It's award season. And while filmmakers and actors, makeup artists and cinematographers, screen writers and producers all deserve their recognition, there are others who have also been hard at work this past year -- many at great personal risk -- doing extraordinary things and serving the vulnerable, the weak, the "least of these," and all of us, too. This year's Dunlin Prize is dedicated to all those people: the nurses, the hospital janitors, the grocery store cashiers, the package deliverers, the bus drivers, first responders, and cooks; and to the lawyers who used their words and their passion to save lives and demand justice for hundreds of thousands of imprisoned people across our country during this pandemic.
In our retrospective on 2020, we noted that this year of COVID-19 is what folklore is made of; a year when we lived through a moment of biblical proportions, with angels and devils. Mary Price is one of the angels; a lawyer who saw those in prison, recognized the great danger they were in from the virus, and decided that something needed to be done. She knew, instinctively, that she had to act to address the immediate danger. But she also recognized that she might be able to make something more lasting out of it. Something good was possible. But more than that, something transformational, too; of redemption, and of forgiveness, and of justice.
Mary is the Vice President and General Counsel at FAMM. She has been fighting for those in prison and for their families for more than twenty years. She is a fierce advocate and a gentle soul; someone of unending kindness and of simple relentlessness. She is an unwavering advocate, but at the same time, someone who sees -- and respects -- the world and the law as her counterparts do. How many lawyers do you know who genuinely do that?
Mary was hired by Julie Stewart, FAMM's founder. The then-new organization was called Families Against Mandatory Minimums, and it was devoted to creating a more fair and effective justice system that respects our American values of individual accountability and dignity while keeping communities safe. Mary had graduated not that far back from Georgetown University Law Center, where she was a Public Interest Law Scholar and the Law Center’s first recipient of the Bettina Pruckmayr Human Rights Award. She had had a human rights background even before going to law school, and FAMM would turn out to be her natural home.
When the pandemic hit, Mary and the others at FAMM sprung into action without any hesitation. They announced an emergency effort to use the federal "compassionate release" program to get as many people out of federal prison as possible. Mary had been the intellectual force behind a change to that program which was contained in the FIRST STEP Act of 2018, the Trump-era sentencing and corrections reform. The change allows prisoners to petition a federal court for release if the Bureau of Prisons either denies their initial request for compassionate release or does not respond within 30 days. With this reform in place, Mary and FAMM decided right after the lockdown was announced to notify tens of thousands of people being held in federal prison and to urge them to submit requests for compassionate release based on the dangers of the virus and to get the 30-day clock running as required to exhaust their administrative remedies. Then FAMM and a small army of lawyers would take over from there, filing motions in federal courts across the country.
To get a sense of what it was like in prisons around the country when COVID-19 hit, listen to these voices from behind the prison walls. As has been well-documented, some of the largest outbreaks of the coronavirus have been in correctional facilities.
Mary led a team at FAMM and two partner organizations, the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers and the Washington Lawyers Committee, and established the Emergency Compassionate Release Clearinghouse for COVID-19. Mary helped recruit and train 300+ pro bono attorneys; established a protocol with the federal Bureau of Prisons to get medical records released quickly; and helped create early positive legal precedents for release.
In past years, the Bureau of Prisons released a couple dozen people each year through the compassionate release program. In the first year after passage of the FIRST STEP Act’s compassionate release reforms, 125 people were released. From March to December 2020 alone, more than 2,500 people were granted compassionate release by the federal courts. FAMM’s Clearinghouse received more than 5,000 requests for assistance. Mary and her team screened and placed cases with federal defenders or pro bono attorneys who they trained, and handled other cases themselves.
Mary's work to get federal prisoners released saved many lives and relieved much suffering. She displayed the same leadership and management skills in this pandemic project as she had shown in so many other projects over the years. Mary was a founder of Clemency Project 2014, the Obama-era program that led to the granting of clemency to thousands of federal drug offenders sentenced to long terms of imprisonment. For years, she has been a Special Advisor to the American Bar Association’s Criminal Justice Section, served on the ABA’s Sentencing Standards Task Force, and was a member of the Task Force on the Reform of Federal Sentencing for Economic Crimes. She directs the FAMM Litigation Project and has advocated for reform of federal sentencing and corrections law and policy before Congress, the U.S. Sentencing Commission, the Bureau of Prisons, and the Department of Justice.
You may have seen or heard Mary's expertise on the PBS NewsHour, MSNBC, NPR’s Morning Edition and All Things Considered, HuffPost Live, The Diane Rehm Show, or elsewhere where she has appeared. Her op-eds and articles have been published in a variety of outlets including Forbes, the National Law Journal, Huffington Post, the Federal Sentencing Reporter and Main Justice.
For all her extraordinary work during the pandemic, for saving the lives of federal prisoners across the country, for her leadership, and for her decades of commitment to the cause of justice, the 2021 Dunlin Prize is awarded to Mary Price.
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And in case the Dunlin Prize is not enough, the Academy of Motion Picture Art and Sciences might consider Mary's supporting role in the 2020 film, The Vanishing Trial. Here's the trailer for that film --
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