Meet Amol Sinha, Executive Director of the ACLU of New Jersey and Advocate for Systemic Justice

Meet Amol Sinha: Executive Director of the ACLU of New Jersey and Advocate for Systemic Justice

Amol Sinha is the executive director of the ACLU of New Jersey. He received his B.A from New York University, his J.D. from the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, and is currently a policy fellow at Princeton University’s School of Public and International Affairs. Prior to joining the ACLU-NJ, Amol led State legislative campaigns at the Innocence Project and directed an office of the New York Civil Liberties Union. Since assuming leadership of the ACLU-NJ in 2017, Amol has been instrumental in driving the organization’s expansion and has secured transformational victories for the New Jersey civil rights landscape. In recognition of his dedication and success, he was elected by his fellow ACLU executive directors as the Chair of the ACLU’s Nationwide Executive Director Council in 2024.

What does the ACLU do, and how do you describe your role?

The ACLU is a nationwide civil rights organization with a focus on issues that cover the waterfront of constitutional rights and freedoms. The national office is headquartered in New York and DC and conducts nationwide campaigns, but we also have 54 state affiliates that have their own unique goals and priorities. Affiliates carry out their work based on what we call the “integrated advocacy” model, which incorporates a wide range of tools including impact litigation, legislative advocacy, lobbying, community organizing, and public education to achieve their goals. There has never been a more important time to defend constitutional rights, and the ACLU is at the forefront of that fight. We protect your First Amendment right to free speech and religion. We protect your right to be free from unreasonable search and seizure under the Fourth Amendment. We protect your right to be free from discrimination under the 14th Amendment. We protect everyone’s right to due process and ensure they have their day court in court, and to make certain that everyone is treated equally under the law. 

What inspired your path to civil rights work?

I grew up in a town called Lawrence, New Jersey, right between Princeton and Trenton. For a little bit of background, Trenton is maybe one of the most economically neglected and underdeveloped capital cities in the country. There are actually no hotels in Trenton, so if people wanted to come to testify before our legislature from California or DC, there wouldn't even be a place for them to stay in the city; they would have to find something outside of Trenton and then drive in, which is mind blowing. Trenton also has one of the highest rates of poverty in New Jersey, and the population is largely black and brown. 

But look just 15 minutes away and we have Princeton, one of the most affluent zip codes in the entire country. It’s a largely white community and it has one of the best public school Ivy League placements. Their high school has an art gallery. Contrast that to Trenton, where the schools are constantly having to fight for more resources and have one of lowest graduation rates in the state. So growing up right in between these two worlds it was sort of a whiplash to go from one end of my town to the other. It took me a while to get to the point of being able to articulate that it wasn't just about wealth, it was also about race—there’s an unjust racial hierarchy in this country. At the time, being a South Asian kid of immigrant parents, I didn't quite realize where I fell in the hierarchy and I certainly didn't know how to disrupt it, but I knew that I wanted to. 

Through college and law school I was more exposed to the language and critical frameworks on systemic racism that allowed me to understand on a deeper level that the neighborly interactions that had always felt off to me—the microaggressions, the bullying, the sort of condescension from teachers and other folks in my life—all came from something bigger. I thought it was maybe more insidious than just people being rude to one another. It took me working in social justice and being a part of the ACLU to realize that it’s all part of this structure and hierarchy of racism, and that there are tools to solve some of it.

How did your legal career begin?

When I was in law school I was able to intern for ACLU National in their legal department, working on national security and First Amendment litigation. It was a fantastic experience that sold me on the organization and its broader mission. When I came out of law school I worked as one of the directors of the New York Civil Liberties Union, which was a huge learning opportunity for me to recognize that litigation was only one tool, not the only tool, for achieving some of the most impactful civil rights advancements. I realized that working at the grassroots level with advocates, community members, and policymakers is sometimes the way to achieve change on a more systematic level, instead of litigation, which is sometimes about resolving very narrow issues.

After  the NYCLU, I went to the Innocence Project, which is a nationwide organization focusing on criminal legal reform and reducing the likelihood that criminal defendants are wrongfully convicted. I was a lobbyist for the Innocence Project leading state legislative campaigns across the country in some very challenging political environments. As you can imagine, working on criminal legal reform in places like Indiana or West Virginia or Missouri there were more losses than wins, but it was still an incredibly powerful and eye-opening experience.

I came to the ACLU of New Jersey as its executive director in 2017 and since then we've more than doubled in size. It was an incredibly significant time for the organization and for millions of Americans. I started in the first year of the first Trump administration. Then there was the summer that George Floyd was murdered and the racial reckoning that happened in our country. Then there was COVID and the fall of Roe v. Wade, another sort of chaotic election season, and now the second Trump administration and everything that has and will continue to come out of that. All this to say that in my time at ACLU-NJ we’ve never had a “normal” moment so to speak, but I’m grateful for the mantle that’s been thrust upon me. I do feel a deep sense of pride and purpose in my role and our organization’s role at this moment in history.

What’s been one of your most meaningful accomplishments?

Probably prison reform in New Jersey during COVID. At the start of the pandemic, there were so many unknowns, especially since the government was figuring out how to prioritize the populations it cares for. We realized very quickly that one of the populations that the government was probably not going to prioritize were the incarcerated. Prisons weren't designed with social distancing in mind; they were designed to warehouse people in close quarters. Even in good times, diseases spread faster inside prisons than elsewhere. In the spring of 2020, New Jersey had the worst rate of COVID-related deaths in prisons in the country, and we had more deaths than the tri-state area combined.

 We filed suit challenging the state to release people who were sentenced to a term in county jail, those individuals who were inside for less than a year and were convicted of nonviolent or small-time offenses.   We entered into a consent agreement with the Attorney General's office and the prosecutors’ offices, leading to the  release of about 700 people from jail, within a week.  Based on that momentum we worked with the Governor's office to create a pathway for release for people who are a certain age or have pre-existing conditions. That executive order led to the release of a couple hundred people. 

We also wrote legislation called the Public Health Emergency Credit, which recognized that people weren't sent to prison with the understanding that they would have no access to services, lawyers, or medical care during a public health emergency, and allowed prisoners set to be released within a year to get eight months taken off their sentence. It led to hundreds of people being released every single month and we were able to get to a 40% reduction of our prison population.

It was a huge success. New Jersey now has one of the lowest rates of incarceration in the country while crime across every major category has been trending downward and recidivism rates are either steady or decreasing. It took all of our tools to be able to get there. We told stories of incarcerated people who were dead or dying, using the voices of their loved ones. We had to get them to relive some of the worst moments of their lives, and they did that willingly for us, so that nobody else would have to face losing their child to COVID while they were incarcerated. It was a powerful moment, and perhaps one of the high points of my career because we saved lives and made sure people were safe.

From your experience at the Innocence Project, what are the main causes of wrongful convictions?

There are so many different ways in which people get wrongfully convicted and caught up in the system. Specifically, flawed eyewitness testimony is a big one. It is, in fact, one of the weakest pieces of evidence. Our memory is not what we think it is, and a huge percentage of wrongful convictions are the result of flawed eyewitness identifications. Eyewitness identification is also rife with racial bias. For instance, people have a harder time identifying features in a different race. There are other things too. Eyewitness testimony, false confessions, racial biases, prosecutor and police misconduct, and just the way the criminal legal system is stacked to close a case rather than getting it right—so much of it is systemic.

If you’ve been convicted there is no automatic right to challenge that conviction outside of the judicial appeals process, which is incredibly limiting in many ways. So the Innocence Project also works in the field of post-conviction relief, but there’s no guarantee that a prosecutor turns over exculpatory evidence even if they have it. Even if there’s DNA evidence sitting somewhere, the prosecutor isn’t forced to turn it over until a court tells them to, and even just getting to that stage could take years.

What corporate behaviors do you hope will evolve to support civil liberties?

Corporations have always been sort of risk averse, and the bottom line is the profit motive of corporate entities. But they've also engaged in corporate social responsibility, responsible sourcing, human rights advocacy, and done a lot of good for the world. I think there is an increasing fear right now preventing corporations from aligning themselves with certain causes. It's not just that politics have become more polarized, it’s all issues that I work on a daily basis becoming more and more politicized. It's harder to get the private sector to want to be a part of that work.

I wish that we had more courage in the private sector to do good and not just cower. I think it's important for us to get to a place where corporations and law firms aren't so easily influenced by a president or an administration acting beyond the rule of law. I hope that things evolve and shift, including providing pro bono legal work, donating to nonprofit causes, and partnering with organizations on social justice. A lot of organizations rely on corporate donations to fund the really vital work they’re doing to advance the cause of civil rights, and I hope that corporations don't abandon them.

What emerging technologies concern you the most?

There are certainly benefits to emerging technologies like AI, but there also need to be guardrails on the way it’s utilized. More specifically, I'm thinking about it from the perspective of government decision making. We've learned that the State of New Jersey uses algorithms for different things, including to decide whether someone is eligible for public benefits. So for instance, there's an algorithm to decide whether somebody is at risk of domestic violence, which unlocks certain benefits. There's an algorithm to decide whether or not somebody gets Medicaid coverage. The rationale is that automating these things promotes efficiency, but because of where AI currently is, they can also lead to some absurd results. We've represented clients who have lost coverage or have been unable to get certain benefits even though they're eligible under the law because there's no longer a human to do quality assurance to make sure that they're getting the services that they need.

Another thing is how much surveillance there is and how we’ve kind of accepted it as a way of life now. Most states now have automated license plate readers, so the government is constantly monitoring you if you drive a car. Facial recognition technology is also being utilized by law enforcement all across the country. I bring up these examples because they lead to a lot of false positives along the lines of a lot of the issues and biases that exist in things like eyewitness identification—we've been involved in litigation where there've been false arrests as a result of flawed facial recognition. There have to be guardrails, including who has access to these technologies on the government side. How long are we holding on to individual data? What happens to that data after it's no longer needed? Do we destroy it? Who is it being shared with? What does that mean for people in New Jersey and elsewhere and what are the actual costs and the human costs of implementing some of these things?

Any final advice for law students?

We may all have a transformational vision for the world that we want to see, but change is incremental. I often tell my team and our interns that we need to make sure that incremental change is in service of that transformational change that we want to see, rather than getting too committed to the perfect 100% version of the world we’re currently not seeing. We're working towards that slowly, and so often when we define what a win looks like for our organization, we have to address the harms that are being inflicted on people today. It’s important to go at the pace of change while having a north star. Not everything has to be adversarial: sometimes it’s more important to know when to fight and when to talk. 

One of the greatest strengths that we've brought to our state is that we've had simultaneously an adversarial and a collaborative relationship with our government. We sue the government, but at the same time, when the Attorney General or the Governor needs advice on a civil rights issue, we’re the first people they call. We help them think through legislation. We make sure the voices of the communities we serve are being heard. There have been moments where we've avoided litigation as a result of these conversations. We’ve had some real civil rights victories in New Jersey because we’re able to hold the state accountable while helping them figure out how to advance the civil rights of its citizens. All of these interactions are part of those incremental changes that go to transformational change. 

The last thing I'll say is also the most important thing I tell our team: we have to be honest brokers to every audience. We can’t say one thing to the community and then a different thing behind closed doors to lawmakers. We have a consistent message across every community we interact with, and that’s important because it gives us credibility. We tell the truth even when it’s hard. These are some of the things we live by at the ACLU, and I hope it’s something law students carry with them as they enter the legal profession. 

This interview has been edited for clarity by Michaela Hwang, a 2L student at Fordham University School of Law.