The Toby Gribben Show

Kristin Henning is the Blume Professor of Law and Director of the Juvenile Justice Clinic and Initiative at Georgetown Law, where she and her law students represent youth accused of delinquency in Washington, DC. Kris was previously the Lead Attorney for the Juvenile Unit of the D.C. Public Defender Service and is currently the Director of the Mid-Atlantic Juvenile Defender Center. She has been representing children accused of a crime for more than 25 years.

Kris trains state actors across the country on the impact of racial bias in the juvenile and criminal legal systems. Her workshops help stakeholders recognize their own biases and develop strategies to counter them. Kris also worked closely with the McArthur Foundation’s Juvenile Indigent Defense Action Network to create a 41-volume Juvenile Training Immersion Program (JTIP), a national training curriculum for juvenile defenders.

She now co-hosts, with the National Juvenile Defender Center (NJDC), an annual week-long JTIP summer academy for defenders. In 2019, Kris partnered with NJDC to launch a Racial Justice Toolkit for youth advocates, and again in 2020, to launch the Ambassadors for Racial Justice program, a year-long program for juvenile defenders committed to challenging racial injustice in the juvenile legal system through litigation and systemic reform.

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Kris writes extensively about race, adolescence, and policing. Her new book, The Rage of Innocence: How America Criminalizes Black Youth, is forthcoming with Pantheon Books (Penguin Random House) on September 28, 2021. Her previous work appears in journals and books such as Policing the Black Man: Arrest, Prosecution and Imprisonment (2017, edited by Angela J. Davis) and Punishment in Popular Culture (2015, edited by Charles J. Ogletree, Jr. and Austin Sarat). The race features prominently in her articles such as The Reasonable Black Child: Race, Adolescence and the Fourth Amendment, 67 Am. U. L. Rev. 1513 (2018), Race, Paternalism and the Right to Counsel, 54 Amer. Crim. L. Rev. 649 (2017), and Criminalizing Normal Adolescent Behavior in Communities of Color: The Role of Prosecutors in Juvenile Justice Reform, 98 Cornell L. Rev. 383 (2013). Professor Henning is also an editor and co-author of the anthology Rights, Race, and Reform: Fifty Years of Child Advocacy in the Juvenile Justice System (2018).

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Henning serves on the Board of Directors for the Center for Children’s Law and Policy and is the Director of the Mid-Atlantic Juvenile Defender Center. She has served as an expert juvenile justice consultant to several state and federal agencies, including the USDOJ’s Civil Rights Division, and was the Reporter for the ABA Task Force on Dual Jurisdiction Youth. She is also a lead contributor to the Juvenile Law and Practice chapter of the District of Columbia Bar Practice Manual and has served as an investigator in eight state assessments of the access to counsel and quality of representation for accused juveniles. 

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Professor Henning is the recipient of many honours, including the 2021 Juvenile Leadership Prize, the Robert E. Shepherd, Jr. Award for Excellence in Juvenile Defense from NJDC, and the Shanara Gilbert Award from the American Association of Law Schools for her commitment to justice on behalf of children, selection to the American Law Institute (ALI), an appointment as an Adviser to ALI’s Restatement on Children and the Law project. In 2005, Professor Henning was selected as a Fellow in the Emerging Leaders Program of the Duke University Terry Sanford Institute of Public Policy and the Graduate School of Business at the University of Cape Town, South Africa. Professor Henning travelled to Liberia in 2006 and 2007 to aid the country in juvenile justice reform. She received her B.A. from Duke University, a J.D. from Yale Law School, and an LL.M. from Georgetown Law.