Partner Profiles
Lindsay Herf
Leading the Effort to Help Arizonans Reclaim Their Future
Lindsay Herf is the Executive Director for the Arizona Justice Project (AJP), the legal aid provider that leads the Reclaim Your Future campaign. Before the expungement campaign, Lindsay’s legal work focused primarily on post-conviction litigation in state and federal court and representing clients who appear before the Arizona Board of Executive Clemency.
Lindsay and the Reclaim Your Future campaign began working to provide expungement services shortly after the 2020 passage of Prop 207, which legalized the adult recreational use of marijuana in Arizona and created a legal pathway for potentially hundreds of thousands of people to expunge their past marijuana-related arrests and/or convictions.
“AJP took the lead in organizing a coalition of nonprofits and legal aid providers across the state, which is now known as the Reclaim Your Future campaign,” Lindsay said.
AJP brought together Community Legal Services and Arizona State University’s Post Conviction Clinic from the Phoenix area, along with DNA Peoples Legal Services in Flagstaff, and the University of Arizona Civil Rights Restoration Clinic, Southern Arizona Legal Aid, and Just Communities Arizona–all from Tucson–to perform outreach and provide legal aid to help people expunge their past charges.
Lindsay and AJP seek to exonerate people who have been wrongfully convicted and correct cases of manifest injustice. To date, Lindsay and AJP have helped nearly four-dozen people get out of prison because of a wrongful conviction or unjust sentencing.
“When AJP clients are released from prison, they face barriers with background checks, which often impact their ability to obtain adequate housing and employment,” Lindsay said. “Expungement allows for a sort-of clean slate–sealing a criminal record for something that is no longer a crime–which, in turn, helps to remove some of the barriers for impacted individuals.”
The Reclaim Your Future expungement campaign is vital to the community because there is a need for the public to understand the law and the availability of free expungement resources, like Reclaim Your Future’s team of qualified attorneys.
You can ask Reclaim Your Future attorneys questions about expungement at the next clinic on Tuesday, June 11, from 4 p.m. to 7 p.m. at Chicanos Por La Causa, 8619 S. Avenida Del Yaqui, in Guadalupe.
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