Lizzy: Hi, I'm Lizzy Ghedi-Ehrlich.
Avigail: I'm Avigail Oren.
Lizzy: And we are your host for Scholar Strategy Network’s No Jargon. Every other week, we discuss an American policy problem with one of the nation's top researchers without using jargon.
Avigail: So, Lizzy, No Jargon has covered the topic of the criminal legal system in the past. But this week we are really looking at a particular aspect of it that might be of special interest to our listeners who have loved ones or community members close to them who have cognitive or intellectual disabilities.
Lizzy: Yeah. And you know, as I was reading sort of the background for this interview and getting myself up to speed, my first instinct was, yeah, we're talking about this like a very specific slice of the population. We talk about this big issue, the court system, the criminal system, jails and prisons for profit, incarceration, all, you know, there's all these different parts. That's a big theme on No Jargon because it's such a huge, complicated domestic policy area. What I learned, and what is the outcome really of this conversation, too, is that this isn't a niche segment of that system. This is a really pervasive issue for that system. The entirety of the system is really dealing a lot with people who have intellectual disabilities in some way, have these adaptive deficits that, yes, of course, we will be talking about what exactly that means.
So for anyone, whether that describes someone in your family, whether or not they've had any contact with the carceral system, these are still things to think about, how the system treats them differently, if they ever do, whether they're particularly at risk for that or not. And then for the huge amount of people who are working within that system or outside it to reform it, this is a big deal, how we're actually treating people with intellectual disabilities equally, so that they can get a fair trial.
And that's why I'm particularly interested to hear what this expert has to say about a group of people who's much larger and touches more lives than I think I initially considered in this episode.
I spoke to Dr. Katie Kronick, she's an assistant professor of law at the University of Baltimore. And in addition to teaching constitutional criminal procedure, she directs the school's criminal defense and advocacy clinic where students represent indigent individuals in criminal matters. Before entering academia, she was an assistant deputy public defender in New Jersey.
Here's our conversation.
Lizzy: Thank you so much for being here and for taking extra time to make sure the audio is set up, which obviously even those of us who do this regularly need the same thing, so I appreciate it.
Katie: No problem. Happy to be here.
Lizzy: Before we dive into the research, I'd love to start with your story. You've got this trajectory where, you know, you started off as a practitioner, you moved from being a public defender to then academia, so a little upstream. You know, you're teaching, you're researching, you're thinking of the theories and now combining that with also leading this clinic that has students working in it. Can you talk about what drew you along that path in, that order, and how this is all connected for you?
Katie: When I was in law school, one of my first jobs was being a research assistant to Professor Wally Mlyniec, who was one of the directors of the Juvenile Justice Clinic. I wanted to work for him because I was really interested in doing public defense work and he ran the juvenile justice clinic. But what I ended up working with him on was an article about clinical pedagogy. I did a lot of reading about teaching law students about ethics and thinking about the moral implications of what they do and caring about clients, and it really made me very interested in becoming a clinical professor. But I also understood that that was a long-term idea and something I certainly would not be doing straight out of law school. And two years later, I had the pleasure of being a student in the clinic that he ran, and being in the juvenile justice clinic with Professors Kristin Henning and Wally Mlyniec, and our fellow Lula Hagos. I fell in love with public defense and doing the work, the clients, not knowing what every day was gonna be, and was committed to doing that work. And so that's what I did, after clerking after law school, and just loved being a public defender for about six years.
Lizzy: Tell me a little more about that. What does falling in love with public defense mean? I feel like we, mostly people's exposure, if you're not actually in the courtroom yourself, either working there or as a defendant, you know, as in media, TV shows, and everything that show that as sort of the downtrodden space. Like, tell me what your love looks like.
Katie: This is one of those questions where when I was interviewing to be a public defender, I was like, it's so obvious why I love this work. And I'm like, why do I, no, I do love it so much. So when I went into law school, I knew I wanted to do public interest work. I wasn't sure what that was gonna look like, but I was always really interested in working with youth, and did that sort of thing throughout high school and college. I really saw the criminalization of youth as being a criminalization of normal adolescent behavior in most circumstances.
One of my internships was with a policy organization, the Gault Center. And I remember one of the women working there told me, if you can feel sympathy for our clients, like please go do this work because so many people villainize them. And that always stuck in the back of my head. And so I was deciding between civil rights work and public defense, and I think public defense is civil rights work, but I was doing more sort of impact litigation, which is sitting at a desk all day writing, reading. And I liked it. It was super interesting, but public defense work, you never know what you're gonna be doing any given day. You might be in court, you might be out investigating, you might be going to visit your clients. You might be sitting at your desk writing motions and doing research, but it's so variable.
So I really loved that energy. I love the clients. They are vibrant and interesting and have complex experiences and lives. And then there's just a real energy amongst public defenders, particularly where I've practiced, at least in the areas I've practiced, which are DC and New Jersey, and now in Maryland. People just caring deeply about the harm that the criminal legal system causes and the over criminalization, the over sentencing. There's just real passion amongst the people who do this work and that I found incredibly energizing.
Lizzy: That's certainly a theme that we've seen running through your work, what criminalization, you know, really means for society. And then another theme that we noticed is really how wide the gap can be between legal theory and then what's happening in court, in practice, especially in criminal law. And when you talk about where theory meets practice, describe that a bit for us. How do you see that showing up in your clinic work and in your scholarship? And tell us a little bit more about that gap, too.
Katie: Yeah. So, one of my areas of focus is the experience of persons with intellectual disability in the criminal legal system. When I was doing compassionate release cases at the height of COVID, I represented a man who was in prison for a robbery. And he'd done about 10 of the 15 years he had on his sentence. It was clear from the court records speaking to him and speaking with his family that he had a mild intellectual disability, and it was clearly affecting his experience while he was incarcerated. So he had a health condition that required him to be vigilant and constantly monitor. But because of his deficits in working memory, meaning he had trouble sort of holding information and remembering to do things, he couldn't take care of his health. And that resulted in multiple hospitalizations because the prison was also ill-equipped to assist him where his own deficits were existing. They couldn't sort of fill that gap.
And working with him and doing the research on how intellectual disability affects a person's adaptive deficits, I was able to think back on so many clients I had had in practice where they very likely had intellectual disability. I didn't realize it, and it affected my ability to adequately represent them.
So I had a client in New Jersey who was given a curfew. He had no prior record. It was a drug possession case, so pretty low stakes. The judge had let him out but gave him a curfew and he just kept on getting rearrested after his curfew, like not doing anything illegal, like picking up Chinese food or, you know, taking a walk outside his house. But he just could not follow this curfew and he ended up being incarcerated because he kept breaking the court's order.
Upon reflection, this was clearly a working memory deficit. The client very likely had intellectual disability. Had I recognized that and been able to articulate it, I don't know that it would've made a difference, but I think the judge might have changed the order, certainly not incarcerated him over it.
And so this sort of spurred me on, really taking this issue on in my research, trying to take all that I've learned about the ways in which intellectual disability can affect a person's experience in the world, and translate it so that practitioners can use it in their practice. So, thinking about what our purposes of sentencing are.
As a practitioner, you're sort of going through the motions. You had to just like prep that sentencing for, you know, the next day. You don't have a ton of time to do independent research, but sort of breaking down for a practitioner why the purposes of sentencing aren't served by sentencing this person to a particular sentence because they have intellectual disability and that would've affected various aspects of their culpability or their ability to rehabilitate, whether there is a need for incapacitation. So trying to take these sort of bigger, complex ideas, and then translate them so that they're easily applied in practice.
Lizzy: Yeah. And so, and you've given us already some great examples of what that looks like, but break it down in plain language for our audience of non-practitioners, too. Tell us, what are you talking about when you talk about. intellectual disability and then especially adaptive deficits, which feels like a very important term, for the specific situation that you are looking at about how some of your clients are able to function in the current system that is maybe not made for one type of person, it sounds like. And you know more about what that actually looks like in a day-to-day courtroom setting. What are the things that you're telling practitioners in that translated way? This is how we need to adapt our process to make room for these clients.
Katie: Yeah, so intellectual disability is defined, there are three elements to it. So one is deficits in intellectual functioning. And so that's usually measured with an IQ test. Generally speaking, an IQ of 70 or below is sort of what qualifies for intellectual disability. But there's, you know, errors in the testing. And so, depending on what test you use, it could be as high as 75 could qualify as intellectual disability from an IQ test perspective.
The second piece, which is what you asked about, is deficits in adaptive functioning. Deficits in adaptive behavior follow three different paradigms, and those paradigms are conceptual skills, practical skills, and social skills. So those three areas, if a person has deficits in those, and there's no sort of perfect formula of you have to have two conceptual and one skills. It's sort of a totality of the person analysis, but significant deficits in adaptive functioning.
And then the third component is that there must be an onset during the developmental period. So by the age of around 18 or 21. And so those three things are what would qualify someone as having intellectual disability.
But the way practitioners or actors in the criminal legal system are going to see it play out is really in the adaptive behavior deficits. You know, one of the things that I talk about is the cloak of competence. So a lot of people with intellectual disability know that there's a stigma around it. Ill-placed stigma, but the stigma exists. They're aware of that. And so they'll do everything they can to sort of cover up that they have intellectual disability. And so that can come in a lot of different forms.
So if somebody doesn't understand information that you're giving them, rather than asking a question, they'll just appear to agree with whatever you're saying. Sometimes people will cover it up by acting overly aggressive in order to sort of prevent people from asking them too many questions. But it can also show up in ways, having sort of reactions to situations or questions that others might deem inappropriate or off for what is called for in that moment. Sometimes people will struggle to have positive social relationships, which can result in losing jobs frequently because they have confrontations with employers.
As I mentioned, working memory issues. So remembering that they have to be somewhere at a particular time. There's just so many ways in which this can show up in everyday life and then can impact your experience in the criminal legal system.
So, you know, people who are on probation have to participate in all of this different programming. If you are ordered to participate in a drug program and that drug program has reading assignments and you don't know how to read, you might fail that drug program because you're unable to fully participate in it. You failed to complete your paperwork that was required, and that could result in a probation violation and you going to jail. You have to show up for court on time. If you have trouble remembering to be in certain places at certain times, that's going to be problematic.
But also, being able to sort of do complex problem solving. A lot of our clients, you know, most people in the criminal legal system are very poor. They don't have their own transportation, so they rely on a bus system. So if the bus doesn't show up and you have court that you have to get to, someone with intellectual disability is gonna have a really hard time sort of problem-solving their way out of that situation, and then will end up missing court for that reason.
So there's just lots of different ways that we see this play out in real life. And you know, I've been hesitant to put too much onus on public defenders to do the figuring out of this, because they are overworked, they have too many clients, they don't have the resources and they're not experts. So I think part of what I'm trying to do with my research is create or identify places for structural change so that we're not putting the onus on people who are already overworked and are gonna struggle to identify when these deficits exist.
Lizzy: Right and in practice you've talked about how we've seen courts failing to take these deficits into account. It sounds like your research is leading you at least to some preliminary ideas about where and when we do need to take them into account so that that downstream figure, the public defender isn't, you know, the first and last stop essentially on that train. And even just from the stories you told about the process that a person is going through when they're adjudicated, and then even after it in this probation period, when you have still so much contact essentially with that system, it sounds like there's a lot of touch points. Do you have ideas like how would you do it? How do we better incorporate this? And how do we sort of, at what stage do we get to draw the line between, okay, this is an actual deficit that needs to be accounted for, versus this is not that this is simply more criminality. That feels like a difficult line to draw.
Katie: Yeah, I mean, I think that's a really tough question. And it's a really complicated question. So it's one that I've been struggling with a lot because technically the ADA, which is the Americans with Disabilities Act, applies to the court process. So people with disabilities are supposed to have accommodations even in their own prosecution. They're supposed to be individualized accommodations made in the court system for people with disabilities. And there's a lawsuit going on right now in DC that the ACLU has brought on behalf of two individuals on this basis, because the problem is that the criminal legal system is designed to be really efficient, to process a lot of people, really quickly. And so, providing individualized accommodations is really hard.
And I think that being said, there will always be a need for and a place for individualized accommodations. But what I've been thinking about a lot is universal design, which is something that comes from sort of the architectural space, but has been moved into education and technology, ways that we could use those principles and put them into the criminal legal system to rethink the way we have certain processes to accommodate those with mental disabilities in the criminal legal system without having to do individualized accommodations.
So one of the things that I've thought about is in the sentencing context. Right now, a lot of jurisdictions will have a range for a particular sentence. So if you commit a theft, you could be sentenced anywhere from one year to three years. I'm totally making up these numbers, but let's just say one year to three years. And a lot of judges will say, all right, there's nothing exceptional about this case. I'm just gonna sentence you to the middle of the guidelines. I'm gonna start from the middle and depending on what the defense and the prosecution say, maybe I'll move up, maybe I'll move down.
What we know, though, is that people with intellectual disability struggle to provide their attorneys with mitigating information, which is information that would be favorable to them. So, you know, for me, if I ever got in trouble with the law, which knock on wood, hopefully I never will, you know, I'd be able to tell my lawyer about my family connections, about the work that I've done, about all the good that I've done in my past, what I've learned, how I can do better, all these things that would make a judge, you know, very likely feel sympathy for me and perhaps give me a lower sentence.
But a person with intellectual disability often really struggles to be a good historical narrator of their own lives, even to tell their attorney about struggles that they've had, about traumas that they've experienced, about family who can support them. All these things that could help them get a lower sentence.
So one of the things that I've suggested as sort of a universal change would be that judges, rather than starting from the middle or some judges, I think maybe start from the top of a range, but rather than starting from the middle to start from the bottom of the range.
So it's not necessarily incumbent on the defense to bring the judge down. Our criminal legal system disproportionately has way too many people with disabilities in it. That they would start from the bottom. And then depending on what, you know, the prosecution says, the seriousness of the offense, there could be other issues that came up, could move them up, but it wouldn't be incumbent upon the defense to bring them, move the judge down in that range because of these sort of struggles with being able to articulate mitigation.
Lizzy: And that makes sense because it's assumed that you understand how to garner sympathy and that you'll be able to perform the task of a performance in a way, a specific public performance, to garner a certain type of sympathy. Then we're sort of allowing people who have those better connections, have a better understanding of what sympathy means, know how to create that story, know how to do that performance, and like what the preferred performance is supposed to look like. We're giving those people an edge as opposed to treating everyone as equal sort of.
And so I, you know, you've talked about intellectual disability and difficulties conceptualizing, remembering those sorts of things, but also that performative aspect. You can also be part of the deficits you're talking about. There's so many stories of people who just didn't act the way we expected. A remorseful person or an innocent person, you know, and that seems to be a huge barrier for the people you're talking about.
Katie: Absolutely. I mean, having what others would deem it sort of an inappropriate reaction. So not being able to demonstrate remorse in the way that a judge might expect someone to can absolutely be a feature of intellectual disability, or smiling during trial. Some people with intellectual disability will smile during, you know, really horrific descriptions of things that happened, because of some of the deficits that they have and that will be interpreted as callousness, not taking it seriously, and sort of like the worst of the worst, essentially.
Lizzy: So specifically talking about one of your recent projects, you wrote an amicus brief, so that's a, you know, essentially a friend of the court letter that comes maybe from experts, maybe from an industry group. Anyone who is not directly involved in litigation but has a stake in a certain case or something to share in the case. Hamm v. Smith, that's a death penalty case out of Alabama. Can you tell us, you know, what's the basic question before the Supreme Court in this case, and how did your argument come together? What are the stakes to leave that hypothetical of just the theft case behind when we're talking about adaptive deficits in bigger cases.
Katie: I was very thrilled to have Arnold and Porter represent me in writing that amicus. So Andrew Tutt and Nate Mensah were the attorneys who filed the brief, and I worked with them on that, and they did an excellent job. So the issue in that case is that Mr. Smith, he was sentenced to death. And this was before Atkins, which is the Supreme Court case on the death penalty where the court said that people with intellectual disability cannot be executed. So if you have intellectual disability, you are not eligible for the death penalty. So it sort of takes that sentence off the table.
And in Atkins, which was in 2002, the court sort of left open the question of what is intellectual disability? They said we'll leave it to the states. But as a baseline, we're gonna say, you should sort of listen to what the experts—like the Association of Psychiatry, the APA, and then the American Association for Individuals with Developmental Disabilities—what they say on this.
So there's been some litigation in the years over what it means to have intellectual disability. But this case is specifically about cumulative IQ tests. So, Mr. Smith had, I think it was five IQ tests, three of which were within range of, having intellectual disability, and two were outside the range. The question is, what should a court do? The circuit below the Supreme Court said that Mr. Smith should not be executed, that he clearly has intellectual disability as demonstrated by his adaptive deficits. So even though his IQ test was borderline, the adaptive deficits sort of put it over the edge.
Alabama is arguing that before you can even look at adaptive deficits, you have to determine that somebody has the intellectual functioning deficits, standing alone without reference or looking to adaptive deficits, and that there should sort of be an average of the IQ scores that are taken. And if that average is above 70, then you should be eligible for the death penalty.
That was sort of a complex answer to your question. But it's essentially like, what do you do with multiple IQ tests where they're not all within the range of having intellectual disability?
The argument that I wanted to make is that we're sort of losing the plot by just focusing on intellectual functioning deficits. That adaptive deficits are what results in people with intellectual disability being wrongly convicted of crimes and then executed. It's the reason why they're more likely to falsely confess. Not be able, like I said, to provide their attorneys with information that would be favorable to their defense, like alibis, or, you know, anything that could demonstrate their innocence. And then their deficits in being able to provide their attorneys with information on why they shouldn't get the death penalty, even if they did commit the very serious offense. And that's what the court had held in Atkins. They focused on this risk of wrongful conviction and wrongful death sentences as part of the reason why they were taking the death penalty off the table, and sort of by myopically focusing on IQ testing. I think we're just, we're losing sight of what the purpose of the ruling was.
Lizzy: I see how it's a push pull. I see how, you know, you have to keep that big picture in mind. You cannot winnow it down to a single criteria. And yet I also understand when you're talking about a system that is seeking efficiency, which can be done, you know, well or poorly, like regardless of kind of how it ends up, I understand why some sense of efficiency is necessary and why some, you know, sense of equality is necessary, or universality, I think is maybe a better way to say it. You know, there's gotta be a standard.
So you've written some op-eds, one in the Baltimore Sun published last year: The criminal legal system is failing people with intellectual disabilities. I'm interested more about when courts miss these things that you have said are critical but also we've agreed are difficult to really clearly hang one's hat on and it's an ongoing conversation, how do we get away from that? How do we fail people with intellectual abilities a little less is kind of where I wanted to set the bar as opposed to completely remediate it, 'cause I see how difficult this could be.
Katie: To be honest, I don't know if our current system, in most cases, we can do a whole lot better. And I think that's why some of my suggested changes are big and substantial systemic ones, because I'm sort of loath to suggest something that I think is gonna make us feel better, like we're doing something better, but it's not actually gonna improve the experience of the people who are going through it.
I do think training can be helpful for public defenders. I don't think that we should expect them to identify every person and they shouldn't have that pressure on them, but I don't think I had any training when I became a public defender. So I had great training before being a public defender on trial advocacy and the law, but not on people with intellectual disability.
So, like, your client seems like they're just going along with you. That might not be a sign that they're just an easy client. It might be a sign that there's an intellectual disability. Educating public defenders, I think, is really important and that's what I do in my clinic.
So my students are representing clients. We have a whole class on working with clients who are dealing with mental disabilities, like severe mental illness, trauma, and intellectual disabilities, so they can understand a little bit more about how their clients are operating and be able to better counsel them, better represent them, so that they're just at least aware that they have sort of a gut check that something's going on. I certainly think that would be beneficial.
You know, I think that judges just taking a little bit more time with each individual will result in probably better outcomes so that they can understand the person before them as a full person so that they can do a check of like, Hmm, this client, this defendant before me seems to be just nodding along and not able to really respond in a thoughtful way to questions that I'm asking them. Maybe there's something going on here that I need to spend a little bit more time on.
Lizzy: You wrote a bit about this in another op-ed: Why is it so hard for courts to adjust? What are the obstacles that are making it hard for courts to adjust? Is it just that time and personnel thing? If we enlarged the size of the system, do you think we could give people the time that they needed and make those adjustments for intellectual disability? Or is it more than just that?
Katie: I think it's more than just that. I mean, I think that would help, but people with intellectual disability and other mental disabilities are just also more likely to be arrested and prosecuted for crimes, not because they commit them more often. And then there's bias sort of at every level of the system. Professor Doron Dorfman has written these great articles about “fear of the disability con,” this fear that people are faking a disability to get something over on somebody else.
That really does not happen in any sort of large form, but there's just this constant fear that that's happening and that bias permeates all systems. Anytime you talk about providing sort of a better outcome for a person due to their disability, there's gonna be a fear that someone's faking it in order to get that better outcome or that benefit, whether it's more time or more consideration or whatever it is. And so I think, you know, more time for the ACT system actors to sort of pay attention and make changes, certainly would help.
But I do think that there's sort of systemic bias, you know, once you get into the system, there's so many negative repercussions for just being in the system, even if ultimately, your case comes out okay. So I think that bringing people into the system is a harm that providing judges or system actors with more time isn't going to fix.
Lizzy: You say that people with intellectual disabilities don't commit higher rates of crime, but do have higher rates of arrest and sentencing. I think that's what you just said. Can you explain that a little bit? Why the overrepresentation?
Katie: Some of it is that just people who don't have intellectual disability are less likely to get caught. So that's not to say that everyone who's coming into the system with intellectual disability didn't commit a crime, but they're often more likely to get caught for doing crimes than like people who commit similar crimes. I don't wanna be here arguing that we should just arrest more people to level the system out. But that is part of the reason, they're not committing crimes more often, but they're more likely to get caught for committing the crimes.
But there is also a real problem with police misinterpreting manifestations of someone's disability, mistaking it for criminal conduct and that can sometimes lead to somebody ending up being arrested and then wrongly convicted of an offense. Or, you know, false confessions, which we know happen more often because one of the adaptive deficits is acquiescing to authority.
So if you have a police officer telling you, and they are allowed to do this, they're allowed to lie and say: Well, we have video showing you committed the crime. Law enforcement, even if that's not true, is allowed to say that. If you say that to someone with intellectual disability, there's a good chance they're gonna go along with what you're saying because of their adaptive deficits.
Lizzy: For listeners who have a loved one with an intellectual or cognitive disability who's either facing charges or, again, part of this population that we know is maybe more at risk for coming in contact with the carceral system, what should they be watching for? How are, you know, allies, guardians, people whose role it is to be an advocate essentially for folks with intellectual disabilities. You know, what's the advice to those people to make sure that the needs of clients like this are better recognized? Are they part of that push to systemic change that ultimately you're asking for?
Katie: Yeah, I mean, I think participating in advocacy, trying to educate community leaders obviously would be great. But there's already an organization that works on issues related to persons with mental disabilities and the criminal legal system. So the Arc is a great place for people who have a loved one who might be involved in the criminal legal system for them to go to get tips on how to help best help and support what to know about the criminal legal system.
And then I think about making things as easy as possible for the public defender or for the attorney if it's not a public defender representing the client. So, providing evidence of the disability, whether that's school records or tests or letters from psychologists or doctors in order to demonstrate that the disability exists and sort of to help fill that gap, in terms of providing information to the attorney, to the court about their loved one, about who they are, about their history, all the things that make them who they are because, you know, as Bryan Stevenson said, none of us are the worst thing that we've ever done.
There's so much more to those who come before the criminal legal system. They are wonderful, complex, interesting people who have a whole world beyond the mistake that they made or the terrible choice that they made. And so those who are family members, being able to provide that information to the judge or the attorney so that they can provide that information to the judge or the prosecutor, I think is a huge way to help.
Lizzy: And if there's one takeaway that you'd want our listeners to remember, what's the main takeaway here? What's one thing that you would hope people would better understand about how intellectual disability is functioning or should be functioning in the criminal legal system?
Katie: I am gonna probably say more than one thing.
Lizzy: That's fine. That is, you are allowed.
Katie: Some of the misconceptions I think that I struggle with the most are this belief that people with intellectual disability can't grow and change, and rehabilitate, and they absolutely can and studies show that. They are not people to be feared or incapacitated. They do not recidivate, which means commit crimes after, you know, they are released from prison. They don't recidivate at higher rates than anybody else. And that we should not be pigeonholing them as this idea of being stuck. So that's one of the biggest misconceptions that I wish people understood.
We don't have good numbers on the number of people with mental disabilities in the criminal legal system. It's not, you know, something that is checked in every case. So there's just no way to know. But we know that there is significant overrepresentation, both in those who are charged and those who are serving prison sentences. And it's not because they're more dangerous or more likely to engage in criminal behavior. And so I think I want people to take this as a really serious issue that we need to contend with and do better.
Lizzy: Well, thank you so much. I really appreciate your sharing that research and your perspective today.
Katie: Thank you so much for having me, and letting me talk about these really important issues and why I love doing this work.
Lizzy: Of course. I love that. I love anytime anyone explains why they love doing their work, that's definitely a No Jargon theme that we hope to keep going. And thank you everyone for listening today.
And thanks for listening. For more on Professor Kronick’s work, check out our show notes at scholars.org/nojargon. No Jargon is the podcast of the Scholars Strategy Network, a nationwide organization that connects journalists, policymakers, and civic leaders with America’s top researchers to improve policy and strengthen democracy.
The producers of our show are Wendy Chow and Dominik Doemer. Our audio engineer is Peter Linnane. If you liked the show, please subscribe and rate us on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your shows. You can give us feedback on X, formerly known as Twitter, @NoJargonPodcast or at our email address [email protected].