Annual Conference

CORINNA BARRETT LAIN is the S. D. Roberts & Sandra Moore Professor of Law at the University of Richmond School of Law and the author of Secrets of the Killing State: The Untold Story of Lethal Injection. She is one of the nation’s leading authorities on the death penalty, presenting her work at national and international conferences and publishing in the top law journals in the country. Her work has appeared in the Stanford Law Review, University of Pennsylvania Law Review, Duke Law Journal, UCLA Law Review, Vanderbilt Law Review, and Georgetown Law Journal, among other venues, and has been cited by numerous courts, including a concurring opinion of the United States Supreme Court.

Lain is also one of the leading voices on criminal justice in Virginia more broadly, lecturing at annual conferences for the bench and bar and serving as the principal co-author of Thompson-West’s Virginia Practice Series on criminal law, a four-volume treatise that serves as the authoritative guide for Virginia criminal law and procedure. In 2023-2024 alone, the Virginia Practice Series was cited 25 times by Virginia appellate courts, including five times by the Supreme Court of Virginia.

Lain graduated summa cum laude from the College of William and Mary, and received her J.D. from the University of Virginia, where she served on the managing board of the Virginia Law Review and was elected to Order of the Coif. She clerked on the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals and then served as a state prosecutor in Richmond, Virginia, before joining the Richmond Law faculty in 2001. Lain is a former sergeant in the United States Army and a recipient of the University of Richmond’s Distinguished Educator Award, the highest award that the University bestows.

Anthony Graves is a criminal justice reform advocate and the founder of the Peer Navigator Project. Anthony’s own experience of being wrongfully convicted and spending 18 1/2 years on death row in Texas inspired him to create this innovative program, which trains formerly incarcerated individuals to become peer navigators and help others through the criminal justice system. During his time on death row, Anthony witnessed over 400 executions and received two execution dates himself before being exonerated in 2010. Since his release, Anthony has become a sought-after speaker and expert on criminal justice reform, working tirelessly to improve the system and prevent others from experiencing the same injustice he did.

Jay Jenkins is a Texas Principal at the Wren Collective. Since moving to Texas in 2014, he has promoted broad youth and adult justice reforms in Houston and across Texas. Jay has researched and pursued reforms related to over-policing and prosecution, while also reimagining the local bail system and supporting indigent defense, and he was instrumental in the development of a first-of-its-kind data dashboard that visualizes more than one million criminal case outcomes in Harris, Dallas, Bexar, and Travis Counties. Jay additionally serves as co-founder and President of the Convict Leasing and Labor Project, which launched in 2018 to expose the history of the convict leasing system and its connection to modern prison slavery. Jay received his Juris Doctor from Northwestern University School of Law, graduating magna cum laude in 2009.