A survivor of violent crime as a young woman, Martina was ultimately incarcerated in federal prison in Washington and then spent years on federal probation.
This left her with a deeply felt sense of the dehumanizing and exploitative approach to addressing harm in prison. Over the past two decades, she has represented both lifers on parole hearings and crime survivors advocating for restorative responses to harms they have experienced; supported class actions protecting the rights of people in prisons; led grassroots coalitions addressing life and long-term sentences, reentry, and meaningful community-based resources for survivors; and facilitated and mentored community-based restorative justice efforts.
As a 2017 Soros Justice Advocacy Fellow, Martina co-founded Collective Justice, an organization committed to shrinking the carceral system and seeding community-based healing. She holds a law degree from the University of Washington School of Law, where she was a William H. Gates Public Service Law Scholar and a Human Rights Fellow at the Rethinking Punishment Project.
