Professors Godsoe and Mogulescu Tapped for Manhattan DA Transition Team

Incoming Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, who is known as part of the progressive prosecutor movement, will have the benefit of two highly regarded members of the Law School’s criminal law faculty, Professors Cynthia Godsoe and Kate Mogulescu, on his transition committee.

In June 2020, at the height of the pandemic, Godsoe and Bragg published an article in Route Fifty calling on prosecutors to exercise the considerable sway they hold with government officials to mitigate the rapid and deadly spread of COVID-19 in prisons.

“I am excited to see what Alvin brings to the Manhattan DA’s office and thrilled to be a part of his vision,” said Godsoe, who is director of the Law School’s Edward V. Sparer Public Interest Law Program. “I hope that the election of Alvin and other like-minded prosecutors is just the first step toward seeing the necessary changes to the criminal system, including diverting more juveniles and emerging adults from the system.”

Mogulescu, director of the Criminal Defense and Advocacy Clinic, will serve on Bragg’s Gender-Based Violence Committee. Through the Survivors Justice Project, a grant-funded interdisciplinary collective, she and her clinic students work with people whose experience with abuse and violence led to their own criminalization and incarceration. Their recent efforts have led to the release from prison of several survivors under the Domestic Violence Survivors Justice Act.

“Prosecutors hold disproportionate power in the criminal legal system,” said Mogulescu. “As a member of the Gender-Based Violence Committee of Alvin’s transition team, I am eager to push to use that power to reduce incarceration and punishment and usher in a more nuanced understanding of violence, abuse, trauma, and harm.”