If Twyla Carter, ’04, ’07 JD shows up in your courtroom, something’s wrong. “We’re the ACLU,” she says. “We don’t make social visits. If we’re in your jurisdiction, it’s likely you’re violating someone’s rights.”

The Seattle University alumna now serves as senior staff attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union’s Criminal Law Reform Project, based in New York City. She parlayed a decade of on-the-ground public defense work in King County into a career making systemic change around the country.

Carter moved to the ACLU in 2017 after the 2016 election, which spurred a flood of donations to the country’s preeminent civil rights organization. New funding meant new attorney positions.

Already, she and her colleagues have won cases and achieved significant reform through settlements in the areas of cash bail reform and right to counsel in South Carolina, Georgia, North Carolina, Texas and Michigan, with a case pending in Oklahoma. She won a temporary injunction in Galveston County, Texas, for example, where defendants now have attorneys present at bail hearings, thanks to the ACLU.

Carter can’t remember a time when she wasn’t aware of racism and her desire to create a more equitable system for people who suffer its effects. Throughout her undergraduate years studying criminal justice and at Seattle University’s School of Law, she worked at a nonprofit that helped people find housing after their release from prison.

Her clients are familiar to her—poor people, people of color and those without the resources and support systems necessary to keep them out of the court system. Carter’s years as a public defender proved essential in her work with the ACLU.  

“I’m talking to folks who are arguably at the lowest point in their lives and telling them that I am not their attorney on their criminal case but instead want them to help me change the system,” she says. Those clients then become the face of the ACLU’s class-action litigation.

Editor’s Note: Since this article’s publication, Carter has accepted a position as national policy director at The Bail Project.