Prosecutors Against Gun Violence Conference (District Attorney's Office)

June 2024
The Great Hall (Joseph McShane Campus Center)

Proud to host you here. 

As we say in our faith tradition here at Fordham – “blessed are the peacemakers.” 

I want to express my profound gratitude for what you do. The looming dockets that threaten to topple over on you. The grumpy judges. The police officers and investigators whom you adore but who sometimes give you fits. The witnesses whose courage takes your breath away. The victims whose pain haunts your nights. 

Uniquely among lawyers, your professional obligation is to serve justice. Most of the time, those answers are clear. Sometimes they take real discernment and humility. 

And you do this work in a country, in a borough, awash with guns. 

I grew up in one of the most violent communities in US – the city of New Orleans. I remember one year when one out of every thousand citizens was murdered. More than 400 in a city of 400,000. 

Growing up, we didn’t have a lot of money, but I still had the privilege of my parents’ education, our race. Even though we therefore experienced a fraction of the violence of our neighbors it was still unimaginably painful to live in a community awash with guns, mixed with desperation, poverty, and searing inequality. 

My friends who were shot and the two who were murdered. The regular terror of armed robberies. The family member raped at gunpoint. The knowledge that any provocation— like when my dad would never let someone cut him off in traffic — could result in a drawn gun, as it did. 

Now I raise my daughter and comfort her through school drills, where they practice hiding from the possibility of an armed gunman trying to kill little

children. I lead my team here through active shooter scenarios. All of it so painfully stupid and cruel. 

I served as an AUSA in New Orleans, doing countless felon in possession prosecutions. It felt like bailing the Titanic with a thimble. 

I tried to pay attention to systems and how they contribute. The drug dealers I prosecuted, who clearly used violence reluctantly – having no other means of enforcement in a black market economy. I remember the kingpin who told me about laying in the hospital with seven bullet wounds, calming a brother filled with rage, eager to retaliate. “Brother – every hog has its butcher.” 

In recent years, we have reason to worry more and more that gun violence ratchets up the specter of political violence — the slaughters in the church at Charleston and the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh. Whatever will come in the buildup to the election in the fall. 

I left the prosecutor’s office to come to academia, to be a law professor at Tulane. But I could not have done that without knowing that my work would make an immediate difference – so I took a job directing a domestic violence clinic. It was civil – family law – but entirely intertwined with the criminal justice system. I worked hard with the NOPD to rewrite policies, train in the Police Academy. 

It was then that I realized that a majority of mass shootings are DV related. Abusers not content with murdering women (usually women, but not always, of course) for not being obedient enough. They would also take out their children. Parents. Co-workers. 

It is hard to measure whether we have worse rates of gender-based violence in this country, but thanks to gun, we have vastly higher rates of gender-based murder. About three a day on average. 

But you don’t need me to remind you of the despair of our reality. This work is hard because it is critical. It is critical.

When it came time as a law professor to write articles that probably no one would read but my mother, I chose a topic rooted in my experience. About how prosecutors and law enforcement serve justice. 

We hear so much – as we must – about overenforcement of the law. When cops get it wrong. When they make tragic mistakes (as they grapple with policing an armed nation.) Worse, when law enforcement throughout history has been the cudgel of racial oppression. I know you work hard to end that reality. 

But there is a flip side of that coin that you work every day to counter. Historically the criminal justice system also refused to help minority communities. Refused to protect them against racial violence and hate crimes. But also just refused to protect them at all. Blaming them for their plight just as they blamed women for rape and domestic violence. 

When you do the work of protecting these communities, you provide “equal protection” of the law. Literally. You protect those who most need protection. 

During the protests this month, I have gotten a reminder – from some of my students and faculty – of the rhetoric that law enforcement is inherently oppressive. That the whole enterprise should be abandoned. 

And I want to shout from the rafters -- anarchy does not benefit the vulnerable. 

Every day, you do the painfully hard work of justice for both defendants and for the communities that some of them choose to terrorize. You know that those who put their babies to sleep in the bathtub to protect them from stray bullets have also lost their freedom. 

If you’re bored, you can read my law review articles spelling this out. (Discriminatory Aquittal or Granting Prosecutors Constitutional Tools to Battle Discrimination.) Which leads me to how mere academics can help. 

Here at Fordham, we have two scholars I want to tell you about. 

Dr. Anita Batisti – in our School of Education – works with our K-12 partners in the Bronx – to deal with the impact of gun violence and trauma on little children, the

collateral damage you see first hand every day. She helps teachers navigate terrain well beyond their normal training. 

Saul Cornell is an historian. Why does that matter to gun violence? Because a majority of the Supreme Court is obsessed with originalism and the second amendment. He is often cited by courts for his work making clear that the right to bear arms (back when that meant muskets that took forever to reload) was a civic right, about helping government protect itself – not the right to go hunting on city streets or in elementary schools. 

We hope to do more. One of the perverse moves in support of the gun lobby is to ban federal public health funding from fully quantifying the cost of a society awash in guns. We are working with the massive local Northwell Health System to use their data on gun violence, collecting over years of treating combat wounds. 

I hope today is full of ideas and strategies, a mix of the unbelievably depressing, but also of hope. I hope it inspires you to have even more determination and brilliance in the work you do every day. 

And on behalf of Fordham and our community of 20,000 – thank you. A million times thank you.