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.

APPRECIATION AWARD
Jacquie Benestante, the Executive Director of the Autism Society of Texas, has been a vital part of the campaign to save Robert Roberson for the past two years. She has issued action alerts about Robert to her network and bylined opinion pieces. When Robert faced execution in 2024, Jacquie coordinated a sign-on letter in support of clemency with other advocacy organizations and parent groups and co-led a petition delivery event with the Innocence Project at the State Capitol. On September 24, 2025, she and her colleagues with the Autism Society of America co-hosted a webinar featuring internationally renowned Autism experts, during which they reiterated their support for Robert and raised awareness of the ways his Autistic behaviors were used against him. All of these activities have drawn attention to this important facet of Robert’s case.

On June 19, 2024, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals declared Kerry Max Cook actually innocent. In their monumental ruling in the 47-year-old death penalty case, the judges cited uncontroverted Brady violations, proof of false testimony, admissions of perjury, and new scientific evidence as reasons for their finding. His case has been called one of the most egregious examples of police and prosecutorial misconduct in American history. 

Cook spent nearly 20 years on death row for the 1977 murder of Linda Jo Edwards in Tyler, Texas (Smith County). His legal odyssey included three trials. Cook was convicted and sentenced to death in 1978, but the verdict was overturned in 1991, leading to a second trial in 1992 that concluded in a mistrial when jurors were unable to reach a unanimous verdict. A third trial in 1994 sent him back to death row but his conviction was overturned for a second time in 1996. On the eve of a fourth trial in 1999, with Smith County prosecutors yet again threatening him with the death penalty, Cook agreed to a no-contest plea deal, which resulted in his release from prison. He remained guilty in the eyes of the law, however, even though he never admitted to the crime.

Smith County prosecutors set aside Cook’s conviction in 2016 after an alternate suspect admitted to perjuring himself in front of multiple juries and at pretrial hearings, including lying about the timing of his last sexual encounter with Ms. Edwards. The Texas CCA’s ruling in 2024 official exonerated Cook.

Read articles in the Kerry Max Cook archives with Texas Monthly: and Cook’s own memoir, Chasing Justice: My Story of Freeing Myself After Two Decades on Death Row for a Crime I Didn’t Commit.

With this award, TCADP recognizes Cook’s his longstanding efforts to seek full exoneration, make the injustice to which he was subjected known, and hold the authorities in Texas accountable for the egregious police and prosecutorial misconduct perpetrated against him. 

Smiriti Mundhra is an acclaimed director, producer, and writer known for character-driven documentaries. In “I Am Ready, Warden,”, she focuses on the final days of John Henry Ramirez before he was executed by the State of Texas in October 2022. The film was nominated for an Academy Award in the Documentary Short Film category in 2025.

“I Am Ready, Warden” represents a significant entry in death penalty discourse. Rather than focusing on an innocence case, the film examines the moral complexity of capital punishment through the experiences of those directly affected—both the condemned and the victims’ families. The documentary’s power lies in its refusal to romanticize either side, instead asking fundamental questions about society’s capacity for forgiveness and redemption. Mundhra calls “I Am Ready, Warden” “the toughest film” she’s ever made because it explores “the moral complexity of a polarizing topic” in a way that challenges viewers regardless of their initial stance on capital punishment. The film contributes meaningfully to ongoing debates about justice, mercy, and the human cost of state-sanctioned execution.