Emily Galvin Almanza is the Co-Founder and Executive Director of Partners for Justice, a nonprofit creating a new collaborative model designed to empower public defenders nationwide which has eliminated nearly 9,000 years of potential incarceration since 2018. Prior to co-founding PFJ, Emily fought for clients inside the LA County Public Defender, Santa Clara County Public Defender, Bronx Defenders, and the Stanford Three Strikes Project. She believes that everyone is entitled not just to equal justice, but to equal mercy.

Emily is a graduate of Harvard University and Stanford Law School, where she earned the Deborah Rhode Prize for her work in the public interest. After her first year as a public defender, she clerked for the Honorable Thelton Henderson of the United States District Court for the Northern District of California. She then returned to the Stanford Three Strikes Project, where she was one of the first attorneys bringing post-reform petitions for relief on behalf of individuals sentenced to life in prison under California’s Three Strikes law. In 2017, Emily was honored as one of the American Bar Association’s Top 40 Young Lawyers. Her writing has appeared in The Atlantic, The Washington Post, Newsweek, Teen Vogue, and
TIME. Her most recent book, The Price of Mercy, was published by Crown in February of 2026 and details the intricacies of the criminal court system, as well as strong, data-based interventions and solutions currently underway around the nation. She is also looking forward to bringing ideas about justice, mercy, due process, and the presumption of innocence to a new audience, with middle-grade novel Andromeda Diaz and the Reasonable Doubt, to be published by Ten Speed Press in 2026.