CRI is a collectively run investigation office and resource center. We build narratives to challenge the death penalty and advocate for the value of human life. We collaborate with families and communities impacted by the judicial system to facilitate safety, growth, and resilience.
CRI was founded in 2006 by Kendra Ing, Scarlet Nerad, Julie Lagarde, and Laura Rogers as a death penalty defense investigation office and community resource center. After years of working on death penalty cases, CRI's founders saw a need to provide services in communities adversely affected by death penalty prosecutions.
Nearly a decade and a half later, CRI continues to serve clients, their families, and capital defense teams.
Through the legal process of mitigation, we communicate to juries what it means to take a person’s life.
We work with families and communities affected by the judicial system and provide support tailored to their needs.
We advocate to reform our criminal legal system and dismantle the death penalty.
We make decisions based on consensus.
CRI is a democratic, worker-run organization. Our flat leadership structure facilitates shared power, maximizes staff agency, and aims to dismantle structural inequity.
We have found working collaboratively is the most effective tool in advocating for our clients and in maintaining the sustainability of our organization.
Aditi joined CRI in 2022 as a mitigation specialist. Their practice shifts power to those marginalized by the system by centering those most directly impacted in decision-making. Healing-centered and trauma-informed, Aditi takes a holistic approach to their work to shift systems so that they care for all. Aditi has a masters in Design Innovation and Citizenship from the Glasgow School of Art and a Bachelors in Science from Olin College.
Anthony joined CRI in 2012 as the Director of Programs. He has since taken on a dual role of overseeing CRI’s operations and conducting direct service investigations as a Mitigation Specialist. Anthony has a BA in Urban Studies and Planning from San Francisco State University and much of his work has focused on documenting how culture, history, politics and ecology impact outcomes of our clients. Prior to joining CRI, Anthony was working with youth and families in Visitacion Valley in southeast San Francisco.
Dylan Majsiak graduated from Brown University in 2020 with a dual degree in English Nonfiction Writing as well as Latin American and the Caribbean Studies. Prior to joining CRI in September 2022, he spent a year working and studying in Mérida, México, through the Fulbright Program. He looks forward to working with CRI’s Spanish-speaking clients.
Harriet joined CRI in December 2018, as a mitigation specialist with the aim of using her background in written and filmic storytelling to craft narratives that not only challenge the death penalty but also affirm the value of human life.
Kyle Earley joined CRI in 2016 as a Mitigation Specialist. He conducts investigative research, record collection, and develops social histories on behalf of men and women facing the death penalty. Kyle has a BA in Communications with a minor in History. Prior to joining CRI, Kyle worked as a Trial Assistant at the Law Offices of Jack Earley.
Lily Sorrentino graduated from Trinity University in 2019, with a B.A in Sociology. Prior to joining CRI as a permanent staff mitigator in August 2019, Lily was an intern and independent contractor for CRI beginning in 2017.
Michelle joined CRI in 2011 as a Mitigation Specialist. She collaborates on social history, mental health and fair trial investigation in an effort to improve the legal standard of care for men and women facing the death penalty. Much of her work has focused on working with individuals who fled or were forcibly displaced from Central America and Mexico. She holds a BA in International Studies from George Washington University.
Rodrigo is a former client of CRI and currently assists in CRI's operations and programming. He has run the CARES hotline, where he helps incarcerated individuals file to receive their stimulus checks during the COVID-19 pandemic. He is very happy and proud to be able to help those who do not have reliable access to resources. CRI has helped restore Rodrigo’s confidence in himself and has proven to him there are still forces of good in the world.
Scarlet has been mitigating on behalf of men and women facing the death penalty for over 20 years. She co-founded CRI in 2007 to continue to investigate death penalty cases at the trial and post-conviction level and train others, while creating and developing initiatives designed to combat risk factors in children we now recognize left our condemned most at risk for incarceration.
Robin Kallman is a supervising attorney and Director of Legal Training at the Office of the State Public Defender (OSPD) in Oakland, where she has worked for over 30 years, representing people sentenced to death on direct appeal and in related habeas corpus proceedings. Prior to OSPD, she worked as an attorney at the San Francisco County Public Defender’s Office and at the Institutional Legal Service Project of what was then Evergreen Legal Services in Tacoma, Washington. She is a native of the Bay Area and graduated from Oberlin College and Hastings College of the Law.
Jesse Stout is excited to work towards abolition of the death penalty while serving on CRI’s board. He is a longtime criminal justice activist and attorney experienced in corporate law, criminal defense, and legislative advocacy. Jesse is an attorney at Greenbridge Corporate Counsel and a member of the No New SF Jail Coalition. He previously served as Policy Director at Legal Services for Prisoners with Children, organizing and lobbying to advance the rights of formerly incarcerated people. Jesse holds degrees from Brown University and UC Hastings College of the Law. During law school he interned with the California Assembly Public Safety Committee, analyzing legislation and making vote recommendations to then-chairman Asm. Tom Ammiano. Before law school, he served as executive director of the Rhode Island Patient Advocacy Coalition; the RI Medical Marijuana Act ultimately overcame three gubernatorial vetoes, protecting thousands from arrest.
Kendra Mastain has been the Director of Development at Live Oak School since 2012. Before coming to Live Oak, Kendra was a freelance photographer for 17 years, and worked for the San Francisco Unified School District as a special needs paraprofessional. Kendra earned a BA degree in Art and Visual Communications from Chico State University.
Mark Lange has served as a technology and investment firm advisor with over three decades of public sector, private equity and venture development experience. He has provided executive and advisory services to public and private companies, venture and private equity funds, international humanitarian agencies, social ventures and non-profits. He has launched and grown innovative web, SaaS and cloud ventures in talent management, social e-commerce, consumer health information and IT management, with an IPO and two successful exits. He has also accelerated large enterprise software businesses for major technology companies, including PeopleSoft, SAP and CA Technologies. While a student at Dartmouth in 1982, Mark began his career as an analyst in the U.S. Treasury Department. He was appointed to the White House as speechwriter to the President in 1989, focusing on economic and foreign policy and writing the 1991 State of the Union address during the first Gulf War. After an MBA from Stanford, Mark ran acquisitions for a KKR private equity fund, where he led or seconded a total of nearly $1 billion in transactions for small-cap information and database companies. Mark’s opinion columns on business, workforce policy, health care and social justice have run in the New York Times, the International Herald Tribune, and the Christian Science Monitor, where his work was awarded “Best Series” by the National Association of Opinion Page Editors, and was entered by the Monitor for a Pulitzer Prize in 2008. Since 2020 he has focused his time exclusively on social ventures and non-profits.
Born and raised in Oakland, Nate has worked in education from the university to the K-12 level since 2000. Nate’s passion of working with the youth, especially young people from underserved communities of color stems from his time in independent school as a student and not having an adult figure in his life who mirrored his own experience. From this passion grew the idea for The Pact, a peer mentoring programming for K-12 independent school aged students of color that Nate co-founded in 2012. Nate currently serves as the Director of Admissions and Financial Aid at San Francisco University High School. Prior to that he was the Dean of Student Life at Live Oak School after 10 years in the admissions and athletics offices at Lick-Wilmerding High School, his alma mater. Nate served on the Board of Directors for People of Color in Independent Schools (POCIS) for three years, Co-Chair for two, as well as a trustee at The Berkeley School for six years. He is currently a member of the Advancement Committee at Live Oak School. Nate holds a bachelor’s in history from UC Irvine and a master’s in education administration from USF.
Yani Chu-Takyi is a Clinical Psychologist whose doctoral research explored the ongoing harm of the prison industrial complex (PIC) and ways in which it drives violence rather than deters it. Yani currently works at Core Insights Psychological Group Inc, and is a Postdoctoral Fellow, and individual supervisor at the prestigious Wright Institute.
