As the director of policy, Walter Katz leads the Innocence Project’s policy department, which works with policymakers and partner organizations to develop and drive advocacy efforts at the federal and state levels to ensure that the criminal legal system is equitable, accurate and reliable, and that law, policy, and practice do not compromise the quality of justice and lead to the conviction of innocent people. Walter is a former public defender who has focused most of his career on improving the accountability of the criminal justice system and has held leadership roles in police oversight, local government, and philanthropy. Throughout his career, he has come back to righting and preventing wrongful convictions from post-conviction litigation related to the LAPD Rampart CRASH scandal to developing risk management protocols while with the City of Chicago. His advocacy leadership helped lead to the passage of police accountability legislation, such as decertification laws and traffic stop data collection requirements, in states across the country. Walter was a 2020 Open Society Foundation Leadership in Government Fellow, his legal scholarship has appeared in the Harvard Law Review Forum and the SMU Law Review. He has written about the intersection of racial, criminal, and economic justice in the Los Angeles Review of Books and for the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis.