Winner of our Criminal Justice Scholarship

Eva Marie Holly

Eva’s impressive essay details how she became interested in advocating for the rights of the wrongfully accused and how improving public education on matters related to the death penalty, especially in Florida, will lead to more just outcomes. Eva is on the fast track to becoming a force to be reckoned with in the legal community, and we cannot wait to see all she accomplishes.

Read Eva’s Essay:

The increasing awareness around wrongful convictions and executions of individuals on death row has been pivotal in abolishing the death penalty throughout the United States in the last twenty years. This is largely in part due to the dedicated work of organizations such as the Innocence Project, the Death Penalty Information Center, the Witness to Innocence project, and others, all of whom dedicate their missions to informing the public about the realities of our criminal justice system. It is when I heard the testimony of Mr. Herman Lindsey, death row exoneree and Executive Director of Witness to Innocence, that I decided to pursue a career committed to criminal justice reform and advocacy. The avenues of which I plan to take to achieve this goal are endless, but at the very least include advocating for mandatory courses on criminal justice in the public schooling system, holding seminars or speaking on podcasts about our nation’s capital punishment system, and finally, challenging the constitutionality of Florida’s death penalty jurisprudence in the courtroom itself.

In February of this year, I was presented with the opportunity to publicly speak on Florida’s capital sentencing scheme for the first time. I had the privilege of speaking on Herman Lindsey’s “Cruel Justice” podcast to inform viewers about the work myself and my colleagues do at the Balanced Justice Project at Florida International University. The Balanced Justice Project (BJP) is a nonprofit investigation agency providing mitigation services to people involved in serious criminal matters that hold severe sentences. In addition to explaining the work that the BJP does, myself and my colleagues explained the general process of capital trials in Florida and the role mitigation specialists play in creating a case for life in prison over a sentence of death. We highlighted the fact that Florida leads the nation with the highest number of death row exonerees—30 wrongly-convicted individuals since 1973 who were sentenced to death and later found not guilty. More generally speaking, our discussion also extended to methods of execution, where I discussed the harsh realities of the methods of execution—most notably the lethal injection—and how what society considers the most “humane” way of killing an individual, is actually so far from it.

Our discussion lasted 1 hour and 17 minutes and was viewed by over 1,100 individuals globally.

Taking part in this podcast was a full-circle moment for me and solidified my decision to pursue a career in advocating for the rights of the wrongly accused. As a second-year law student in the fall of 2023, I did not know, nor could I conceptualize, what the term mitigation meant in relation to capital sentencing proceedings. In fact, I was wholly uninformed about the process of capital trials, entirely. It is the unfortunate reality that the same can be said for the majority of my peers at school today. It is only because I voluntarily enrolled in the Death Penalty Law course offered by my university that I became aware of the arbitrary and capricious nature of capital sentencing processes in Florida, and in the United States as a whole. The fact that the majority of my graduating class will leave law school unaware of the injustices in our criminal justice system is alarming. Part of my initiative to improve the education about the criminal justice system is to advocate for a requirement in law schools stating that you must take a course on criminal justice or death penalty law in order to graduate. It seems to me that the bare minimum we can do as upholders of the law is be educated on the process by which our state can execute its citizens.

At the end of the day, how a society treats its outcasts, the least among it, says perhaps the most about the type of society it is and yearns to become.