Marissa is a Senior Staff Attorney on the Racial Justice Team. Prior to LCCRSF, she worked on disability rights in state prisons at the Prison Law Office. In 2023, she was part of a small trial team that won a historic order imposing $112 million in contempt fines against the California Department of Corrections for failing to provide life-saving mental health care to incarcerated people with mental illnesses. 

Marissa was formerly a clinical instructor in Georgetown Law’s Civil Rights Clinic, where she oversaw litigation in state and federal courts on a variety of issues including police misconduct, state-sanctioned surveillance of Black Lives Matter organizers and D.C. public housing residents, inhumane medical treatment by private prison contractors, and race-based employment discrimination. Marissa also taught a seminar on movement lawyering, cultural competency, and trauma-informed lawyering as part of her work with the clinic. 

Before clinical teaching, Marissa was a staff attorney at Equal Justice Under Law, where she litigated class action cases challenging poverty discrimination, exploitative private probation companies, and other criminal system reform issues across the country. Marissa’s litigation helped to end the “Driver Responsibility Program” in Texas, which overwhelmingly targeted impoverished communities, and she also helped to repeal a Pennsylvania law allowing driver’s license suspensions for petty drug infractions, which targeted communities of color through stop-and-frisk practices—overall, resulting in over one million individuals becoming eligible to reinstate their driver’s licenses.  

Marissa has litigated impact cases in over a dozen federal and appellate jurisdictions, with a focus on racial justice and the carceral state. She was born in Oklahoma, raised in California, and earned her J.D. from Georgetown Law, where she founded and served as co-president of the Native American Law Students Association (NALSA) and was awarded the Dean’s Certificate for outstanding contribution to the law school community. She is licensed to practice law in California, the District of Columbia, and the Chickasaw Nation.