Sharpening the Craft of Special Victims Prosecution

Katya Valasek:

We're joined today by Jennifer Long, a lawyer and CEO who founded and runs a nonprofit that's advancing the craft of prosecution across the U.S. and beyond. In particular, your organization is focused on accountability for sexual violence and related crimes of abuse and exploitation. We'll talk about how you do that shortly, but to start, I want to know more about what drew you to prosecution in the first place.

Jennifer Long:

I was drawn to prosecution because it was a career that responded to some early experiences I had, volunteering actually, experiences even before law school, working with social workers who worked with victims of child sexual abuse, working in homeless shelters with some children who were exposed to violence or had been the victims of violence and in domestic violence shelters. Then across those experiences, I would hear the phrase, my prosecutor's good, my prosecutor is bad, and how that was explained, the context for that, or maybe it's how I interpreted it from what I was hearing, was my prosecutor's talking to me about what's happened. They're explaining the law, they're explaining the process, they're hearing me, they're listening to what I have to say, they're supporting me.

As someone who was interested, aware of the crimes, those very violent crimes that occur largely to women and children, but of course, there's no bar on victims of these crimes, I knew I wanted to do something about it, and prosecution to me seemed like the place where I could make a difference and a contribution. And so that's something that stuck with me through law school, through clinics that were available to me at the Philadelphia DA's office. It just reinforced what I wanted to do.

Katya Valasek:

And then after law school, you started right at the DA's office. How did those first cases where you were responsible for the outcomes compare to your experiences as a clinical worker or as a student who was working at the DA's office?

Jennifer Long:

The amazing thing about the DA's office, at least when I was there, and I think this does represent a lot of ways of coming into a district attorney's office, is typically when you are a new prosecutor, you are going to be assigned to cases and to units where any mistakes that you may make are going to have lower consequence. So we were not handling sexual violence cases, you're not handling domestic violence or child abuse cases right from the get-go. And typically right in the beginning, maybe not a case with a direct victim.

Maybe you're handling theft or a drug prosecution and you might think a DUI and you might think, oh, well, this is so outside of what you were interested in. How is this relevant? Actually, those were some of the best early cases to have. You are getting an opportunity to argue areas of the law that will apply to all of the cases. Criminal procedure comes to life. Fourth Amendment search and seizures. You're being able to argue those motions right away. You know, evidentiary rules, understanding how hearsay applies and different types of statements out of court that may be non-hearsay and different things that you learn in law school come to life there and you become an advocate. Even though you're handling these lower level, you still are going up against some of the most experienced defense attorneys. Because sometimes you might have clients that have very long criminal histories and have some very experienced, very good defense attorneys. So your trial advocacy, your knowledge of the law is getting tested right away. You're also having the opportunity to engage with witnesses sometimes and so you're really learning how to deal compassionately while still following the truth.

So on those early cases where I wasn't fully on the crimes that have brought me to prosecution, I thought they were very valuable because you're learning and you're able to really hone your craft and to learn from people around you, watch people who are more experienced than you are or battle in court, I guess I would say, with people who have a lot more experience and who are frankly better advocates than you at the time. By the time you're handling cases that involve special victims, we call them the domestic violence, child abuse, stalking, exploitation, sexual violence cases, you've been identified by your office as someone who's interested in the cases, who's compassionate, who wants to work with individuals and who can engage with a victim of a crime in a way that's both compassionate and that you're able to stay faithful to your duty as a prosecutor.

Katya Valasek:

How long did it take you to get to work on those cases that brought you to prosecution, the work that you did for the special victims?

Jennifer Long:

So I would say we moved through unusually quickly only because of movement in our office at the time. The class ahead of us, some of them left and departed so there were spots open. The first place I really handled these cases was in the juvenile unit and I'm going to say it was perhaps a little over a year, might be short on a year in the office, it might have been even sooner than that, where you are handling cases with both juvenile defendants who've committed these crimes and then also cases that involve very young children with abuse where there are preliminary hearings. Some jurisdictions may have grand juries before cases are formally moved forward in the process. For us, once a defendant is arrested and preliminarily arraigned, made aware of their charges, you have a set amount of time to hold a preliminary hearing and that's basically showing that there's probable cause.

Probable cause that a crime was committed and that this individual is the one who committed it and our evidence is much higher than that, but that's what's required at that level. And those were the kind of cases with very young children that would come through the juvenile unit as well, that special court, because it was really set up to address and respond to young victims. And of course, some victims are so young that they cannot testify.

Some are very, very young and you have to qualify them to be able to be competent to testify, but that would happen in there too. And again, it was really an incredible, very hard, obviously, to see the kinds of crimes that are committed and the types of victims, how vulnerable they are. Typically, those crimes are committed by people who are supposed to love and care for them. But when those crimes happen, and so being a prosecutor and trying to be on the side of accountability and protection was something that was a wonderful experience.

Katya Valasek:

It's very clear from talking to you how passionate you were for the work that you were doing, even when it was the hardest, most emotional circumstances. At what point did you realize that you can make a difference in prosecution without being a prosecutor?

Jennifer Long:

So, you know, moving from that juvenile unit, I did, you know, I was in the family violence, sexual assault units. Of course, you're now working with adult victims of the crimes. And truly, if I'm being honest, that was a job, it was a job I would have done for the rest of my life. It was extraordinary. There were a lot of women lawyers. It was a very diverse group, racially, ethnically, in all ways diverse. And so I had wonderful mentors who were also absolute experts at what they did. And so I loved that.

And, you know, at the time, I made a change for personal reasons, had nothing to do with, you know, relationship reasons, I guess, where we moved. And even during that time, although I couldn't be a prosecutor, I was still working as a volunteer with domestic violence advocates. And I had, you know, even when I was a prosecutor, just looking at the other partners, there are guardian ad litem child advocates for the child victims, there are victim advocates and civil attorneys for the adult victims, there's police.

So I certainly understood that there were a wide range of people who supported in these crimes that were important. But I didn't know that this world that I'm in now, which is a world that works with the helpers, if you will, works with prosecutors existed until I was introduced to it by my, at that point now, former DA, Lynn Abraham, who said, there's an organization, it was at the time, the American Prosecutors Research Institute, it was a subsidiary of one of the National District Attorneys Association, and they have a National Center for the Prosecution of Violence Against Women. She said, I think you should look into this, it would be perfect for what your interests are. And I was very lucky to meet one of the most important people of my life, my former boss, Teresa Scalzo, who was a mentor for many years, and hired me on.

And that's when I started to learn that there were Department of Justice funded and private funded organizations that provided support to prosecutors and other people on the ground, specializing in these cases. And as incredible as that job was, if you think about, I'm not going to get the numbers precise, but there's something around 3,300 district attorney's office across the country, and let's just say somewhere around 35,000 DAs or prosecutors, whether that's AGs, U.S. attorneys, maybe it's a little bit more with U.S. attorneys than local. And all of them are going to handle cases.

Some are specialized in these cases, but any case that comes across your desk, you could have a case that comes across as a theft from a Walgreens. And when you look at some of the factors, you might see indicia that this is a victim who's being sexually exploited or trafficked. So we know that the volume of cases, for me sitting at that position, and for some people that I was working with, we thought it was very important to have an organization that specialized in these crimes and that provided assistance to the field on these specific issues because of the very unique legal issues and also the human compassion pieces.

And so I guess to answer your question, that first job made me realize how you could work in this field that I cared about without being an actual prosecutor and then forming Equitas, I think for me really took it to the level that it was even more impactful.

Katya Valasek:

You loved your job. You loved your colleagues. You left because of reasons unrelated to the work that you were doing. How did you reach the point where you made the decision to not go back to the work in the DA's office? What drove you to make that pivot?

Jennifer Long:

You know, unfortunately, it was mostly, it was financial, not that, you know, the nonprofit world makes much more money. But at the time I was, with a change in circumstances, I just actually couldn't afford to go back into prosecution, even though that's very much what I would have wanted to do. And if, you know, as I look back on it, it was maybe a blessing because it forced me to focus more on writing.

It made me think about how I could be involved in ways that weren't with the prosecution of a case, even when I wasn't a prosecutor. So I did serve as a child advocate for the Support Center for Child Advocates in Philadelphia. And so you do get an opportunity to help even when you're not at the prosecutor's office.

But it was a financial decision. I also graduated with law school loans, and it's difficult to pay them off, but I don't regret any part of it. I made a decision on where I want to go to law school. It was worth it. But, you know, it came with some decisions at some point.

Katya Valasek:

Yeah. So this journey led you to the path of founding AEquitas. Tell me about the name. I think that the name really gives such a clear sense of your mission.

Jennifer Long:

Equitas, our name is really our mission. And AEquitas is named after the Roman goddess of fairness and the fair application of the law of fairness and justice. And our mission at Equitas is to advance justice for victims of sexual violence, domestic violence, stalking, human trafficking, exploitation by working with prosecutors.

And I want to take from one of my favorite cases that talks about the role of the prosecutor in how I feel that we achieve that. It's a case, I believe it's Berger. And it talks about the role of the prosecutor is that you're not the representative of a party. You're the representative of a community, in essence. I mean, I'm summarizing here. And that, you know, your goal, you can strike hard blows, but you can't strike foul blows. So really embodying that fairness. It goes on to say that the role of the prosecutor is to make sure that guilt does not escape and that innocents shall not suffer. And finally, and this is my, you know, I think my favorite part of the decision is that it's your duty to use every legitimate means to bring about a just outcome. And so how I feel that AEquitas plays the important role in that is that we are providing prosecutors with the ability to enhance and strengthen their skills so that they become, you know, highly adept at the legal issues, the scientific forensic information, other technical information, especially now with the explosion or the awareness of the tech-facilitated sexual abuse and other abuses, that they are aware of these things and can bring them to bear, as well as the very important, compassionate and human part of working on these crimes that so uniquely impact victims, not only because of the harm that those crimes cause, but because of the almost immediate reaction to blame victims for the crimes that they have suffered and to discredit them. And so for that way, that's how we were named really did end up encompassing what I think our mission is every day.

Katya Valasek:

Yeah, that is an important and an ambitious mission. And so I want to walk through how Equitas provides prosecutors with the support that you mentioned. What are some of the ways that your organization assists prosecutors in gaining this knowledge and gaining this understanding?

Jennifer Long:

I think I would say we divide it into some pretty, you know, buckets that might be easy for people might be aware of an education bucket. We do a lot of training and that training can be virtual or in person and one hour to many days. We write legal publications.

I like to think of them as practical law review articles, not to in any way criticize law review articles. We try to make them very heavily cited on specific legal issues that people are facing and to see how the law has been decided and how practices have evolved in other jurisdictions so they can steal from them, even though it's not precedent, they may learn from them. We do some amicus briefs along the way.

Katya Valasek:

So you mentioned amicus briefs. What are those and why are they important?

Jennifer Long:

Sure, an amicus brief is I guess the Latin term for friend of the court brief. So you're not a party in a case, but an amicus brief is filed by organizations or agencies, sometimes one, sometimes several to raise maybe sometimes a public policy issue around a case that's being decided or perhaps to offer some research that should be considered when making a legal determination. And we've been really lucky to be able to partner with people to develop and to submit briefs even at the U.S. Supreme Court to state Supreme Courts. And I think they play an important role. It's unclear, they may or may not be cited in a case. I don't think ours ever were. But we think that they provide a good educational piece, not only to the courts, but to the field of why something's important.

Katya Valasek:

So what else?

Jennifer Long:

So we do some work with grantees or with jurisdictions who are working on an issue. Witness intimidation is one where we did work across many different cities in terms of identifying witness intimidation in our cases, responding to it, both prosecuting and trying to respond to it to prevent it.

And then we also provide consultations in the grant world. It's called technical assistance. And it can range from everything to, I'm looking for an expert on this topic in my jurisdiction or somewhere else. Do you know who testifies to something like this? To, I'm looking for cases that describe a certain way that a case was prosecuted or decided so I can learn from that. To, I want to make my office a place that responds to sexual violence better.

And I want you to tell us not only how, you know, what the practices might be, but how we can look at our office and determine what it is that we're doing and how can we make sure we're doing it better every time. And that could be an office that's never had a unit, maybe starting from scratch to one that has an established unit that wants to make sure that they are delivering on the justice that they think they're delivering.

Katya Valasek:

And you do some public awareness work too, right?

Jennifer Long:

Sure. Our Stalking Prevention Awareness and Response Center, which we're very proud of, SPARC, our National Resource Center on Cybercrimes, which is continuing to evolve. It's one of our newer centers. Also raises awareness about the crimes, the prevalence of the crimes, the incidence of the crimes, as well as providing some specific skills base. But SPARC, especially during January, Stalking Awareness Month, that is National Stalking Awareness Month. They have wonderful posters and social media campaigns, ways for people to understand these crimes because it's an important piece of prevention.

We have a podcast also that we run out of AEquitas called Just Champions, which does cover, in some ways, it's for the prosecutors and people we work with because we talk about cases and legal issues. But it's also for law students or other people who might want to understand how prosecutors work and how our crimes, the domestic violence, sexual violence, stalking, human trafficking, how some of the cases on those crimes have impacted the law generally.

Katya Valasek:

So you are CEO of the organization. How do you spend your time? What are you doing day to day?

Jennifer Long:

So I am not doing as much of the substantive work as I did when I was an attorney on the That's both a source of sadness because I love that work, although I still do the substantive work because I think it's very important for me to keep my hands in it so I can lead the organization, so I can write grants. But I do a lot of grant writing. I do a lot of management of projects in terms of checking in with the people who are responsible for doing the trainings day to day and making sure they have what they need.

And in some ways, though, it is both to make sure the organization is running smoothly, but also to continue that next generation of people to support their expertise and people who can lead in the field. And so those are pieces of what we do. We do, obviously, work with my CFO closely. Having for compliance issues, we receive federal and private foundation money. And we need to be good stewards of those money. So making sure that we're compliant and filing the right paperwork and following the right procedures.

Katya Valasek:

So the support you're going to provide is going to change as the laws change. As you look at the strategic goals of the organization, how do you gather information? And how does that information gathering have you collaborate with your board and your staff?

Jennifer Long:

I'll start with the staff. Because a lot of the information gathering when we're talking about the laws, when we do trainings or when we're giving assistance to organizations, whether it's one-off questions or whether we're working with them on site, it is a dialogue in that we're learning from them about emerging issues. We're learning from them about opinions. We're learning from people. How are their courts ruling? What are the kind of emerging crimes that they're seeing that the law may not have been written to address? And at AEquitas, I mean, we don't pursue legislation. There's groups that advocate for that. And they're very important. Our role is to find the path with what is. And so for us, while a jurisdiction might be working then with advocates to change the law, we're trying to figure out what we can do with the laws and the tools we have to move forward.

In fact, this is a concrete example. We teach a course at Georgetown University Law Center. It's a small, experiential course where it's only up to 12 students, I think. Sometimes it's more like 10, sometimes under that, where it's a weekly course and then they come and intern for us. And early on, 2014, 2015, we had a student who brought to us a paper as a component of this, a paper on image-based sexual abuse. Basically, what I'm talking about is either you have an image that was non-consensually taken or consensually taken and disseminated without the victim's permission, or there's technology now that is advanced. But even, I'll go back into the 90s, you would have rapes where your perpetrator would be taking Polaroids of the rape and annotating them ongoing. So the tech really, it's true when they say the tech facilitates the abuse that's already around because that is true.

But it was that student paper that came in and then we ended up pairing one of our staff to talk about the practical implications and having one of the first written pieces on that issue. And that's something then that evolved. Even though we were already addressing it in training and TA, we were much more intentional about building our capacity. In many ways, I would say the groundwork for the National Resource Center on cyber crimes.

Katya Valasek:

To move the organization beyond being just an extension of you, the founder, you had to let go of some of the day-to-day tasks, maybe many of the day-to-day tasks. What have you done to help you get to the point where you felt like you could let some of those responsibilities or some of that work go?

Jennifer Long:

I think some of it is just necessity. There's so much being produced that if you were to require yourself as the final sign off on anything, nothing would be done. And I think where I started seeing me being the bottleneck made me realize like this is not sustainable. It's not good for anybody. And you're also demonstrating that you don't trust the people around you. And sometimes there are mistakes made. And those mistakes, I mean, we make mistakes all the time and that's something that can be remedied. Sometimes people just have a different perspective and that's very important. I mean, as long as we're online with the mission, one thing we really require here is candid feedback because we want everybody sort of having their voice heard and people being able to defend their opinion or their findings and recommendations. We have a team that is unbelievable. And every single one has some expertise that is unique that can benefit their peers, whether they are a younger attorney or whether they've been here for 30 years. And so I think that played a big role in it. I mean, there's just a fantastic team that you rely on and doing great work.

Katya Valasek:

Writing matters a lot in your work. Amicus briefs, field guides, publications, and maybe counterintuitively, the writing matters a lot more for your work now than when you were a prosecutor. You mentioned earlier that you took some time to develop your writing. How did you develop your writing into something you could lean on?

Jennifer Long:

Sure. So, I mean, I think the first really important cue because as a prosecutor, prosecutors' offices are different. Some people handle their own appeals. At Philadelphia, we had an incredible appellate unit, although still, depending on where you were, you might handle your own motions. So there was certainly some writing, but most of what you're doing is oral argument and oral advocacy. So the first real, even though in law school, writing was a very important component, the first professional real moment of truth came when I was working in a firm because my writing just really wasn't up to what my prosecution skills might have been. I think I was writing like I was speaking. And so that was, I think, one of the most valuable things because in finding APRI, I was able to clerk for an administrative judge, Bettina Calloway. I will say her name because she was just wonderful.

And as administrative judges, it's not like we're sitting in front of a courtroom, but you're writing opinions. And it was really an important time to sit. There were clerks, senior clerks who would go through your writing, but it was a concentrated time to focus totally on writing. I wasn't an advocate. I wasn't arguing. And it served me very well because that bar, our work at AEquitas, we want it to be thorough. We want it to be credible. We want it to be well cited. That was my journey on writing. Bitter, but good, very important.

Katya Valasek:

And grant writing is something that's completely different from legal writing. Early on, did you have to do that on your own? And how did you learn to do that if you did?

Jennifer Long:

Trial and error and very generous peers that had written grants that were willing to show you an example of how something is written. Sometimes the grant instructions make the grant, the final grant application repetitive, maybe not flow as organized as you may want. There is somewhat of a formula, but it is really learning how important it is to read what you're being asked for.

You're writing something that's somewhat enjoyable because people have to read this and they have to believe that you have the capacity. You know what you want to do and you have the capacity to do it and a plan to do it within the money and time you're being given. I mean, we're given significant sums of money and we need to be able to tell people where that money is going and how we're going to do something and why we're the ones who are the right people to receive it. And I think when you approach it that way, it becomes more enjoyable than it is.

Katya Valasek:

You've said that you're sometimes the demon on the panel as the prosecutor in the room. What do you want listeners who are skeptical of prosecution to understand about the work?

Jennifer Long:

Yes. And I'm going to, I want to provide some context for that because that particular experience was on a panel at a law school where I was representing the prosecution perspective in rape, domestic violence, human trafficking cases. And the other panelists were representing the defense and maybe civil attorneys.

And I think that in recent years, the role of the prosecutor has been defined in a way that may explain or maybe a description of a very few people. And those very few people would be rejected by prosecution at the whole. What I talked about before, the mission of Equitas, that case that I cited about your twofold aim, that guilt shall not escape, innocence shall not suffer.

You're trying to achieve justice. That wasn't a rape, sexual assault case. That's generally the role of the prosecutor.

And when you're that person, you're really, there's so many things that you are thinking of. You are approaching something compassionately and with mercy. But these files, they're not just paper files. They are documentation of some very vicious harms that have occurred to very real people at the hands of other individuals who could have shown mercy at any time during the course of the crime and did not. And there is an important part of life to have to take account for that, both for the safety of the community and for the autonomy of a victim. And justice can look very different.

But when I think about what side I'm on, I'm very much on the side of the community. I'm very much on the side of justice. But I understand that my mercy stands with the victim as part of that, because what I want to make sure is that this person has safety, that they have had the opportunity to testify, to tell what happened to them, to be supported and supported by outside advocates, but to be supported by me or other prosecutors, knowing the law, knowing where to look for the evidence, knowing how to argue the evidence and corroborate the victim so that they're not standing alone. Because the reality is, in most courtrooms, in the courtrooms that I was in, you had a victim and you had a lot of people standing with the defendant, and a victim might have been completely alone, even alone sometimes from their own family.

And so having the energy spent in having that person be able to talk about what happened, having accountability for what happened to them, and having them safe, that's where I feel that the role of the prosecutor is, balancing all of that with fairness.