Karen McKinney is a career prosecutor and former public defender who rose to the highest ranks of the gang unit in Orange County, California. She is also a screenwriter and producer who has developed a pilot script with Law & Orderproducer Robert Nathan and another with producer partner Gary Hart, former head of Paramount TV. A graduate of the University of Pennsylvania and the Charles Widger School of Law at Villanova University, Karen lives with her husband and two children in Orange County, California, where she continues to work in the district attorney’s office.

Born to Holocaust survivors and trained in the black-and-white world of law, veteran gang prosecutor Karen McKinney believed in justice, punishment, and moral certainty—so when she was asked to oppose the parole of a man she sent away for life twenty years earlier, she expected to confirm his ongoing danger. Instead, she was confronted with something she had never encountered: true transformation.

Misjudged chronicles McKinney’s radical rethinking of justice through her evolving friendship with Joseph Herrera—a man she once believed to be irredeemable. Woven with personal reckonings, family trauma, and courtroom tension, this powerful memoir of healing and self-discovery reveals how the silent burdens of inherited trauma, family shame, and generational judgment shaped McKinney’s worldview—and how, through great effort, she began to break free and learned that the stories that shape us don’t have to define us. For anyone who has ever felt stuck, spiritually hungry, or disconnected from their true self, Misjudged is a compelling and hope-filled exploration of what it means to understand another person’s capacity for change and how to drop our fear-forged narratives in order to find true connection and humanity in this polarized world.