Financial Destruction
Legal defense can cost a lifetime of savings. Many families emerge vindicated and bankrupt at the same time.
Justice Restoration Foundation
Restoring Lives.
Renewing Justice.
Rebuilding Trust.
When the government brings a case it cannot sustain, the damage rarely undoes itself. We build the economic case, the coalition, and the legislation to put accountability back where the harm begins.
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Credibility
A 501(c)(3) educational foundation.
Board: Stephen Keller, President · Lucky Ott, Vice President · Directors: Dr. Ron Elfenbein, Dr. Michael Villarroel, Paul Giguere.
Home of Restore the Promise — modernizing the 1997 Hyde Amendment.
The Problem
The Process Should Not Become the Punishment.
For many people, the punishment begins long before a verdict — years of investigation, public accusation, legal costs, lost income, and trauma can destroy lives even when charges are dismissed or a person is acquitted.
Reputation Damage
A headline outlives a dismissal. Public accusation follows people into careers, relationships, and community long after the case closes.
Family Fallout
Spouses, children, and parents carry the weight of an investigation they never chose. Families are too often the unseen casualties.
Legal Trauma
The fear, surveillance, and uncertainty of a long prosecution leave wounds that no verdict alone can heal.
Community Isolation
Friends fall away. Institutions distance themselves. People learn what it means to be presumed guilty in the eyes of those around them.
Loss of Faith & Stability
Health, sobriety, faith, and a sense of order can collapse under sustained pressure — and must be rebuilt deliberately.
What We Believe
Argue the system, not the verdict.
We don’t ask you to take our word that any one person is innocent. We ask a harder question: in a system where roughly 97% of convictions come by plea, and the prosecutors who cut corners are shielded from consequence, how confident can anyone be that it reliably tells guilt from innocence?
Our Work
Reform-first work with restoration at the center.
Four pillars guide the Foundation’s public education, reform, storytelling, and restoration work.
Accountability & Reform
Advancing reforms that prevent failed prosecutions and their fallout up front — beginning with Hyde Amendment reform and the larger fairness agenda around charging, venue, immunity, and remedies.
Public Education
Helping the public and policymakers understand how process harms families, businesses, reputations, and communities — and why accountability strengthens trust.
Restoration Support
For those the system has already broken: resources, referrals, practical guidance, emotional support, and community connection to help families rebuild.
Storytelling & Dignity Repair
Documenting stories with consent and care, restoring human context to people too often reduced to a headline or docket entry.
Restore the Promise
Hyde Amendment reform as public education and research.
Fewer than 15 meaningful Hyde Amendment awards have been granted in nearly 29 years, because the current “vexatious, frivolous, or bad faith” standard is nearly impossible to meet. The reform we research and educate on would replace it with a prevailing-party standard, remove the net-worth cap, set reasonable market-rate fees, and make awards mandatory.
< 15
Meaningful Hyde awards in nearly 29 years, according to the public-safe research layer currently used by the Foundation.
Economic Impact Study
What does a failed federal prosecution actually cost?
The Foundation is building a conservative, defensible economic framework that measures the cost to defendants, jobs, businesses, communities, and taxpayers.
Explore the studyFour buckets
Direct government cost · Direct defendant cost · Economic ripple · Settlement and civil tail.
Leadership & Board
Led by people who understand the system and the work of repair.
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Stephen Keller
President & Co-founder · Author of “Pay to Play”
Stephen Keller serves as President and is the author of the memoir Pay to Play. He founded Kelco at 27 and helped create the modern life-settlement industry — in 1998 introducing the first securitized bundles of life-insurance policies on the NYSE and, at its peak, capturing roughly 65% of the global market. Over his career he raised some $13 billion on Wall Street, co-founded the industry’s first association, and helped author regulations still in force. After a federal investigation, trial, and international manhunt, he was arrested by Interpol in Panama, extradited, and served nine years before rebuilding his life in South Florida, where he runs the Stephen L. Keller Foundation scholarship for Eastern Kentucky entrepreneurs. He is the Foundation’s primary public voice.
Online: stephen-keller.com
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Mark Sorensen
Co-founder · Healthcare entrepreneur
Mark Sorensen 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.
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Lucky Ott
Co-founder & Vice President · Founder of Boerne Drug
Lucky Ott is a San Antonio entrepreneur who built Boerne Drug Company into a modern, tech-enabled pharmacy. After a 2019 federal action targeted a colleague, prosecutors pressed him to incriminate that colleague; he refused to falsely confess. Charged in 2022 in the Southern District of Georgia — a district he had never set foot in — he rejected every plea offer. At trial in Statesboro in October 2025 his defense dismantled the government’s central claim, and on October 27, 2025 the court granted a motion for acquittal, finding the government failed to establish venue. He founded the Foundation to turn that ordeal into structural reform, and leads its mission, narrative, and day-to-day operations.
Get Involved
Join the coalition. Partner with us. Follow the research.
Join the coalition
We connect professionals, physicians, advocates, and families affected by federal prosecutorial overreach into one national network.
Partner with us
Medical societies, associations, counsel, and reform organizations can advance the research and public education with us.
Follow the research
Track the Economic Impact Study and Restore the Promise as findings publish and are shared with policymakers and the public.
A Storytelling & Education Initiative
The Pay to Play Project
A book and a growing public-education platform.
Pay to Play is reframed as Stephen Keller’s memoir and the “Stories of Injustice” education series — a dignified storytelling lane, not an investigative intake or lobbying page.
“Justice is not just a principle. It is a promise. And it must be kept.”
Support
Help restore what the process broke.
Donations are live. Your support funds research, public education, story documentation, and restoration resources.
Donate Now