Derecka Purnell is a human rights lawyer, scholar, and author of Becoming Abolitionists: Police, Protests, and the Pursuit of Freedom. Purnell received her JD from Harvard Law School, her BA from the University of Missouri- Kansas City, and studied public policy and economics at the University of California- Berkeley as a Public Policy and International Affairs Law Fellow. Her writing has been published widely, including in The Oxford Handbook of Race and Law in the United States (forthcoming), The Harvard Journal of African American Policy, The New York Times, The Atlantic, The New York Magazine, Boston Review, Teen Vogue, and Harper's Bazaar. Purnell has lectured, studied, and strategized around social movements across the United States, The Netherlands, Belgium, South Africa, the United Kingdom, and Australia. In 2022, she was selected as a Freedom Scholar by the Marguerite Casey Foundation.

She is currently a Scholar-in-Residence at Columbia Law School and a columnist at The Guardian.