Alexandra Harrington

Alexandra Harrington directs the Criminal Justice Advocacy Clinic and the Innocence and Justice Project at the School of Law. Through the clinic, student attorneys represent incarcerated individuals in second-look proceedings like resentencing, parole, and clemency, and advocate for criminal system reforms in New York State. Before coming to Buffalo, Harrington was a Senior Liman Fellow in Residence at the Liman Center at Yale Law School. Previously, she was a Deputy Assistant Public Defender with the Connecticut Division of Public Defender Services in the Innocence Project/Post-Conviction Unit. Harrington helped to shape and coordinate the Division’s representation of individuals who were sentenced as juveniles in adult court to lengthy prison terms.

Harrington’s research explores the aims of sentencing and how these goals influence opportunities for back-end sentence review or second looks. She has written about how recent Supreme Court decisions regarding sentences for people who were children at the time of the crime inform our understanding of parole’s function, about the role that prosecutors play in realizing or frustrating resentencing reforms, about the ways in which focus on the underlying record of the crime can contravene the purpose of second looks, and about racial disparities in New York’s felony murder law. Her work has been published in the Cornell Law Review, the Iowa Law Review, and the Journal of Criminal Law & Criminology.

Harrington graduated in 2014 from Yale Law School. She holds a B.A. from Vanderbilt University. She grew up in Buffalo, and she is thrilled to be working in her hometown.