Restorative Justice in Action

Satana Deberry

District Attorney, Durham County, NC

Satana Deberry serves as the elected District Attorney for Durham County. As District Attorney, she has prioritized the prosecution of serious offenses, implemented policies to reduce unnecessary pretrial incarceration and court involvement, and worked to improve trust and equity in the courts.

Throughout her career, Deberry has worked to dismantle systems that restrict the lives of poor people, families, communities of color, and other marginalized and underrepresented groups. She brings to the office of District Attorney extensive experience, having served as a criminal defense attorney in her hometown of Hamlet, North Carolina, General Counsel for the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services, and executive director of the nonprofit North Carolina Housing Coalition.

Deberry is a recipient of the North Carolina Justice Center’s 2020 Defender of Justice Award for Litigation, the Duke Law Alumni Association’s 2020 Charles S. Murphy Award for Civic Service, and Attorney General Josh Stein’s Dogwood Award. She received her AB in Sociology from Princeton University, her Juris Doctor from Duke University School of Law and her master’s in Business Administration from Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business. She is a mother who enjoys spending time with her active daughters.

Dr. Alissa Ackerman

Associate Professor and Criminal Justice Program Coordinator, California State University

Dr. Alissa R. Ackerman is the co-founder and owner of Ampersands Restorative Justice. She is a “pracademic” and “survivor scholar” in that she incorporates her academic training, practitioner, and personal experiences with sexual violence in her work. She holds a PhD in Criminal Justice from the City University of New York. Alissa has dedicated her career to understanding everything she can about sexual offending, the impacts of sexual victimization, and restorative options for those impacted by sexual harm. After participating in a life changing vicarious restorative justice as a survivor, she began building and facilitating processes for others who sought restorative options as part of their own healing. She writes extensively on topics related to sexual violence in blogs and magazine articles and has published over 35 peer-reviewed journal articles. She has authored or edited eight books and served as co-editor on a special edition of the Journal of Sexual Abuse in 2018. She co-authored Healing from Sexual Violence: The Case for Vicarious Restorative Justice, with Dr. Jill Levenson in 2019 and her most recent co-edited volume, Survivor Criminology: A Radical Act of Hope, was released in 2022. Alissa is an internationally sought after speaker and trainer, having given over over fifty national and international talks, including a TEDx Talk in 2018.

Special Counsel for Juvenile Justice Reform and Chief, Restorative Justice Program Section

Seema Gajwani

D.C. Office of the Attorney General

Seema Gajwani is Special Counsel for Juvenile Justice Reform and Chief of the Restorative Justice Program Section at the D.C. Office of the Attorney General. Prior to this position, Gajwani ran the Criminal Justice Program at the Public Welfare Foundation in Washington, D.C., funding efforts to improve criminal and juvenile justice systems across the country, with a focus on pretrial detention reform and prosecutorial culture change. Gajwani started her career as a trial attorney at the D.C. Public Defender Service representing juvenile and adult defendants for 6 years. She was chosen as a 2019 Obama Fellow for her work on restorative justice, and was awarded the ABA’s 2022 Crime Victim Attorney Award.

Rachel Marshall

Executive Director, Institute for Innovation in Prosecution

Rachel previously served as the Director of Communications and Policy Advisor at the San Francisco District Attorney’s Office, following nearly a decade working as a public defender in Alameda County, California. Rachel has extensive expertise in the criminal legal system and efforts to reform it, as well as experience in media, policy, and advocacy.

Rachel graduated from Stanford Law School and Brown University. After law school, she clerked for federal District Court Judge David O. Carter in the Central District of California. Prior to law school, she taught high school history for three years in the Bronx.