Ezekiel Edwards

Ezekiel leads Arnold Ventures’ pretrial team, overseeing more than $80 million invested in three strategic areas: bail reform, prosecutorial practices, and public defense. The team develops strategy and investments to eliminate unjust pretrial detention and advance community safety, promote prosecutorial decision-making that is transparent, data-driven, and humane, expand access to high-quality and independent counsel to all stages of a criminal case, and eliminate disparate treatment based on race in the criminal legal system.

Ezekiel joined Arnold Ventures after serving as director of the ACLU’s Criminal Law Reform Project, where he oversaw efforts to end overincarcetation, overcriminalization and racism in the criminal legal system through cases and campaigns focused on a range of pressing issues, including pretrial practices, unconstitutional policing, underfunding of public defense, excessive sentencing, prosecutorial misconduct, juvenile life without parole sentences, and drug prohibition. He was lead author of several reports, including the groundbreaking report on racial disparities in the enforcement of marijuana laws, Marijuana in Black and White: Billions of Dollars Wasted on Racially Biased Arrests. Ezekiel has been featured in news outlets across the country, including the New York Times, Washington Posts, and Vice News.

Previously, Ezekiel worked as a staff attorney at the Innocence Project, a criminal justice fellow at the Drum Major Institute of Public Policy, a public defender at the Bronx Defenders, an investigator at the New York State Capital Defender Office, and a paralegal in the appellate bureau of the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office. Ezekiel earned his B.A. with departmental honors from Vassar College and a J.D. from the University of Pennsylvania School of Law, where he was selected as a Public Interest Scholar.