Alexander Busansky, Executive Director
Alexander Busansky is a former prosecutor who began his career at the Manhattan District Attorney's Office in 1987. Over more than a decade of work at the District Attorney's Office, he handled homicides, serious domestic violence and other family violence, and sex abuse cases. In 1998 he left New York City to work for the U.S. Department of Justice, becoming a trial attorney within the criminal section of the Civil Rights Division. For nearly five years, he investigated and prosecuted cases across the country involving excessive use of force by federal, state, and local law enforcement and corrections officers. In 2002, he was detailed to the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, becoming Counsel to U.S. Senator Russ Feingold (D-WI). In that role, he developed strategies to address the USA PATRIOT Act, drafted legislation concerning the use of excessive force by U.S. Custom agents, developed the Anti-Gang Act, and addressed other law enforcement and homeland security issues.
E-mail:
Jon Wool, Senior Counsel
Jon Wool, a former public defender in Manhattan, has been a senior staff member of the Vera Institute of Justice for two and a half years, working in two areas: indigent defense system reform and state sentencing reform. He has conducted studies of the assigned counsel systems in the federal trial and appellate courts, authored a report on states' funding for drug treatment programs within the criminal justice system, and written three papers analyzing the Supreme Court's Blakely and Booker decisions. After receiving his J.D. from Yale Law School, Jon Wool began his legal career as law clerk to Chief Justice Shirley Abrahamson of the Wisconsin Supreme Court.
E-mail:
Michela Bowman, Counsel
Michela Bowman is a Ph.D. candidate in New York University's Law and Society Program and a Soros Fellow graduate of NYU School of Law. She has studied and worked on a broad range of issues related to criminal justice and incarceration, with a particular focus on prison health care and conditions. Prior to law school, she worked at the Prisoners' Rights Project of the New York City Legal Aid Society, where she assisted in litigation on behalf of HIV-positive prisoners. She has interned with the Federal Defender's Office and the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund's criminal justice division, and worked with the Legal Action Center as part of NYU's Ex-Offender Re-entry Clinic. Last May, she joined the Southern Center for Human Rights in Atlanta as a volunteer in their effort to investigate problems with Hepatitis C care in the Georgia prisons and to devise an appropriate advocacy strategy. As part of that effort she spent months visiting prisons throughout the state of Georgia to speak with prisoners about their medical care. Michela has also taught an undergraduate seminar at NYU on race and the criminal justice system.
E-mail:
Mike Corradini, Research Assistant
Mike Corradini works part-time for the Commission as a research assistant. He is currently pursuing a Master of Arts degree in Arab Studies with a concentration in history at Georgetown University's Center for Contemporary Arab Studies, and will be a first year law student at the Georgetown University Law Center in 2006. Prior to joining the Commission staff, Mike worked as a paralegal for Baach Robinson & Lewis PLLC in Washington, DC, on cases involving complex insurance and reinsurance disputes, the UN Oil-for-Food Programme in Iraq, and copyright infringement. Mike graduated magna cum laude from the George Washington University with degrees in Political Science and Middle Eastern Studies in 2004. He was a member of George Washington's nationally-ranked Mock Trial team for four years, and coached the team that won the American Mock Trial Association's National Tournament at Stetson University in 2005.
|
