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ArchCity Defenders
ArchCity Defenders (ACD) is a legal advocacy organization in St. Louis, Missouri. History ArchCity Defenders was co-founded by three graduates of St. Louis University School of Law in 2009, modeled after The Bronx Defenders, to address gaps in civic and criminal justice services. ACD primarily operated on volunteer service and donated office space. They expanded operations in 2013 through a contract from mayor Francis Slay's initiative to end chronic homelessness. In 2017, Blake Strode was named the new executive director after two years on staff through the Skadden Fellowship. In 2018, ACD was awarded the Thomas Merton Award. Activities Between 2015 and 2018, ACD filed class action lawsuits against seven cities in St. Louis County for civil rights violations, reaching a settlement of over $20 million. Lawsuits describe the violations as a debtors' prison scheme in which plaintiffs were charged with minor infractions and held in prison when unable to pay cash bail In e ...
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Non-profit Organization
A nonprofit organization (NPO), also known as a nonbusiness entity, nonprofit institution, not-for-profit organization, or simply a nonprofit, is a non-governmental (private) legal entity organized and operated for a collective, public, or social benefit, as opposed to an entity that operates as a business aiming to generate a Profit (accounting), profit for its owners. A nonprofit organization is subject to the non-distribution constraint: any revenues that exceed expenses must be committed to the organization's purpose, not taken by private parties. Depending on the local laws, charities are regularly organized as non-profits. A host of organizations may be non-profit, including some political organizations, schools, hospitals, business associations, churches, foundations, social clubs, and consumer cooperatives. Nonprofit entities may seek approval from governments to be Tax exemption, tax-exempt, and some may also qualify to receive tax-deductible contributions, but an enti ...
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Missouri
Missouri (''see #Etymology and pronunciation, pronunciation'') is a U.S. state, state in the Midwestern United States, Midwestern region of the United States. Ranking List of U.S. states and territories by area, 21st in land area, it borders Iowa to the north, Illinois, Kentucky and Tennessee to the east, Arkansas to the south and Oklahoma, Kansas, and Nebraska to the west. In the south are the Ozarks, a forested highland, providing timber, minerals, and recreation. At 1.5 billion years old, the St. Francois Mountains are among the oldest in the world. The Missouri River, after which the state is named, flows through the center and into the Mississippi River, which makes up the eastern border. With over six million residents, it is the List of U.S. states and territories by population, 19th-most populous state of the country. The largest urban areas are St. Louis, Kansas City, Missouri, Kansas City, Springfield, Missouri, Springfield, and Columbia, Missouri, Columbia. The Cap ...
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Blake Strode
Blake Strode (born July 9, 1987 in St. Louis, Missouri) is an American civil rights lawyer serving as the executive director of ArchCity Defenders (ACD), and is a former professional tennis player. Early life and education Strode grew up in Charlack, Berkeley, and Bridgeton, in North St. Louis County, Missouri, and graduated first in his class at Pattonville High School in Maryland Heights in 2005. He earned degrees in Spanish and economics at the University of Arkansas, where he was an All American tennis player for the Razorbacks. Strode was admitted into Harvard Law School in 2009, which he deferred for three years to pursue his career in tennis. At Harvard, he participated in the student practice organization "Project No One Leaves," reaching out to recently-foreclosed homeowners and informing them of their legal rights. He interned at the U.S. Department of Justice Civil Rights Division's voting section. He graduated in 2015, after several high-profile police brutal ...
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Thomas Merton Award
The Thomas Merton Award has been awarded since 1972 by the Thomas Merton Center for Peace and Social Justice in Pittsburgh, United States. It is named after Thomas Merton and is given annually to "national and international individuals struggling for justice." Award recipients :1972: James P. Carroll :1973: Dorothy Day :1974: Dick Gregory :1975: Joan Baez :1976: Dom Hélder Câmara :1977: Dick Hughes :1978: Bishop John Harris Burt & Bishop James Malone :1979: Helen Caldicott :1980: William Winpisinger :1981: The people of Poland :1982: Archbishop Raymond Hunthausen :1983: Not awarded :1984: Bernice Johnson Reagon :1985: Henri Nouwen :1986: Allan Boesak :1987: Miguel D'Escoto :1988: Daniel Berrigan :1989: Comrades of El Salvador & Elizabeth Linder :1990: Marian Wright Edelman :1991: Howard Zinn :1992: Molly Rush :1993: Reverend Lucius Walker :1994: Richard Rohr OFM :1995: Marian Kramer :1996: Winona LaDuke :1997: Ron Chisom :1998: Studs Terkel :1999: Wendell Berry :2000: Ro ...
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The Bronx Defenders
The Bronx Defenders is a public defender office located in the South Bronx neighborhood of New York City. At the Bronx Defenders, criminal defense lawyers work together with civil lawyers, family defense lawyers, immigration lawyers, non-attorney advocates, social workers, and investigators to help their clients address the full range of legal and social issues that can result from criminal charges. History Founded in 1997 by a team of eight advocates, including its former executive director Robin Steinberg, David Feige and criminal defense attorney Daniel Arshack, the Bronx Defenders is responsible for developing holistic defense, an interdisciplinary model of criminal defense lawyering. The Bronx Defenders is also host to The Bronx Freedom Fund, the first charitable bail organization in New York State. In late 2023, Justine Olderman stepped down from her position as Executive Director. She held the post for six years, and was the second ever in the position, being appointed by ...
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Francis Slay
Francis Gerard Slay (born March 18, 1955) is an American politician and lawyer who served as the 45th Mayor of St. Louis, Missouri from 2001 to 2017. The first mayor of the city of St. Louis to be elected to the office four consecutive times, Slay is the longest-serving mayor in St. Louis history. He is a member of the Democratic Party. He is to date the last male mayor of St. Louis. Education and early career Slay graduated from St. Mary's High School in 1973. He received a degree in political science from Quincy University and a J.D. degree from Saint Louis University School of Law. After graduating from law school, Slay served as a law clerk for Judge Paul J. Simon of the Missouri Court of Appeals for the Eastern District. In 1981, he joined the law firm of Guilfoil, Petzall, and Shoemake where he specialized in business law and commercial litigation. Slay was elected to the St. Louis Board of Aldermen in 1985, representing the 23rd ward. In 1995, he was elected President ...
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Skadden Fellowship
Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom LLP and Affiliates (known as Skadden) is an American multinational law firm headquartered in New York City. The firm comprises approximately 1,700 lawyers and is the fourth highest grossing law firm in the United States. History The firm was founded in 1948 in New York by Marshall Skadden, John Slate, and Les Arps. The same year, Joseph Flom was hired as the firm's first associate. In 1959, William R. Meagher joined the firm and its first female attorney, Elizabeth Head, was hired. In 1960, the firm's name became Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom. In 1973, the firm opened its second office in Boston. In 1981, Peggy L. Kerr became the first woman to become a partner at Skadden. In 1987, the firm opened its first international office in Tokyo. In 2008, together with the City College of New York, Skadden launched the Skadden, Arps Honors Program with the goal of increasing diversity in law schools and the legal profession. In November 2 ...
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Debtors' Prison
A debtors' prison is a prison for people who are unable to pay debt. Until the mid-19th century, debtors' prisons (usually similar in form to locked workhouses) were a common way to deal with unpaid debt in Western Europe.Cory, Lucinda"A Historical Perspective on Bankruptcy" , ''On the Docket'', Volume 2, Issue 2, U.S. Bankruptcy Court, District of Rhode Island, April/May/June 2000, retrieved December 20, 2007. Destitute people who were unable to pay a court-ordered judgment would be incarcerated in these prisons until they had worked off their debt via labour or secured outside funds to pay the balance. The product of their labour went towards both the costs of their incarceration and their accrued debt. Increasing access and lenience throughout the history of bankruptcy law have made prison terms for unaggravated indigence obsolete over most of the world. Since the late 20th century, the term ''debtors' prison'' has also sometimes been applied by critics to criminal justice ...
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Cash Bail
In economics, cash is money in the physical form of currency, such as banknotes and coins. In book-keeping and financial accounting, cash is current assets comprising currency or currency equivalents that can be accessed immediately or near-immediately (as in the case of money market accounts). Cash is seen either as a reserve for payments, in case of a structural or incidental negative cash flow or as a way to avoid a downturn on financial markets. Etymology The English word ''cash'' originally meant , and later came to have a secondary meaning . This secondary usage became the sole meaning in the 18th century. The word ''cash'' comes from the Middle French , which comes from the Old Italian , and ultimately from the Latin . History In Western Europe, after the fall of the Western Roman Empire, coins, silver jewelry and hacksilver (silver objects hacked into pieces) were for centuries the only form of money, until Venetian merchants started using silver bars for large tra ...
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New York Times
''The New York Times'' (''NYT'') is an American daily newspaper based in New York City. ''The New York Times'' covers domestic, national, and international news, and publishes opinion pieces, investigative reports, and reviews. As one of the longest-running newspapers in the United States, the ''Times'' serves as one of the country's Newspaper of record, newspapers of record. , ''The New York Times'' had 9.13 million total and 8.83 million online subscribers, both by significant margins the List of newspapers in the United States, highest numbers for any newspaper in the United States; the total also included 296,330 print subscribers, making the ''Times'' the second-largest newspaper by print circulation in the United States, following ''The Wall Street Journal'', also based in New York City. ''The New York Times'' is published by the New York Times Company; since 1896, the company has been chaired by the Ochs-Sulzberger family, whose current chairman and the paper's publ ...
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Jacobin
The Society of the Friends of the Constitution (), renamed the Society of the Jacobins, Friends of Freedom and Equality () after 1792 and commonly known as the Jacobin Club () or simply the Jacobins (; ), was the most influential political club during the French Revolution of 1789. The period of its political ascendancy includes the Reign of Terror, during which well over 10,000 people were put on trial and executed in France, many for " political crimes". Initially founded in 1789 by anti-royalist deputies from Brittany, the club grew into a nationwide republican movement with a membership estimated at a half million or more. The Jacobin Club was heterogeneous and included both prominent parliamentary factions of the early 1790s: The Mountain and the Girondins. In 1792–93, the Girondins were more prominent in leading France when they declared war on Austria and on Prussia, overthrew King Louis XVI, and set up the French First Republic. In May 1793, the leaders of th ...
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Public Defense Institutions
In public relations and communication science, publics are groups of individual people, and the public (a.k.a. the general public) is the totality of such groupings. This is a different concept to the sociological concept of the ''Öffentlichkeit'' or public sphere. The concept of a public has also been defined in political science, psychology, marketing, and advertising. In public relations and communication science, it is one of the more ambiguous concepts in the field. Although it has definitions in the theory of the field that have been formulated from the early 20th century onwards, and suffered more recent years from being blurred, as a result of conflation of the idea of a public with the notions of audience, market segment, community, constituency, and stakeholder. Etymology and definitions The name "public" originates with the Latin '' publicus'' (also '' poplicus''), from ''populus'', to the English word ' populace', and in general denotes some mass population ("the ...
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