“Prosecution Is About Locking Black People Up” [Kenneth Montgomery, PLLC] on why there aren’t more black prosecutors

A report from the Women Donors Network revealed that 95 percent of America’s elected prosecutors are white. For context on this stunning number, I spoke to Melba Pearson, the president of the National Black Prosecutors Association and an assistant state attorney in the Miami-Dade State Attorney’s Office. Pearson told me about her efforts to recruit black law students into her profession by convincing them that if they really want to make the criminal justice system less discriminatory against black communities, they should become prosecutors, not defense attorneys, because that’s where the real power in the system lies.

On Thursday I caught up with a defense lawyer named Kenneth Montgomery, who is black and grew up in Brownsville, Brooklyn before attending Fordham Law School. Montgomery, whom I met earlier this year while reporting a story about one of his clients, the rapper Bobby Shmurda, holds uncompromising views on the justice system’s mistreatment of black people, and he went into law with the intention of becoming a civil rights lawyer. But after getting his degree, Montgomery accepted a job offer from the Brooklyn District Attorney’s Office.