Our Mission

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.

Our History

May 2020

CRI launches advocacy initiative, joining local and statewide coalitions aimed at reimagining community safety.

2014

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Our Impact

In the

Courtroom

Through the legal process of mitigation, we communicate to juries what it means to take a person’s life.

With the

Community

We work with families and communities affected by the judicial system and provide support tailored to their needs.

Advancing

Policy

We advocate to reform our criminal legal system and dismantle the death penalty.

June 1972

As a result of various state and Supreme Court decisions, executions in the state of California stop. No state-sanctioned executions are carried out for the next twenty years.

November 1978

California voters reinstate the CA death penalty by passing Proposition 7, the Death Penalty Act.

April 1992

Executions resume in California on April 21, 1992, when Robert Alton Harris is executed by lethal gas at San Quentin State Prison.

January 1996

Congress passes HR-1358, eliminating federal funding for Death Penalty Resource Centers.

July 2006

CRI was founded by Kendra Ing, Scarlet Nerad, Julie Lagarde, and Laura Rogers, creating a space where mitigation specialists work collectively on cases and invest resources in the communities most impacted by prosecutions.

September 2009

Metwest, a public school in Oakland, partners with CRI to develop a high school internship program. Student interns at CRI study the school to prison pipeline, prison food and nutrition, and prisoner safety.

November 2012

CA Proposition 34, which would have repealed the death penalty and replaced it with life in prison, fails at the ballot with 48% support from voters.

August 2013

Colleague and friend of CRI, Sandra Coke, is kidnapped and murdered. Sandra had maintained an office at CRI and was a valued member of the mitigation community.

February 2016

CRI attends the Oscars for the animated documentary, Last Day of Freedom. The film, directed by Dee Hibbert-Jones tells the story of Manny Babbit's arrest and execution as experienced by his brother Bill.

September 2016

CRI begins it's annual Alcatraz Swim fundraiser. Staff, board members, and volunteers bravely raise funds for families impacted by the death penalty by swimming the San Francisco Bay.

June 2017

Students of CRI's Music for the Masses program hold their first recital with performer and teacher Meghan Dibble. The program pairs children of incarcerated and deported parents with musicians to help students learn an instrument of their choice.

December 2017

CRI's Artist-in-Residence program partners with painter Leyla Margolis-Brooks. In this program, artists use their medium to work with families in healing through telling their stories. Leyla's piece Across the Lines is featured at SF De Young Museum.

May 2020

CRI launches advocacy initiative, joining local and statewide coalitions aimed at reimagining community safety.

Our Team

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.

Staff

Aditi Joshi

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 Ginez

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

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 Storm

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

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

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 Gaudet

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 Gomez

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 Nerad

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.

Tay Wiles

Tay joined CRI in 2023 as a mitigation specialist. She previously worked as a criminal defense investigator on court-appointed cases in the Bay Area, and as a private investigator on civil litigation and corporate due diligence. Prior to becoming an investigator, Tay was a reporter and editor for 10 years.

Board of Directors

Robin Kallman

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

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

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

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.

Nathan Lundy

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

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.

Former Board Members

Amie Fishman

Cassandra James

Janet Engelbert

Kari Hong

Kendra Ing

Klaira Llerma

Lisa Goldthwaite

Lyzette Bullock

Meredith Ing

Naeemah Charles

Raina Celnik

Rebecca Kelley

Susan Marcus

Teodora Ildefonzo-Olmo

Traci Owens

Veronica Martinez

Our Finances

98% of our budget comes from direct service fees billed to courts, agencies, and attorneys for defense investigation and mitigation, with the majority going to staff salaries and wages.

Funding Sources
Annual Total
% of Total
Direct Services
$907,353
98%
Contributions
$18,517
2%
Expenses by Program
Annual Cost
% of Total
Investigation
$463,383
50%
Administration
$228,860
25%
Client/Family Services
$159,206
17%
Internships/Education
$74,421
8%
Hours Expenditure
% of Total
Cases
66%
Admin & Office
23%
Programs
6%
Training
4%
Unknown
1%
Fundraising
1%
PTO
1%

Support

Help us end the death penalty and repair its harm on our communities.
Support
CRI is 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization | Tax ID 26-0564961
3030B 16th St, San Francisco, CA 94103