Before she was an award-winning writer and professor at the University of San Francisco School of Law, Lara Bazelon spent seven years working as a federal public defender in Los Angeles.

The post gave her a chance to help exonerate a man named Kash Register, who was wrongfully convicted of murder in 1979. After he was finally set free in 2013, Bazelon began researching the practice of "restorative justice," which brings together exonerees, crime victims and others affected by wrongful convictions in an effort to address harm and enable healing.

In October, her resulting book "Rectify: The Power of Restorative Justice After Wrongful Conviction" hit bookshelves. In it, Bazelon draws on her experience as a public defender and former director of the Loyola Law School Project for the Innocent to analyze restorative justice and its potential for helping heal the trauma that wrongful convictions create.

Last month, Bazelon chatted with Law360 about the concept, how it has been implemented before and what barriers are preventing its implementation going forward.

How do you define restorative justice?

The criminal justice system has really focused on blame and punishment. Restorative justice is fundamentally different: it focuses on the harm that was caused, the needs of the people who were harmed, and how the people who inflicted the harm can go some way toward meeting those needs.

It seems to me that that's a way of looking at crime and punishment that often leads to better outcomes for the people who are responsible for committing harms and also for the people who are victimized.

What does it look like in practice?

The best example of how the criminal justice system can implement it is this case I write about in my book. Thomas Haynesworth, an African-American man, was convicted of raping three white women in three separate incidents during the 1980s.

His lawyer was able to uncover DNA evidence that proved someone else committed one of the rapes. And then his lawyer approached the attorney general for Virginia, Ken Cuccinelli, to see what he could do to convince the DA to let go of the other two convictions, where DNA evidence had been destroyed.

Traditionally, the AG would have stuck by the convictions because there was no DNA and the victims had not recanted. Instead, he looked into the case and convinced himself that Thomas was innocent and that there was actually a serial rapist who had done these crimes and a dozen others. He then advocated forcefully in court for Thomas's exoneration, but he also went a step further than that with several important and restorative actions.

First Cuccinelli had a meeting with Thomas where he personally apologized on behalf of the state. And then he pushed very hard to get Thomas out on parole before the exoneration. Once that happened, he hired him to work in the attorney general's office, even though Thomas was still a convicted sex offender.

It was his way of saying, not only that he believed in Thomas's innocence, but also that he believed that it was his responsibility to do everything he could to support him and get him back on his feet.

How can restorative justice involve a victim?

In Thomas' case, the victim in the case with DNA was this woman Janet Burke. She went through just a horrible experience in which she was brutally raped by a stranger at knifepoint in the church where she worked.

Afterwards she did the right thing in her mind: she followed the instructions of the police. She made an identification. She was positive it was Thomas.

And then 25 years later, detectives show up at her house unannounced to tell her that the DNA results pointed to this other person and that there was not even a 1 in 6.5 billion chance that it was anybody other than this man, Leon Davis Junior, who she had never heard of.

I think from Janet's perspective, she was feeling multiple layers of trauma.

Interestingly, the first sort of real help that she got was from Thomas' lawyer, who reached out to her and talked to her about how mistaken identifications are made, particularly cross-racial identifications and how this was a good faith mistake.

But she still was really traumatized. And then several years later after Thomas was exonerated, the lawyer, Shawn Armbrust, brought Janet and Thomas together to meet each other. And that, I think, was this watershed moment, particularly for Janet because she got to come face to face with Thomas and share with him how horribly she felt. And that was important for her. It was also important for her to see how well he was doing and what a strong person he was.

They connected in this really profound way that continues to this day. They are in very close touch with each other.

What kind of restorative justice is available for exonerees?

One thing is that they really do want an apology. It's important to them to get that from the state. And they don't always get it.

And the other important component is them being financially compensated. When they get out, they have nothing. Sometimes family members have died or moved away. They're estranged because they'd been locked away for so long, they haven't worked for decades and it's very hard to get employment and get back on their feet.

In some states they don't get any money at all. Or if they want to get any, they have to sue, which is very arduous.

A third critical component for some exonorees is meeting the people on the other side. They want as much information as they can possibly get, and that's something that the victim's side can provide to them that they didn't have before.

Why do you think some DAs — you've called them "innocence deniers" — fight claims of wrongful convictions? How does state opposition affect restorative justice?

Innocence deniers are, to me, the antithesis of restorative justice practitioners. They're prosecutors who believe in spite of all evidence to the contrary that a wrongfully convicted person is in fact guilty. And they enforce that belief by fighting tooth and nail to preserve these wrongful convictions.

I think part of it is psychological: nobody wants to admit to such a horrible mistake. And also it's potentially professionally damaging to admit to a mistake like that because you worry if you're running for reelection, that voters think, "if he messed up this case, how many other cases has he messed up?" You might worry, "isn't this antithetical to my tough on crime message of locking people up when I'm letting people out?"

But the message needs to be "what I'm doing is bold and courageous." Acknowledging a mistake and doing what you can to correct it, that is ultimately your mission as a prosecutor. It's to be a minister of justice and vindicate the truth.

All Access is a series of discussions with leaders in the access to justice field. Questions and answers have been edited for length and clarity.

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