Brittany K. Barnett ’11

A visionary legal mind, Brittany K. Barnett ’11 seeks criminal justice reform with compassion.

Born in Dallas, Barnett graduated from Commerce High School before attending The University of Texas at Arlington, completing her Bachelor of Business Administration in accounting in 2005 and her Master of Science in accounting in 2006. She gained corporate experience as an audit associate at PricewaterhouseCoopers in Dallas before enrolling at SMU Dedman School of Law, where she completed her Juris Doctor in 2011. During her time at SMU, she served as the regional director of the Black Law Students Association and completed a judicial externship with Judge Renee Toliver, a federal judge for the Northern District of Texas.

Barnett’s mother’s incarceration while Barnett was applying to SMU sparked a lifelong calling to criminal justice reform that continues to this day. As a corporate attorney, Barnett was committed to pro bono representation of clients in federal prison serving excessive sentences under federal drug laws. Her work resulted in executive presidential clemency for a number of clients during both the Obama and Trump administrations.

She is the author of A Knock at Midnight: A Story of Hope, Justice, and Freedom, a memoir that was selected as an NAACP Image Award nominee and a Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalist.

Barnett has founded and co-founded multiple nonprofits, including Manifest Freedom, which supports entrepreneurship of the formerly incarcerated; the Buried Alive Project, which works to eliminate life without parole sentences under federal drug laws; and Girls Embracing Mothers (GEM), which empowers girls with mothers in prison to break the cycle of incarceration.

Her pioneering work has earned her interviews and guest slots on Good Morning America, CBS, NBC, ABC News, NPR’s Fresh Air, PBS NewsHour and Essence. She has been quoted in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Rolling Stone, Huffington Post, The Hill, The Atlantic, The Dallas Morning News, D Magazine and others.

In 2022, Barnett gave a TED Talk on “the creativity, innovation and ingenuity languishing in U.S. prisons.”

She served as a practitioner-in-residence for SMU’s Deason Criminal Justice Reform Center from 2017 to 2018.

Her many accolades include being a Good Works Under 40 Top 5 finalist by The Dallas Foundation and an Outstanding Young Lawyer of Dallas by the Dallas Association of Young Lawyers, both in 2013; a National Outstanding Young Lawyer finalist by the American Bar Association (YLD) in 2014; a Young Leader Award winner by the Dallas Women’s Foundation in 2016; and a Nonprofit Leader Award winner by the Legal Aid of Northwest Texas in 2017.

Barnett is the daughter of Evelyn Fulbright and Leland K. Barnett. She credits her parents and grandparents with instilling in her a mindset of accomplishment, even amid hardships. “She encouraged me to stay strong and keep my eyes on my goals,” she says of her mother.