SJI Monday: Ending Police and Prison Violence

Omavi Shukur

Practitioner-in-Residence

Initiative for a Just Society at the Columbia Center for Contemporary Critical Thought

Omavi Shukur is a Practitioner-in-Residence at the Initiative for a Just Society at the Columbia Center for Contemporary Critical Thought. In this capacity, Omavi researches the legal dimensions of efforts to create a more just, equitable and empowering society. He also litigates civil rights and criminal cases that implicate a myriad of pressing social justice issues, most notably the harms caused by the criminal legal system.

Omavi is co-lead counsel in Walls v. Starks, an ongoing lawsuit that challenges a police officer’s unlawful killing of Bradley Blackshire, a black father of five children, and the municipal indiscretions that precipitated this tragic loss of life.

During his legal career, Omavi has successfully tried criminal and civil cases before juries in various federal and state courts. In addition, his appellate litigation has resulted in favorable published opinions issued by trial and appellate courts.

As an Assistant Counsel at the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, Omavi represented victims of racialized police violence in pending and forthcoming federal civil rights cases. He also co-led the development of the litigation team’s strategy for protecting protesters from police violence and undue prosecutorial persecution during and after the Summer 2020 Racial Justice Protests. Prior to joining LDF, Omavi represented victims of wrongful criminal convictions in federal civil rights cases at a national law firm.

Omavi has also litigated civil rights and criminal defense matters in his hometown, Little Rock, Arkansas. In Covington v. Key, Omavi negotiated a settlement on behalf of black students who challenged the Little Rock School District’s racially discriminatory allocation of high-quality educational resources and top-end facilities after obtaining favorable rulings denying the school district’s dispositive motions.

Also while in Little Rock, Omavi founded Seeds of Liberation, a nonprofit organization that engaged with marginalized communities in a collective effort to help eradicate the unique harms faced by formerly incarcerated people in Arkansas. In this capacity, Omavi worked alongside formerly incarcerated Arkansans to successfully bring an end to the ban on people with felony drug convictions receiving food stamps and welfare benefits in Arkansas.

Before returning to Little Rock, Omavi was a public defender in New Orleans, where he witnessed firsthand the despair of people jailed because of their inability to post bail and the vindictiveness of a criminal legal system designed to exclude and control impoverished black lives. Omavi’s years as a public defender continue to inform his research and advocacy.

Omavi has taught Critical Race Theory as an adjunct professor at the William H. Bowen School of Law. He has also served as an instructor at the Harvard Law School Trial Advocacy Workshop.

His is a member of the Arkansas, Louisiana and New York state bars, and is admitted to various federal district and appellate courts.

Omavi received his J.D. from Harvard Law School and B.A. in Political Science from Columbia University.

Derecka Purnell

Scholar in Residence

Initiative for a Just Society at the Columbia Center for Contemporary Critical Thought

Derecka Purnell is a lawyer, writer, organizer, and author of forthcoming Becoming Abolitionists: Police, Protests, and the Pursuit of Freedom. She works to end police and prison violence by providing legal assistance, research, and trainings in community based organizations through an abolitionist framework.  

As a Skadden Fellow, she helped to build the Justice Project at Advancement Project’s National Office which focused on consent decrees, police and prosecutor accountability, and jail closures, providing community training, political education and legal representation to organizers. Her advocacy efforts led to the dismissal of over 3,000 cases based on unconstitutional policing practices. Additionally, she supports several campaigns and grassroots organizations around the criminal legal system, electoral justice, and community investment, including Action St. Louis, Dream Defenders, Communities Against Police Crimes and Repression, the Ferguson Collaborative, and the Movement for Black Lives. Derecka also organized the founding steering committee for Law for Black Lives, a growing network of 5,000 law students, lawyers, and legal workers to support social movements.  

In the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, Derecka co-created the COVID19 Policing Project at the Community Resource Hub for Safety Accountability. The project tracks police arrests, harassment, citations and other enforcement through public health orders related to the pandemic. 

Derecka received her JD from Harvard Law School, her BA from the University of Missouri- Kansas City, and studied public policy and economics at the University of California- Berkeley as a Public Policy and International Affairs Law Fellow. Her writing has been published in The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Guardian, Cosmopolitan, Harper’s Bazaar, Teen Vogue, The Appeal, Truthout, Slate, Boston Review, Huffington Post, Vox, and In These Times. She’s been on NPR, Democracy Now!, Slate’s What Next, and MSNBC, and is the former Editor-in-Chief of the Harvard Journal of African American Public Policy. Derecka has lectured, studied, and strategized around social movements across the United States, The Netherlands, Belgium, South Africa, the United Kingdom, and Australia. 

She is from St. Louis and lives in D.C.

Bernard E. Harcourt

Executive Director

Initiative for a Just Society at the Columbia Center for Contemporary Critical Thought

Bernard E. Harcourt is a contemporary critical theorist, advocate, and the author most recently of Critique & Praxis (Columbia 2020), which won the 46th annual Lionel Trilling Prize. He is the Isidor and Seville Sulzbacher Professor of Law and Professor of Political Science at Columbia University.

Intersecting contemporary critical, social, and political theory, Harcourt’s writings examine different modes of governing in our punitive and surveillance society, especially in the post 9/11 period and the digital age. He traces what he calls the birth of an “expository society” and our recent turn in the United States to the paradigm of counterinsurgency warfare as a mode of governing. He is the author, recently, of The Counterrevolution: How Our Government Went to War Against Its Own Citizens (Basic Books, 2018), Exposed: Desire and Disobedience in the Digital Age (Harvard 2015), The Illusion of Free Markets: Punishment and the Myth of Natural Order (Harvard 2011), and Occupy: Three Inquiries in Disobedience with Michael Taussig and W.J.T. Mitchell (Chicago 2013). Earlier books include Against Prediction: Profiling, Policing and Punishing in an Actuarial Age (Chicago 2007), Language of the Gun: Youth, Crime, and Public Policy (Chicago 2005), and Illusion of Order: The False Promise Of Broken Windows Policing (Harvard 2001).

Harcourt is also an editor of works of Michel Foucault. He recently edited the French edition of Michel Foucault’s 1972-73 lectures at the Collège de France, La Société punitive (Gallimard 2013) and the 1971-1972 lectures, Theories et institutions pénales (Gallimard 2015). He is also the editor of the new Pléiade edition of Surveiller et Punir in the collected works of Foucault at Gallimard (2016). He is co-editor of the lectures Foucault delivered at Louvain in 1981, in French and English, Wrong-Doing, Truth-Telling: The Function of Avowal in Justice (Chicago 2014). He is currently working on Foucault’s lectures on Nietzsche for the next series of lecture publications by Gallimard/Le Seuil.

Harcourt is the Founding Director of the Columbia Center for Contemporary Critical Thought. He is also a directeur d’études (chaired professor) at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Socialesin Paris. Harcourt served as visiting professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton in 2016-2017.

A passionate advocate for justice, Harcourt started his legal career representing death row inmates, working with Bryan Stevenson at what is now the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, Alabama. He lived and worked in Montgomery for several years and still today continues to represent pro bono inmates sentenced to death and life imprisonment without parole. He recently resolved the case of Alabama death row inmate Doyle Lee Hamm. He also served on human rights missions to South Africa and Guatemala, and has actively challenged the Trump administration’s Muslim Ban, representing pro bono a Syrian medical resident excluded under the executive order, as well as Moseb Zeiton, a Columbia SIPA student.