Premal Dharia, Fellow, was named as the 2024 recipient of the Krieger Champion of Liberty Award by the ABA Criminal Justice Section. The award is named in honor of Albert J. Krieger, a Fellow of the ABF, who served as the Section’s Chair from 2002 to 2003 and represented the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers in the ABA’s House of Delegates.
The award will be presented to Dharia at the section’s White Collar Crime Institute in March in Miami. A lawyer is selected for this award based on their devotion to public or private criminal defense practice, whether state or federal, and who have distinguished themselves as criminal trial lawyers, embodied the principles enunciated in the ABA Standards for Criminal Justice, Defense Function.
Dharia currently serves as the Executive Director of the Institute to End Mass Incarceration at Harvard Law School. Prior to leading the Institute, she spent nearly 15 years as a public defender in three different places: the Public Defender Service in Washington, D.C., the Office of the Federal Public Defender in Baltimore, Maryland, and the military commission at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
Read more about the award here.