SEPTEMBER 07, 2022
Local entrepreneur and Dallasite Justin Magnuson today announced the launch of the Justice Reform Foundation (JRF), a nonprofit organization dedicated to helping those impacted by America’s broken criminal justice system.
Magnuson experienced the fundamental dysfunctions in the U.S. criminal justice system firsthand when he found himself wrongfully accused and unlawfully incarcerated. Magnuson ultimately spent 20 months in a county jail under false pretenses during the height of the Coronavirus pandemic.
Magnuson is a self-made entrepreneur who worked his way through undergrad at University of North Texas and grad school at Southern Methodist University. As he was pursuing his Executive MBA from UCLA and commuting between Dallas and Los Angeles, he decided to expand his business ventures into the legal cannabis industry. He partnered with producers in California already legally growing cannabis and obtained all necessary permits for the business but, unbeknownst to him, the people he’d partnered with had violated federal law by selling products across state lines.
The prosecution had no evidence to produce a guilty verdict and still, due to the abuse of bail systems, he was detained and had his life upended. However, despite the difficulty he faced, Magnuson recognizes it was still a privilege he was able to walk away at all.
The experience compelled Magnuson to do his part to help fix a broken system by launching the Justice Reform Foundation, a non-profit advocating for structural change in the criminal justice system that is destroying lives and hurting families across the nation. Magnuson wants to ensure that people with fewer resources than him have the opportunity to get their lives back on track.
To read the entire press release, click here.
