Things were not looking up for Saabir Lewis last August. The 21-year-old faced up to 20 years in prison on charges including assault, trespassing on school property, and armed robbery stemming from incidents in 2015 and 2016. He is now in a dramatically different circumstance: After 10 months in county jail, Lewis will soon be transferred to a juvenile-detention facility to finish out a two-year sentence, after which he’ll have five years of probation.

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Lewis caught a break because his mother got intimately involved in his case. Before a sentencing hearing in April, Heather Lewis explained his personal history to his public defender in the hopes of influencing his sentence. Saabir had been emotionally and physically abused by a relative since he was 10 years old, she said, and had recently been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder after he was shot at a party. The public defender renegotiated Saabir’s plea deal based on this information, and at the hearing his mother testified to her son’s story.

It may seem obvious for a lawyer to use family members’ insights in building a client’s defense. But public defenders like Saabir’s typically don’t, thanks to large and time-consuming caseloads that preclude that kind of nitty-gritty work. A model of community organizing called participatory defense seeks to compensate for that deficiency—by training non-lawyers, like Heather, on how to be effective advocates for their loved ones.

Heather already had some expertise on how to work Saabir’s case. In the last two years, she helped establish a participatory-defense program outside of Philadelphia before becoming a participant herself. At the Community Action Development Commission, an anti-poverty nonprofit in Montgomery County, Heather organizes weekly meetings that are the bedrock of the participatory-defense model, functioning as part support group and part training session. Participants can pose questions about the legal system and learn which ones to ask their loved one’s lawyers, and sometimes a representative from the public defender’s office comes, too.

Participants’ chief mission is to become the best courtroom supporters they can using the firsthand knowledge they have. Their work can take the form of delivering testimony at a hearing, like Heather did; soliciting letters of support from other family members, employers, doctors, and others, for the judge and lawyers to use as a reference; and even gathering actual evidence to bolster an offender’s claim of innocence.

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Read the source article at The Atlantic