Within the United States, California is among a handful of states where judges are elected rather than appointed. Los Angeles County (which includes the city itself) has hundreds of judges, most of whom were career prosecutors, and who never appear on the ballot because they run unchallenged. To fight this status quo, Los Angeles organizers are building an alternative pipeline. The Defenders of Justice Academy, launched by La Defensa, is training public defenders and other progressive advocates to run for judge—and win.
Last fall, we interviewed public defenders George Turner and Ericka Wiley about their own campaigns in the weeks leading up to election day. Now, both Turner and Wiley are on the bench. Previously, we spoke with Holly Hancock, who participated in the 2022 Defenders of Justice cohort and who then also went on to win a Superior Court bench.
With three of their six endorsed candidates winning elections, the Defenders of Justice are proving that even the most entrenched systems can be challenged. Inquest managing editor Adam McGee and assistant editor Daven McQueen spoke with La Defensa deputy director Gabi Vázquez and campaigns lead Leah Perez about building the academy, running successful campaigns, and the enduring commitment to community organizing that makes the wins possible.
Adam McGee: How did you decide to start the Defenders of Justice Academy?
Leah Perez: We were first inspired to run this academy because of Buckeye Justice, a national judicial accountability organization that runs something similar in Ohio. We had run a cohort in 2022 and were like, “OK, this went well. But there’s more we can learn.” So we shadowed some of Buckeye’s courses and got a sense of the standards for judicial campaigns, which are really different from campaigns for other roles. We realized we could use this downtime to do some analysis about fundraising, for example, and make the academy better for the 2024 run.
Gabi Vázquez: We also ended up partnering with LA Forward, which does organizing to democratize bureaucratic processes in our city. Its deputy director, Godfrey Plata, approached with the same idea in mind, that these years when there isn’t active campaigning for election could be a great chance to spend time building out those campaign skills. It was incredibly helpful. We found it to just be a really great way to slow down that process and give people tools to make a well-researched decision well before the deadline to file to run for office.
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McGee: Something we talk about a lot at Inquest is that to do something like this, you have to have an idea of what you’re actually trying to accomplish and how the things that you’re doing move toward that goal—in short, a theory of change. What was the theory of change underpinning the idea of the academy?
Perez: Our goal as the Defenders of Justice is to get people who have traditionally not been represented on the bench to run for office. A major question for us is about their values: we want someone who is more left-leaning progressive. In LA County, until our PAC work began, we had never elected a public defender into a judicial seat. Some had been appointed in the past by governors, but public defenders tend to be very underrepresented on the bench. So you’re getting a lot of prosecutors in this pipeline, people who come from a carceral, penal background. That obviously affects over-incarceration in our jails. Moving forward, we’re in a space where we’d like to think about getting different attorneys on the bench as well—tenants rights, immigrant rights, other folks who do nontraditional, non-prosecutorial work. I would be remiss not to mention that it’s predominantly old white men on the bench; something like 60 percent of judges are white. The Los Angeles population is much more diverse than that, and it’s important for that to be reflected in our judiciary.
Vázquez: Right. And there are attorneys out there right now who are well versed on alternatives to incarceration, but they can only advocate so much; sentencing ends up not being their ultimate decision. But when we get those folks to that position of power, they are then able to use their years of experience and understanding of how these court systems work to actually give people the chance of accountability.
George Turner, who went through the academy and then won a Superior Court bench last election, is a great example. He’s in Dependency Court, and he was sharing with us that their ultimate goal is to make sure that families can be whole, and there are services and ways to do progress checks so that can happen. But there are thirty-eight courts across the county—even one on Catalina Island—and they’re not all criminal courts. So it is very important that there is a diverse group of people in these courts who know how to connect people to those services, who want to follow that person’s journey to make sure that, ideally, they don’t have to come back into this system. I think that’s the real goal, to be able to say to people, “You’re here in court. How do we help you so that this doesn’t keep happening?”
Traditionally we see the carceral mindset, with judges saying that there’s so many risks and things that can happen that we should just incarcerate this individual. That they’ll learn in the LA County jail system. But the reality is that we have a huge pretrial population of folks who are legally innocent and just waiting for their day in court. Have those judges really worked with those individuals? These people could still be contributing to society, learning from that process rather than languishing in our overpopulated, overcrowded, underfunded jails.
Daven McQueen: Adam and I had a great conversation with George Turner and Ericka Wiley a few months ago before the election, and we heard from them a little bit about their decision to run. But on y’all’s end, what is the process for identifying candidates who would potentially be a good fit for the academy and ultimately the bench?
Vázquez: To get the word out about the academy, we reached out to a lot of our colleagues, who, for example, worked at the ACLU or the public defender’s office, or at immigrant rights law clinics, and asked them to share the program with their contacts. We were encouraging people of color, people who have different diverse identities, to apply. It was free and took place over about two months of summer—kind of like summer camp.
When it comes to actually identifying people, we formed a coalition four years ago called Transforming the Judiciary that has folks from Ground Game LA, LA Forward, La Defensa, and a number of individuals in their own capacity. In that space, we developed a questionnaire that spoke to values, political alignment, and other factors important to us as a coalition. And we interviewed folks. After this academy, some folks were genuinely interested in running, so we had them meet the coalition. It was that group who was able to say, “We think this person is really ready, let’s help them.”
Getting someone ready to run is a long journey, but once folks file, it’s actually a really fast process. Unlike, for example, the race for LA city attorney, where people start filing fifteen months out, the seat numbers for judges only get put out by the registrar five or six months before the primary. Then, once you file and have a seat number, it’s already almost the primaries, so the actual campaign is pretty short.
Perez: Yeah, our campaign road was mid-November to March 5, I think. With the holidays happening in between, we had a very tight timeline.
McGee: Could you tell us a little bit about what they learn in the academy? What’s the curriculum, and then what kinds of support do candidates receive if they decide to run?
Perez: Godfrey Plata had actually run before for California State Assembly, so he covered the basics of what he had learned, some of the most foundational things like learning how to fundraise, how to make those fundraising calls, how to have call time. He had them make a list of every person in their life who would support them in a campaign; people who would donate money, who would spread the word, whatever. He was like, “My list has 2,000 people and I want yours to look like that too.” I think that was wonderful to just think about, for the candidates, you know, listing all their teachers, professors, coworkers—all those people who are going to be on the sidelines rooting for you.
He also had them make their two-to-five-minute stump speeches, and at the very end of the academy we did mock interviews for endorsements with them. They were really nervous about that. They were like, “Y’all are taking this very seriously.” And we were like, it is very serious! And if you run, you’re gonna do this at least twice a week. It was all really good practice.
Vázquez: We also shared a lot of the tips and tricks we’ve learned as organizers working on campaigns. You learn that you’re not going to knock on everybody’s door, but you still have ways to share your message. You have to ask, what does your political education look like? You’re talking to someone who might’ve never spoken to somebody running for judge. What if you have one minute with them? Thirty seconds? What are you going to say?
What was really great was that we were able to give them that spaciousness—we gave them time to really imagine how these conversations would play out. It was very fast-paced, but I think they learned a lot, and they got to keep all the materials to use however they want in the future.
McQueen: That sounds like a really thorough and comprehensive process, and obviously it’s been successful: you’ve had three of six candidates win their bench spots. But beyond those election results, what do you consider to be other milestones or victories of the academy?
Perez: Well, I can tell you that two additional candidates from the academy went after incumbent judges. That’s only happened ten times in the last decade, and there are something like 200 incumbents reelected every two years. So it’s abysmal in terms of the numbers of people who are actually getting challenged for their seats. Of those two folks from our cohort who challenged judges, one lost and one won, becoming the only person of those ten challengers to have successfully unseated a judge. Other graduates of that cohort have applied for appointment, and some others are not eligible to run yet—you need to have been a lawyer for ten years—but took the course to get in that headspace. Really, we haven’t seen the culmination of everything; it might take a decade for us to see the results from just that first academy cohort. But it’s definitely made a change. And it’s made people interested in this process. Prior to this, we would hear from public defenders that it’s career suicide to go after a judge, with the possibility of retaliation from the DAs just because you ran. So we really are shaping and changing the way that this process has worked historically in the county.
Vázquez: And this process has really impacted Angelenos at large. We’ve activated a lot of people who hadn’t given much thought to judicial campaigns—and not because they didn’t care or weren’t affected. It was more like, “Well, I know I can vote for somebody for judge, but I looked them up and don’t know who they are.”
We knew that’s what a lot of folks in our county experienced. And I think one result of our work is that people are now familiar with the Defenders of Justice, almost like a brand—and they associate it with certain values. These are folks who lean more progressive, understand alternatives to incarceration, understand mass incarceration, and see themselves as individuals who’ll confront those issues when in power. For example, Democratic clubs previously didn’t weigh in on judicial races. But through our political education—like when Leah would go to Dem clubs and talk about these campaigns—they’d end up deciding, as a club, to weigh in on the races. So we really changed how active groups in L.A. County view these seats.
Another thing I love about progressive spaces in L.A. is how seriously we take voter guides. They’re key resources we share across our networks because we care about people being informed before elections. Because we do that hard work for political education, we’re now in more than twenty voter guides—resources that never mentioned judges before.
We’re proud that La Defensa is now seen as a credible messenger on judicial races, and that the Defenders of Justice campaign is something people recognize. Now folks can turn to it to learn who’s on their ballot and actually know something before deciding. Before, it was hard—I joked (and it’s probably in print somewhere) that I thought I was bad at my job because I’d try to look up judges and find nothing. The reality? There just wasn’t info.
We’ve done the work to make these races as visible as city council or mayor races. And that’s the goal—get to know these candidates: their background, their opponent’s background, and make the most informed decision you can.
McGee: Unfortunately, in the recent election, California made some regressive choices—like rejecting the measure to remove slavery for incarcerated individuals from the state constitution, and reinstating more punitive sentencing guidelines. How do you see your work fitting into this larger landscape? California’s stance on the carceral system seems in flux. How can your efforts help push things back toward progress?
Vázquez: There’s a lot of work ahead. We need to treat every year as a campaign year—doing slow, deep canvassing to help Californians understand why prioritizing people’s basic needs matters. This “tough on crime” shift isn’t data-driven; it’s fueled by media narratives that stoke fear. With everything happening federally, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed. But we can’t let that stop us. We have time now—four years, two until the next election—to keep educating voters so they’re better informed next time.
McQueen: What are the benefits of grassroots organizing in between the more prominent struggles?
Perez: Thinking about the Democratic Party, for example—that’s funded by capitalists who have very specific interests in protecting their money. As an independent organizer, I don’t have to censor myself to fit liberal or neoliberal values. I can speak directly from my heart with messaging I truly believe in.
That’s been key to our success: we don’t adapt our message or compromise our goals. We’re clear that we’re abolitionists. We’re not doing centrist Democrat work or building something we’ll have to tear down later. That clarity resonates with people.
When canvassing, I’ve found being direct creates deeper connections. Many people of color tell me, “I’m not voting for Democrats. I don’t support them.” And I get it—I don’t either, honestly. But I explain: while the other side is terrible, judges are technically nonpartisan. We have to think critically about what we’re really up against, especially with the right’s influence.
Vázquez: And I’ll add that these off-years are prime for base building. It’s about meeting people where they’re at, giving them space to name what they’re experiencing, and connecting them to what matters. Maybe judicial campaigns don’t sound sexy (they never do!), but someone might connect with other work. We’re happy to help people find their political home.
For those of us privileged to organize professionally, every interaction is an opportunity to connect people to existing spaces doing meaningful work—to help them get politicized, informed, and bring their networks in. I grew up in a union household—both my parents were organizers in LA’s labor movement. That shaped my worldview: it’s never just about the individual, but the collective. The more we can share that mindset, the stronger our base becomes—people who won’t be swayed by false media narratives or empty “just donate $5” Democrat messaging.
This is the long work: giving people the language to articulate what they feel, connecting them to the process. I have friends who never cared about elections before, but now share our voter guides with their families. When we make it accessible and invite everyone in—no matter their background—we grow stronger.
Image source: Colin Lloyd / Unsplash
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