Maya Moore - WNBA Great & Social Justice Advocate
Moore founded Win with Justice in 2017 to shed light on the excessive power prosecutors have in maintaining and expanding mass incarceration
On Saturday night, the WNBA's Minnesota Lynx retired the number 23, the jersey number than belonged to Maya Moore. After helping the storied women's basketball program at the University of Connecticut to back to back championships in 2009 and 2010, Moore was drafted first overall by the Lynx in 2011. During her eight year career in Minnesota, Moore helped lead the team to four WNBA championships in 2011, 2013, 2015 and 2017, creating the first dynastic team in the young league.
Adding to her team accolades, Moore is a WNBA Season MVP, WNBA Finals MVP, 6-time WNBA All-Star, 3-time WNBA All-Star Game MVP, 7-time All-WNBA Selection, two time Olympic gold medalist (2012, 2016) and two time World Championship winner. In 2024, Moore was inducted into the Pro Basketball Hall of Fame. Sports Illustrated called Moore the "greatest winner in the history of women's basketball." Any conversation about the best women’s basketball players in the world had Maya Moore’s name mentioned in the first sentence.
After only 8 years, she announced her decision to step away from the WNBA for the 2019 season in order to shift her focus toward her “family and ministry dreams.” At just 29 years old, the four-time WNBA champion and perennial WNBA All-Star was walking away from the game in her absolute prime.
Instead, she endeavored to focus her time and effort on criminal justice reform. She'd started Win with Justice in 2017 to advocate for prosecutorial reform, and specifically turned her focus on the case of Jonathan Irons, a family friend from Jefferson City, Missouri, that the family believed to be wrongfully imprisoned for the past two decades.
In 1997, when Irons was 16 years old, he was tried and convicted as an adult, and sentenced to a 50-year prison term by an all-white jury for the burglary and shooting at the home of 38-year-old Stanley Stotler. Irons maintained his innocence while he was in prison, saying he was wrongly identified during the lineup. Though the crime was violent and involved a gun, no weapon was ever found. No blood evidence, no footprints and no fingerprints tied Irons to the crime.
After years of fighting the verdict, a Missouri judge overturned Irons' conviction in March 2020, saying there were problems with the way the case had been investigated and tried, including a fingerprint report that would've proved Irons' innocence not being turned over to his defense team. He was finally released from prison in July 2020, and Moore and Irons were married shortly after.
In 2023, Moore and Irons published a book, Love and Justice: A Story of Triumph on Two Different Courts, and the two were featured in an ESPN Films documentary, "Breakaway."
You can read more about Jonathan Irons' case on his page at the National Registry of Exonerations, who seek to provide comprehensive information on exonerations of innocent criminal defendants in order to prevent future false convictions by learning from past errors.
