We are very pleased to announce our most recent fellowship, the Register Fellowship for Restorative Justice, funded by Mesa Alum Lara Bazelon.
Lara was a resident and Langeloth Foundation Criminal Justice Fellow at the Mesa Refuge in 2017. She is a writer and law professor at the University of San Francisco, where she directs the criminal and racial justice clinical programs. As former director of a Los Angeles-based Innocence Project, she funded this fellowship in honor of Kash Register, who was wrongfully convicted for a murder in 1979. He spent 34 years in prison and was finally set free in 2013 with help from Lara and her team.
She says, “Litigating Kash’s case changed my life profoundly. When it was over, I wanted to know how, if at all, it would be possible to heal from such profound trauma. When I learned that there was a fledgling movement to apply restorative justice practices to cases of wrongful conviction by bringing together exonerates, crime victims, and their family members, I decided to write a book about it.”