LEADERSHIP
Executive Leadership, Directors & Advisors
The Justice Restoration Foundation is guided by executive leadership, a board of directors, advisors, and team leads united by a shared commitment to federal procedural reform.
Executive Leadership
Stephen Keller
Chief Executive Officer · Co-Founder
Stephen is an entrepreneur and market-builder with more than three decades of experience in finance, insurance, and regulated markets. He founded Kelco and helped create the modern life-settlement industry, building it toward a projected $13 billion market, co-founding its first trade association, and helping author regulations that still govern the field today. As Chief Executive Officer, he is the Foundation's primary public voice, carrying its work to media, podcasts, conference stages, and the policymakers and supporters the mission depends on. His perspective is also personal: having built a market and then faced a federal prosecution that cost him nine years, he tells that story in his memoir, Pay to Play — the argument that led to this Foundation. He brings to its public face a credibility earned on both sides of the American economy.
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Lucky Steve Ott, Jr.
Executive VP & COO - Co-Founder
Lucky is an operator and entrepreneur who spent two decades building companies, from his family's Sonic Drive-In business to Boerne Drug Company, which he grew from a single store into a technology-enabled pharmacy group delivering care outside the PBM system, until retroactive clawbacks closed it in 2019. As Executive Vice President and COO, he co-founded the Foundation and runs it day to day — its operations, coalition, research, and governance. His perspective is also personal: indicted in 2022 in a Georgia district he had never set foot in, he declined every plea offer and won a judgment of acquittal at trial in 2025, with the government's appeal now pending — a case that cost him his companies, his savings, and his parents' retirement. Today, he owns OtterBooks and brings an operator’s discipline to the Foundation.
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Stuart Anderson
VP of Research, Education & Programs
Stuart is a J.D.-trained policy, research, and business professional with more than two decades across legal analysis, contract negotiation, corporate governance, and executive leadership. At the Foundation, he leads legal research and compliance, drives grant writing and development, develops the governance and research documents behind its work, and co-leads its Economic Impact Study on the costs of federal prosecutorial overreach. Stuart also carries the Foundation's work to universities, podcasts, and civic and professional audiences, building partnerships with allied groups and policymakers advancing federal reform. His perspective is also personal: having practiced law and later encountered the justice system from within, he brings firsthand insight to the work. Across these roles, he holds the Foundation to a standard of verified claims and transparency.
READ FULL BIOBoard of Directors
Dr. Michael Villarroel, D.O.
Director · U.S. Navy Commander · Bronze Star
Dr. Michael Villarroel, D.O., is a combat-decorated U.S. Navy Commander and physician with nearly nineteen years of service, including a posting supporting Naval Special Warfare. A specialist in family and internal medicine, he was awarded the Bronze Star for his service as a Navy doctor in Iraq. As a director of the Foundation, he brings clinical and professional perspective to its research and public education on what federal prosecution does to licensed professionals — a population that can lose a license, a practice, and a career on a timeline disconnected from any adjudication, and rarely gets any of it back.
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Dr. Ron Elfenbein
Director · Emergency Physician, Johns Hopkins-trained
Dr. Ron Elfenbein is a Johns Hopkins-trained emergency physician and medical director with a record of building healthcare delivery at scale. During the COVID-19 pandemic he stood up one of Maryland's largest testing and treatment networks at emergency speed — treating well over 300,000 patients in partnership with federal and state government, and earning recognition from the Maryland governor, the state legislature, and the state medical society. That work was procurement, staffing, and coordination under crisis conditions as much as it was medicine. As a director of the Foundation, he brings clinical credibility and its deepest relationships across the physician and medical-society community to the work of reform.
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Paul Giguere
Director · Nonprofit Governance & Compliance Advisor
Paul Giguere is a nonprofit executive with more than twenty-five years of leadership across organizations accountable to boards, donors, and the public. He built that career as a YMCA branch and association executive across Texas, Arizona, and California, and today advises mission-driven organizations through his own firm. As a director of the Foundation, he architected its three-arm structure — separating charitable, advocacy, and commercial work behind a financial firewall — and built the governance framework its board operates under: the reason an organization asking the public to fund a fight about accountability can withstand a hard look at its own books.
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Mark Sorensen
Co-founder · Business, Commercial & Partnerships
Mark spent 25 years building SyMed Inc., a Medicare-enrolled durable-medical-equipment company. Charged in 2019 with Anti-Kickback Statute violations — though never with health-care fraud — he was convicted at a 2023 trial built largely on cooperators' testimony and sentenced to 42 months. On April 14, 2025, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit found the evidence legally insufficient, a precedent-setting decision; after DOJ declined further review, the court entered his acquittal on June 12, 2025, ending a nearly six-year ordeal. His case is now a cornerstone precedent in the Foundation's research, and he leads its business, commercial, and partnership efforts.
Freya Pearson
Advisor · Founder, Finality Is Not Justice
Freya is an independent researcher, analyst, author, and justice-impacted scholar whose work examines constitutional enforcement, institutional accountability, and the gap between formal rules and real-world outcomes. Drawing on record review, investigative research, structural analysis, and personal experience, she studies how institutional decisions are made and how they affect the people subject to them. Freya is the author of Reclaiming the Sixth Amendment and has a background in law, paralegal studies, criminal justice, mediation, and arbitration.
Angela McArdle
Advisor · Former Chair of the Libertarian National Committee
Angela is the former Chair of the Libertarian National Committee (2022–2025) and the current Chair of the national Mises Caucus. A co-founder of Rage Against The War Machine and Rescue The Republic, she is also a two-time congressional candidate for California's 34th District.\n\nAngela is widely recognized for her pivotal role in securing the release of Ross Ulbricht. Notably, she extended a controversial invite to Pres. Donald Trump to speak at the 2024 Libertarian National Convention, where he committed to pardoning Ulbricht—a promise fulfilled immediately following his election. Following Ulbricht's freedom, she has dedicated herself to championing the release of other crypto prisoners, like Ian Freeman and Samourai Wallet developer Keonne Rodriguez.
Team Leads
JP Maroney
Vice President of Marketing & Communications
JP is an entrepreneur, author, and media producer with more than thirty years across publishing, media, advertising, software, and e-commerce. The founder and CEO of Marocom Group, he has built and advised companies as a strategist and fractional chief marketing officer, and has authored numerous books on business growth and marketing. As Vice President of Marketing and Communications, he leads the Foundation's marketing, brand, and communications, and is building Justice Impact — a video-first media and podcast network, including the "Stories of Injustice" series, that carries first-person accounts to the public. He brings the Foundation a professional media operation of a kind its cause has rarely had behind it.
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Dionne Hutton
Director of Technology & Data
Dionne is a senior software and data engineer with more than two decades of experience across defense and commercial enterprise systems, and a former U.S. Army Signal Officer. Johns Hopkins-trained, with graduate and undergraduate degrees spanning computer science, systems management, and journalism, she has designed and led complex data systems at scale. As Director of Technology and Data, she owns the Foundation's data architecture and directs the methodology behind its Economic Impact Study, defining the classification standards behind every figure it publishes. Because the person who designed the methodology also runs the systems that collect the data, the Foundation's research is built to be checked rather than simply believed.
READ FULL BIOFounding Members
Stephen Keller · Lucky Ott · Stuart Anderson · JP Maroney · Dionne Hutton · Mark Sorensen
Join Our Team
We are always looking for passionate advocates, researchers, volunteers, and partners. If you want to contribute your skills to the movement, we would love to hear from you.