Sarah Kunstler

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Sarah Kunstler (b. 1976) is a documentary filmmaker and lawyer. Kunstler graduated from Yale University with a BA in Photography in 1998, and from Columbia Law School with a JD in 2004.

Kunstler is the junior partner in Fink & Kunstler, a civil rights and criminal defense firm specializing in federal criminal defense for indigent defendants in the Southern District of New York. She is a member of the Executive Committee of the New York City chapter of the National Lawyers Guild. Along with attorneys Elizabeth M. Fink and Jesse Berman, Kunstler represented Osama Awadallah, a Palestinian college student studying in the United States, who was arrested as a material witness in the days following the September 11, 2001 attacks and prosecuted for alleged perjury before the grand jury investigating the terrorist attacks. Awadallah was acquitted in November 2006.

Together with her sister, Emily Kunstler, she is a co-founder and director of Off Center Media, a company that produces documentaries exposing injustices in the criminal justice system. At Off Center Media, Sarah has produced and directed a number of short documentaries, including Tulia, Texas: Scenes from the Drug War (2003), which won Best Documentary Short at the Woodstock Film Festival (she was instrumental in winning exoneration for 35 wrongfully-convicted people in the small town of Tulia, Texas); and Getting Through to the President (2004), which has aired on the Sundance Channel, Current TV, and Channel Thirteen/WNET.

Kunstler is the daughter of left-wing radical lawyers William Kunstler and Margaret Ratner Kunstler, and is currently producing a documentary about her father entitled Disturbing the Universe: Radical Lawyer William Kunstler.

[edit] Books

  • The Emerging Police State, edited by Sarah Kunstler

[edit] Articles

[edit] External links