Lives, Money, & our Constitution

The Sixth Amendment to the Constitution promises your right to a defense attorney. It promises that we will not be left voiceless. Yet, despite this mandate from the Constitution, the core problem in America’s criminal legal system is a failure to uphold this promise of adequate Public Defense.

Investing in Public Defense will save lives, it will save money, and it will save our Constitution.

Restoring Justice built a holistic, client-centered model for public defense based on serving our clients’ needs. Go ask someone in jail for their most pressing need. If they don’t have it, they’ll tell you they need good legal representation. If they have that, they’ll tell you they need connections to life-essential resources. They’ll describe to you broken family connections and needing loving relational support. And you’ll quickly realize their prior trauma needs to be professionally addressed, like so many of us, for them to experience true freedom – physically, socially, emotionally, and spiritually. And so, our four pillars of service were built: 1) client-centered legal representation; 2) social services; 3) relational volunteer pairings; and 4) free trauma-informed therapy offered to every client. Our impact has been beyond our expectations.

Investing in public defense saves lives

Since founding, we have saved 475 years of incarceration for 97 people. That averages to about 5 years of incarceration saved per client, giving them their lives back. 

Investing in public defense saves money

Compared to our expenses, we can report an ROI of over 4800%, having saved the Texas economy $145,000,000. For every $1,000 donated to us, we can show a $50,000 return in economic savings.

Investing in public defense saves our Constitution

Remember the story we shared about Michael? Prosecutors in his case unconstitutionally failed to disclose police misconduct & exculpatory evidence of his innocence, and his judge tried to force him into an unconstitutional guilty plea. Revealing these injustices in Michael’s case has sparked a systemic change project because we upheld his Constitutional rights by deploying our model of services.

How can you invest in public defense?

Unfortunately, public defense just doesn’t have enough service providers right now. To solve that core problem, Restoring Justice has plans for an exciting fellowship program taking passionate law school graduates and creating change agents. We have a proven model of listening to our clients and others in jail to drive systemic change, and we want to expand it. We need new financial partners to sustain our service model in order to prepare for this fellowship program to spark broader change.

With your help, someday we’ll realize an end to mass incarceration by pursing Christ’s justice, one client and heart at a time. We hope you’ll join us in this vital effort.