'Andromeda Diaz and the Reasonable Doubt' with Emily Galvin Almanza

episode of What Happens With Sid, I would like to welcome an amazing author, public defender. She knows anything law, so she's always great, and her books are amazing. Emily Galvin Almanza. Emily, how are you? I'm really happy to be here. Thank you so much for having me. Well, thank you so much for coming on. And so I just finished reading one of your books about Andromeda, and I actually love how you incorporated the name. But before we kind of take a look At a couple of your different books, tell us a little bit about who you are, where you're from, and what really made you decide, hey, I want to take what I've practiced and put it into books for other people to learn. Absolutely. So I am from just south of you. I'm from Iowa. I grew up in Iowa and Wyoming. And before I was a public defender, I was actually a kid who needed to be defended. And I had my own contact with the criminal legal system and a judge who really changed my life, as I wrote about in The Price of Mercy. which was my first book. But then as a young defender, you know, I was walking into rooms with kids who were not that much younger than me, who had done stuff that I myself had done as a young person, except for that they were black and brown in East Los Angeles, and I had not been. And another thing I realized when I was representing these kids was not only that their conduct was being viewed through this lens of threat. What threat did they pose? Instead of the lens we should apply to children, which is what potential do they have? What promise do they have, right? I also learned that many of them had not had their first contact with the police when they were 13 or 14. It had started much younger when they were seven or eight and adultified and criminalized and stopped and questioned and searched walking home from school, which is a deeply affecting, even traumatizing experience for a young person. There's studies showing that kids can disengage from school as rapidly as the next day following police contact. So after I wrote The Price of Mercy, which is for grownups, I really wanted to write something that could help teach kids about their rights, about the law, and also kind of convey that unique mix of like critical reasoning and empathy that defines public defense. So kind of teaching kids how to think like a lawyer, even how to think like a public defender. And most importantly, destigmatizing conversations about criminalization, arrest, police contact, because when kids are not afraid to share their experiences and talk about what they're seeing and hearing and what's happening to them, we can all do a lot more to protect our children. Most people don't know this. Most parents have a safety procedure for if there's a fire or stop, look and listen when you're crossing the road. But 90% of children waive their rights if they're stopped by the police. And false confession rates, particularly among kids under 14, are extremely high. So as parents, we need our kids to be talking about this because we also need to learn what they are facing in their daily lives and before we and that kind of takes us you know to the story of Andromeda which and i feel like a lot of times in the world that we live in nowadays when you're black brown or just any minority anytime you see a cop you're just kind of like on pins and needles because you can honestly just be minding your own business walking down the street or not doing any traffic violations and suddenly you're stopped or you're being looked at and so you just automatically get on edge and especially with kids like that kind of puts a preset in their mind, like don't trust cops, depending on the kind of interaction that they have, you know, at such a young age, because of course, everybody knows kids are very impressionable when they're young. So that kind of puts a precedent in their mind. But I want to go back into your book, The Price of Mercy, to help viewers a little bit, if they're not familiar with it, what it entails and what would you say is maybe one or two lessons you would like for readers to take away from that particular book? Yeah. So my book is about my experiences as a public defender inside the criminal legal system and also my own firsthand experience with it, not as a professional, but as a system user. And I wanted really to give ordinary people the full spectrum of not only everything I had learned as a defender, but all of the data and research that's out there about how badly this system harms us, how far away from safety and justice it takes us, how it's actually undermining safety and undermining justice. And then the second half of the book, the first half of the book kind of depressing because i tell everybody all the bad stuff um but it's like you know for people for readers who are like oh i want to know what's happening in the darkest corners like come on in i'm gonna tell you but the second half of the book is all solutions because i've spent the last like nine years of my life building a program that i co-founded called partners for justice where we enhance and expand public defense across the country and this work is simple we provide more help for public defender clients with things like housing and jobs and treatment support. But that simple work in the last nine years has eliminated over 16,000 years of incarceration. And there's a lot of different programs like this that have so much promise, so much data behind them. Simple things like after-school programs can decrease youth involvement in violent crime by 50%. Something as simple as painting the sidewalks, adding street lighting, fixing up dilapidated buildings can drop youth homicides by 75%. So there's all these really promising things that make our neighborhoods nicer and more livable and also keep us much safer. I wanted every voter to know what's out there so that they can ask their lawmakers for the nice things that we are currently being deprived of by tough on crime ideology. And now kind of switching gears to Andromeda story, it's Andromeda Diaz and the reasonable doubt. And it's a middle grade mystery. I found myself very intrigued that I'm not even in middle school anymore. But you really took the things that you've learned when you were practicing law and kind of not really dumbed it down, but you put it in a way where kids, even me, and I'm almost 30, can like grasp and understand and learn new things. Like I've learned new things with the law, you know, like when it comes to kids and if they're in a room with a cop and an adult, a lot of times they don't know that they can ask for maybe their parent or a lawyer because they see the law that's in the room and they automatically waive their rights and i love the characters that you had in in the book and andromeda you know she was she had all these different you know she had a wild brain where she had all these different ideas and danny was just kind of like okay you know just like going with the flow and you had humor in there as well because i loved how danny was stuck on noah you know throwing the frog and i was just like oh this book was so well put together so tell viewers a little bit more about Andromeda's story and why you felt it was so important to kind of put it in a perspective for young kids to learn yeah so Andromeda and Danny go to a school it's like any other school I love I loved writing this book because there's no there's no villains in it there's no like bad guy who's doing stuff at the school like there's a bunch of grown-ups who are working under the incentives and pressures that grown-ups work under and their friend benji is accused of a crime in the school context and andromeda and her best friend sort of feel like something's wrong with this accusation and they want to find out what really happened they want to possibly use andromeda's defense skills that she has soaked up from living with her public defender parents um to protect a friend so to start with i really really love empowering kids i love books that accurately rely on the fact that kids are capable of so much more than we realize and kids understand so much more than we realize and they can do so much more so books that really hand the reins to a kid character to do some wild stuff i'm so here for that and andromeda is absolutely that kid um actually in book two that comes out next year andromeda is going to get into real criminal court on a real felony case she's going to real detention centers like she's she's doing the thing so what i loved about writing this book is you're right like as a mom i'm one of those moms that like mixes zucchini and black beans into various desserts. And with the writing, like I'm kind of doing the same. There's a lot of humor. There's a lot of jokes. There's a lot of mystery and adventure, but also, you know, I teach law students. I teach at Stanford law school in the winter quarter. I'm giving these kids stuff that is for like young attorneys, like basic trial training skills. Like if your kid reads this book, they're going to know what a subpoena duces tecum is. And I love that. I actually, I think that kids adore having niche knowledge that their parents don't have. Yeah. I gave it, I remember, to one test reader who was 11, and he was dropping that subpoena duces tecum stuff on his mom for the next four days. And when I go give talks to kids in schools, the level of their knowledge amazes me. I got a question about exceptions to the judicial warrant requirement for police to enter your house from a fifth grader in Iowa last month. So we don't realize how much our kids are listening. They are paying attention to the news. they hear what's happening all around us they have a lot of legal questions and when you open the door and you say here take this knowledge I'm going to fold it into a story about a case and by the time you read this you're going to be able to handle a case just like this it's very empowering for them and I think that it's also good for them in the long term to know what they're capable of yeah and I love like the little doodles and you know like pictures it was almost like a diary in a sense you know like how she created a list when she was you know putting her facts together you know before she went and talked to the vice principal and just everything about the book made it fun like i said i'm almost 30 and i was entertained with it and learned things you know myself when it comes to laws and different things like that and i think it's very important to you know put that kind of information in a way that kids can learn because their brains are like sponges like anytime they can grasp something you know or like you said like how he was dropping the words and you know anything to make them feel like you know i know something that you don't you know like that's our goal and especially when kids because nowadays we're in a literary crisis like kids don't want to read there's so many banned books that's going on nowadays so it's like how can we get these this information into the hands of kids and so you are actually going to be here in michigan um coming up soon on the 28th at schuler books so tell everybody a little bit about this upcoming event yeah so i'm going to be at schuler books in the evening 6:30 p.m. on the 28th, I am really really excited I'm gonna come and talk about the book but whenever I go and talk about the book I'm also totally there to give legal information and legal trainings and know your rights trainings to kids so if you are a parent and you're like if all of your conversations about policing have been survival based or if you're a parent and you've had the luck to never have had to have a conversation about police with your kids come on over, we will talk about safety together um we'll talk about the real facts about how many kids give up their rights exactly as you describe. And we'll talk about the impact that kids can have once they're empowered with this information. So it's a little bit about the book. It's a little bit about Know Your Rights. It's going to be, I guarantee you, your kids will have fascinating legal questions if you just let them ask whatever legal questions they have. That part is always really, really fun. And then I think, you know, the best feedback I've gotten from parents is that kids gobble this book up in like 24 hours. So maybe there'll be a kid or two. It's a quick read, it's I tried to make it really hard to put down so there might be some kids there for whom we can talk about what they've already read and I really really love writing empowering notes to kids in the book so if you got a book please bring it over if you want to get a book there obviously they're going to be for sale I would really love to turn your children into obnoxiously empowered legal professionals yeah and Emily before I let you go is there anything else that you would like to say to fellow watchers and book readers out there? Yeah, I think that we're in an interesting moment. And this book tour has been really illuminating for me about how much destigmatizing conversations around the criminal legal system can empower our children. One out of three Americans has been arrested, just like me. And the more we talk about it, the healthier the conversation becomes because kids can share the things that have been in the back of their minds that they haven't wanted to ask. I can't tell you how many times I've had a kid say, hey, my dad got arrested. Can I ask you about it? Yeah. These are conversations our children want to have. We shouldn't be shying away from the subject matter or treating it as different. Teaching our kids about their rights is a safety process that we and parents can, as parents, can engage in. And I'm really excited to help make that conversation comfortable. Well, Emily, thank you for what you're doing, you know, sharing your knowledge for adults, like for instance, in The Price and Mercy, and then also for, you know, kids in Andromeda Story. And I can't wait to read book to you know when that one comes out and thank you for taking the time to come and chat with me and fellow book lovers out there we greatly appreciate it thanks so much for having me it's great to be here