Our Team
Staff
Patrice Sulton
Executive Director
Patrice is in charge of ensuring we have everything we need to reach our goals and make the District safer, freer, and more equal.
Bethany Young
Deputy Director
Bethany is in charge of coordinating across staff, partners, projects and tasks, and keeping things moving forward.
Naïké Savain
Policy Counsel
Naïké is in charge of keeping us mission-aligned and pushing the District to center Black children and families in all public safety decisions.
Lindsay Ayers
Policy Counsel
Lindsay is in charge of leading the conversation around policies that transform the legal system, repair harms done, and make people whole again.
Caitlin Holbrook
Policy Advocate and Research Associate
Caitlin is in charge of making our policy campaigns successful through research, writing, oral advocacy, and events.
Iris Benson-Sulzer
Special Assistant to the Executive Director
Iris is responsible for providing administrative support to the Executive Director.
Board of Directors
Donald Braman
Board Chair
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Don is Associate Professor at the George Washington University Law School.
Don teaches courses on criminal law, evidence, policing, evidence-based policymaking, data-driven criminal justice reform, and data science and law. Through The Lab @ DC, he provides assistance and support to DC Agencies seeking to increase equitable outcomes, particularly in the areas of public safety and reentry. Through the Justice Innovation Lab, he assists jurisdictions seeking to reduce inequality though criminal justice reform.
Don is a graduate of Yale Law School and the Yale Graduate School (Anthropology), where he worked with families of prisoners and authored Doing Time on the Outside, a study of the impact of mass incarceration on families and communities in the District of Columbia. He has written extensively about the role the criminal justice system plays in disassembling families and communities, contributing to the conditions that give rise to the social disorder that the criminal justice system purports to reduce.
What is one thing you would like to change about the D.C.'s criminal legal system this year?
Increasing support services to justice-involved residents.
Chanell Autrey
Vice Chair
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Chanell currently serves as Senior Manager of Government and Community Affairs at Starbucks, developing and leading public policy strategies that drive Starbucks regional policy agenda, in Washington, DC, Maryland, Virginia, and Delaware. Prior to joining Starbucks, Chanell Autrey served as Senior Director of Government and Community Affairs for Monumental Sports and Entertainment. In this role, she led and executed the government relations strategy for the Washington Wizards, Mystics, and Capitals.
A dedicated public policy lawyer, Chanell spent five years at the Council of the District of Columbia, serving in various roles, including as Committee Director for the Committee on Business & Economic Development. A graduate of Pennsylvania State University and George Washington University Law School, Chanell began her professional career as an Assistant Public Defender in Baltimore and is an active member of the Maryland Bar Association.
Chanell currently serves as a Member-at-Large of the National Bar Association, the nation’s oldest and largest national network of predominantly African-American attorneys and judges.
Chanell has been named to the National Black Lawyers Top 40 under 40 and the National Bar Association’s Top 40 Under 40. She is a native of Washington, D.C. and a proud member of Xi Omega Chapter of Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Inc.
What is one thing you would like to change about the D.C.'s criminal legal system this year?
I would reform the city’s expungement process.
Samra Lakew
Secretary
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Samra is a multi-hyphenate planner-organizer-engineer committed to ensuring equitable infrastructure in cities. Her work involves the practical application of technology for public good and solving for their implications to quality of life and equity for marginalized groups.
Samra is currently a Project Manager at Dimagi, Inc, managing the software implementation and digital transformation in state governments across the U.S. Her previous experiences include management consulting and international development policy in the US and Ethiopia.
Samra earned her Master in City Planning (2020) at MIT’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning and her undergraduate degree in Materials Engineering at McGill University.
What is one thing you would like to change about the D.C.'s criminal legal system this year?
Shifting the DC criminal justice discussion from retributive to restorative and planning for physical infrastructure that meaning reflects that shift.
Lauren Johnson
Treasurer
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Lauren Alicia Johnson serves as Assistant Counsel at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. Prior to joining LDF, Lauren served as senior legal counsel at The Justice Collaborative, where she worked to address systemic injustice in local criminal legal systems across the country through community -focused campaign advocacy and policy development. Lauren's work in criminal law policy at TJC was informed by her work as a public defender. As a trial attorney at the Public Defender Service for the District of Columbia Lauren represented clients charged with serious felonies in D.C. Superior Court.
Before joining PDS, Lauren was an E. Barrett Prettyman Fellow at Georgetown University Law Center where she represented clients charged with misdemeanors and felonies, and supervised third year law students in the Criminal Justice Clinic. Lauren received her J.D. from NYU School of Law and L.L.M. in Clinical Advocacy from Georgetown University Law Center. Lauren also hold a B.S. in finance and marketing from Georgetown University.
Lauren has also been an adjunct professor at The George Washington University Law School, focusing on trial advocacy and public interest lawyering.
What is one thing you would like to change about the D.C.'s criminal legal system this year?
End mandatory minimums and excessive sentence terms.
Juliene James
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Previously, Julie served as senior policy adviser for the U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Assistance, supporting state and local efforts to reduce solitary confinement and reform sentencing, corrections, community supervision, fines and fees, and pretrial policies and practices. Julie also worked as a senior policy associate for the Vera Institute of Justice, assisting policymakers on criminal justice policy matters, and practiced law at Wiggins, Childs, Pantazis, Fisher & Goldfarb, representing clients who experienced discrimination in employment and housing based on race, sex, and disability. In addition, she served as a judicial clerk for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit.
Julie earned a B.A. from Harvard College and a J.D. from New York University School of Law, where she served as editor-in-chief of the NYU Law Review.
Julie is a Vice President of Criminal Justice at Arnold Ventures, a private philanthropy dedicated to maximizing opportunity and minimizing injustice. Julie leads a team working on two strategy areas: prisons and fees & fines.
What is one thing you would like to change about the D.C.'s criminal legal system this year?
End solitary confinement in the DC Jail.
Clinique Chapman
Board Member
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Clinique Chapman is a Senior Program Associate II at Vera’s Center on Youth Justice in the Restoring Promise initiative. Prior to joining the Vera Institute of Justice, Clinique was a Program Manager with the DC Department of Corrections, where she worked to shift correctional culture from the inside-out, by way of program implementation and developing a behavioral health team. Clinique’s passion and skills were honed as a forensic social worker with The Public Defender Service for the District of Columbia where she spent a decade as a sentencing advocate and mitigation specialist, specializing in youth who were tried in adult court. Clinique has also consulted on mitigation death penalty cases.
Clinique is an Adjunct Assistant Professor at Howard University School of Social Work where she teaches criminal justice to the next generation of change agents. Clinique serves as an Advisory Board Member for Free Minds Book Club and Writing Workshop and as an Executive Board for the National Alliance of Sentencing Advocates and Mitigation Specialists (a section of the National Legal Aid and Defender Association). She received her BA and MSW (with a concentration in criminal justice) from Howard University and is a licensed clinical social worker.
What is one thing you would like to change about the D.C.'s criminal legal system this year?
Raising the age of adult prosecution to at least 18yo., improving the conditions of the DC Jail (CTF and CDF), and dismantling the DC MPD.
Jade Chong-Smith
Board Member
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Jade is a lawyer at Zuckerman Spaeder LLP. She has defended people at every stage of criminal proceedings. Over the last several years in private practice, Jade has represented clients in white collar cases, government investigations, campus disciplinary proceedings, and professional responsibility matters.
Prior to entering private practice, Jade worked as a supervising attorney and interim director of the criminal division at Rising for Justice. She defended clients in criminal, juvenile, and civil protection order cases. She also helped hundreds of DC residents seal their records and thereby overcome the collateral consequences of arrests, charges, and convictions. Jade taught students from DC-area law schools and supervised attorneys within Rising for Justice, as well as pro bono attorneys from major DC law firms. Jade has also worked at Privacy International, a non-profit based in London, UK, where she challenged intrusive government surveillance practices and the overcriminalization and monitoring of people from low-income communities.
Jade is a graduate of Yale Law School, where she defended clients in criminal cases, worked on juvenile resentencing, assisted in death penalty litigation, and helped draft amicus briefs on prosecutorial misconduct and ineffective assistance of counsel issues. She was a board member of Yale Law Women, the Alliance for Diversity, and the Clinical Student Board. Over two summers, Jade worked at the Legal Aid Society in New York City and the Public Defender Service for the District of Columbia.
Kyle Doman
Board Member
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Kyle is a 20+ year career real estate professional in the DC metropolitan area. He has long has a specific focus on equity and inclusion in housing, finance, and education. His passion for criminal justice reform and merging his relationships in business, sports and entertainment to bring awareness to his much needed component of our society is paramount in his life's work. He is a longtime resident of Washington, D.C. where he resides with his wife and two children.
Ed Lazere
Board Member
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Ed is a Senior Fellow in State Fiscal Policy at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
Prior to that, Ed founded the DC Fiscal Policy Institute in 2001 and served as its Executive Director until March 2020. At DCFPI, he conducted research on inequities in housing, jobs, education, and health care and partnered with advocacy organizations, labor unions, and community partners for fair wages, affordable housing, and access to health care. His successes supporting advocacy include creating the largest state-level Earned Income Tax Credits in the nation, reforming the DC school funding formula to provide more resources to high-poverty schools, and creating DC’s progressive paid family and medical leave program.
While at DCFPI, Ed chaired DC’s Public Education Finance Reform Commission and served on the D.C. Tax Revision Commission. Ed has served on the boards of other DC-focused organizations, including the Children’s Law Center, the Consumer Health Foundation and the DC Primary Care Association.
Prior to DCFPI, Ed was a policy analyst at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
Ed has a Masters Degree in Public Policy from the University of Maryland and a Bachelor’s Degree from Harvard University.
What is one thing you would like to change about the D.C.'s criminal legal system this year?
Beginning the process of shifting resources from traditional policing (MPD) to community-based approaches to safety.