? New! International), there will be a virtual program to engage you.
Brooklyn Law School will host one of the Festival’s Bookend Events on Wednesday, Sept. 25, 2024: Protect Your People: Challenging Mass Incarceration Together (RSVP required for this free event.)
This event will highlight the recent book Protect Your People: How Ordinary Families Are Using Participatory Defense to Challenge Mass Incarceration (The New Press, 2024).
The event will feature: Raj Jayadev, the book's author and a MacArthur Fellow, Heather Lewis, Executive Director of the Reuniting Family Bail Fund, and Justine “Taz” Moore, Director of Training at the National Council for Incarcerated and Formerly Incarcerated Women and Girls. These speakers will converse with Brooklyn Law School Professor & Associate Dean Jocelyn Simonson, author of Radical Acts of Justice: How Ordinary People are Dismantling Mass Incarceration (The New Press, 2023). As noted here, this program will highlight “the innovative storytelling techniques of groups of people who have changed the outcomes of criminal cases by intervening collectively through ‘participatory defense.’” Brooklyn Law School's Center for Criminal Justice is a sponsor of this event.
- Date & Time: Wednesday, Sept. 25, 2024, 6:00 pm - 7:30 pm
- Place: Brooklyn Law School, 250 Joralemon St., Brooklyn, NY
This Festival’s Children’s Day will be on Saturday, Sept. 28, 2024 from 10 am – 4 pm in Brooklyn Commons (= MetroTech in downtown Brooklyn).
Activities will include:
Goosebumps & Beyond: A Spooky Conversation with R.L. Stine
Mad Libs: Graphic Novel Edition!
Puppet Making Workshop with writer Vojtěch Mašek
A gameshow, Are You Smarter than an Author?, in which participants can test their skills against middle grade novelists.
Festival Day & Literary Marketplace will be on Sunday, Sept. 29, 2024 from 10 am - 6 pm. It features local, national and international authors, publishers and vendors. Many of these programs will occur in Brooklyn Law School and in our “front yard”: Brooklyn Borough Hall. Click here to view the many authors participating in Festival Day.
These are two of many Sept. 29, 2024 Festival Day events that will occur at Brooklyn Law School (w/ links to entries for the authors' books in BLS Library's catalog):
Dreaming of Freedom: How We Move Beyond an Expanding Police State
Brooklyn Book Festival's program description: "With 'robot dogs' at the border, automated surveillance, and arbitrary decisions controlling probation and parole, a system of policing and punishment seems less concerned with fairness or safety than with social control. What does it all have to do with justice?" Program participants will be: sociologist Ruha Benjamin (author of Imagination: A Manifesto), journalist Ben Austen (Correction: Parole, Prison, and the Possibility of Change), and lawyer and anthropologist Petra Molnar (The Walls Have Eyes: Surviving Migration in the Age of Artificial Intelligence). The moderator will be Vincent Schiraldi, former Probation Commissioner of New York City and author of Mass Supervision: Probation, Parole, and the Illusion of Safety and Freedom.
- Date & Time: Sunday, Sept. 29, 2024, 4 pm
- Place: Brooklyn Law School, Moot Court Room, 250 Joralemon St., Brooklyn, NY
Debt, Solidarity, and Economic Justice presented by Brooklyn Law School
- Brooklyn Book Festival's program description: "A conversation about the legal, political, and economic forces shaping debt markets and horizons for change and the abolition of debt featuring: Luke Messac (Your Money or Your Life: Debt Collection in American Medicine), Chrystin Ondersma (Dignity Not Debt: An Abolitionist Approach to Economic Justice), Melissa Jacoby (Unjust Debts: How Our Bankruptcy System Makes America More Unequal) and Astra Taylor (co-author of Solidarity: The Past, Present, And Future Of A World-Changing Idea and founder of the Debt Collective). Moderated by Vijay Raghavan, Associate Professor of Law, Brooklyn Law School."
- Date & Time: Sunday, Sept. 29, 2024, 5 pm
- Place: Brooklyn Law School, Moot Court Room, 250 Joralemon St., Brooklyn, NY
See you at the Festival!
The First Step Act was enacted and signed into law with bipartisan support in December 2018. The statute includes numerous sentencing reforms, including a provision that allows a prisoner to file a motion for compassionate release if he or she can demonstrate “extraordinary and compelling” reasons for such relief. Data from the United States Sentencing Commission show that from October 2019 through December 2024, judges have granted 5,547 compassionate release motions.
In 1997, in his courtroom in the Eastern District of New York, Judge Frederic Block sentenced Walter Johnson to five life sentences for robbery, cocaine possession, and witness tampering. According to a NY Times article, Johnson’s criminal misdeeds in the 1980s and 1990s included armed robberies on a bus, on the F Line of the subway, and in a church. Notably, he was a suspect in the 1994 shooting of Tupac Shakur in the lobby of the Quad Recording Studios in Manhattan.
At the time of the 1997 sentencing, Judge Block had been on the bench for under three years. In the intervening years, the First Step Act was passed and on October 17, 2024, Judge Block granted Johnson’s motion for compassionate release, writing:
“Just like prisoners who have evolved into better human beings during their lengthy periods of incarceration, judges also evolve with the passage of years on the bench. When I sentenced Johnson in 1997, I had been a judge for only two years. But judges gain insights that with the passage of time only can come with experience on the bench and their judicial maturation. Now, having been on the bench for almost thirty years, the First Step Act has given me a second chance to reconsider the sentences I imposed on Johnson 27 years ago. I will now also give him a second chance.”
Interested in hearing more about Judge Block’s reasons for granting Walter Johnson’s motion, or about the six compassionate release cases he highlights in his latest book “A Second Chance: A Federal Judge Decides Who Deserves It”? Brooklyn Law School’s Center for Criminal Justice has organized “Sentencing, Second Chances & Justice,” a conversation between Judge Block and BLS Dean David Meyer about the book and the topic of compassionate release. The event is on April 1, 2025 at 6 PM, and further details can be found here (RSVP by March 27.)
If you plan on attending the event or have an interest in learning more about the topic and Judge Block’s views, BLS Library provides the BLS community with digital access to “A Second Chance.” Use the QR code above or click here for access. The library also has print copies of Judge Block’s earlier books Crimes and Punishment: Entering the Mind of a Sentencing Judge and Disrobed: An Inside Look at the Life and Work of a Federal Trial Judge as well as other works on sentencing reform. For help accessing any of these resources, please reach out to askthelibrary@brooklaw.edu
[Note: If you are a member of the BLS community and do not have access to the NY Times articles linked to above, information on how to sign up for free access to the Times and other news publications can be found at https://guides.brooklaw.edu/news]
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