Jamila Johnson (she/her/y’all) is a Senior Counsel. Jamila joined the Lawyering Project after almost a decade in private practice and nearly six years litigating around the remains of slavery and Jim Crow in Louisiana’s criminal systems. Jamila was the Deputy Director at the Promise of Justice Initiative (PJI), where she ran its End Plantation Prisons Project. For two years, she was PJI’s Managing Attorney for its Jim Crow Jury Project. There she led a mass post-conviction project during the pandemic for those in prison with non-unanimous jury verdicts. Before that, Jamila was a senior supervising attorney at Southern Poverty Law Center and a shareholder at Schwabe, Williamson & Wyatt. She holds a law degree from the University of Washington School of Law.
Jamila is actively licensed to practice in Louisiana, Oregon and Washington. Jamila resides in New Orleans, Louisiana and is unreasonably enthusiastic about crawfish season.