Dana Mulhauser

Dana Mulhauser is civil rights prosecutor and litigator. She spent a dozen years at the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice, where she specialized in prosecuting hate crimes, police excessive force, and human trafficking cases. She then created two units within state and local level government to investigate and prosecute law-enforcement misconduct and to review wrongful convictions. She is currently deputy director of affirmative litigation at Everytown Law, the legal arm of Everytown for Gun Safety.

While at the Department of Justice, she brought one of the largest labor trafficking cases in history, involving Guatemalan teenagers being forced to work at chicken farms in Ohio. She prosecuted multiple cases involving racially and religiously motivated violence, including the firebombing of a Somali restaurant in North Dakota and a case in which a black man was beaten with a broom “in the name of the White Race.” She prosecuted the first-ever excessive force claims in Mississippi’s largest state prison and a case about the repeated, ritual beatings of inmates at the Muskogee County Jail. Her civil cases included lawsuits against a housing provider that hung a noose and otherwise discriminated against Black residents, a homeowners’ association that banned wheelchair ramps, a redlining mortgage lender, and a town that denied municipal services to non-churchgoing residents. She also worked briefly as a domestic-violence prosecutor at the D.C. U.S. Attorney’s Office.

From 2019 to 2021, she was the founding chief of the Conviction and Incident Review Unit at the St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office. The unit investigates and prosecutes all cases involving misconduct by public officials, including police shootings and other excessive uses of force. It brought some of the first excessive force cases and police shooting cases in St. Louis County in decades. The unit also created a conviction review process to examine prior convictions for claims of innocence or official misconduct.

From 2021-2024, she founded and led the Independent Investigations Division at the Maryland Attorney General’s Office. The unit was created by statute in 2021 as part of a package of police reforms in the wake of the murder of George Floyd. It is charged with overseeing the investigation and prosecution of all police-involved fatalities in the state of Maryland.

She clerked for the Hon. Michael W. McConnell on the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals. Before being a lawyer, she was a journalist, and she continues to write newspaper, magazine, and law-review articles about legal issues. She is a graduate of Harvard Law School and Stanford University.