For 25 years, I have worked inside the legal institutions where decisions are made that can alter the course of a person's life.

I have been a prosecutor, a public defender, a DHS trial attorney, an immigration judge, and a civil liberties advocate. I have stood on every side of the courtroom. I have represented the government and challenged it. I have decided cases from the bench and argued them from counsel's table.

Over time, I became increasingly focused on a single question:

What happens to conscience inside systems of power?

Not as an abstraction, but as a lived experience.

Throughout my career, I have watched people confront difficult choices between principle, loyalty, ambition, fear, duty, and truth. I have also watched individuals refuse to compromise what they believed was right, often at significant personal cost. Again and again, I found that the most important part of those stories rarely appeared in the official record.

Witness is an attempt to preserve it.

Witness is a long-form interview podcast exploring conscience, power, and public life through conversations with lawyers, journalists, scholars, doctors, public servants, activists, religious leaders, and people whose lives have been shaped by institutional conflict and moral decision-making under pressure.

These conversations are not debates. They are not commentary. They are testimony: careful accounts of what people saw, what they chose, what it cost them, and what they learned.

There is a word in Arabic — shahid — that means witness. Not simply someone who sees events unfold, but someone who bears truthful presence to them. Someone who refuses erasure.

That is the spirit of this project.

I am a former institutional insider trying to understand how conscience survives systems of power.

You are the judge of whether the truth has been preserved.

Power leaves archives. Witnesses leave history.