20.
The Return
The summer after my first year of law school, I go to Rome. My head is a camera, snapping shot after shot, a pastiche of images exploding too fast. I can’t take it all in. It’s too much—the ancient city in ruins, the enormity of our world’s history, the thrum and rumble of Rome’s streets, how humble and minuscule I feel seeing the pope at the Vatican, the exquisite taste of fish seemingly plucked right out of the sea, drizzled with olive oil, salt, and simply grilled. I vow to come back.
One day, I get a surprise email. After my work on the Reynolds Wintersmith case, MiAngel and other lawyers in the office nominated me for the National Defender Investigator Association’s Investigator of the Year Award. Again, vowing not to obsess, I’ve put the thought of winning out of my mind. Or tried to. Didn’t always succeed. Now, reading this email, I find out that I’ve won.
I’m overwhelmed by the honor.
I send thank-you emails to everyone who nominated me. Then I reread the first email again, savoring every line. I can’t wait to tell my mom. And then I think I can’t wait to share the news with Joi.
Yes. Joi. We’ve kept our distance except for a few sporadic texts and emails. But I’ve thought about her, a lot, wondering if she’s thought about me a little. Returning to Chicago, I hit her up again, tell her about the award on a phone call as casually as I can, even though I’m bursting with excitement about winning. From there, we start texting more intensely. The texts became phone calls that became dates that became overnights that became weekends, and then over the holidays we became a couple. It’s destiny, I think, if you believe in such things, and I do.
* * *
—
When the second year of law school ends, Loyola offers a program in China, and Joi and I go together. Now a world traveler, I’m certain I know my way around a map and refuse to ask directions, and Joi and I get hopelessly lost. Two young Chinese students save us. I gawk at the sheer enormity of the landscape, the number of people, the culture, the epic achievement of the Great Wall.
Third year of law school starts, my fellowship at the Federal Defender Progam ends, and I go to work at Loevy & Loevy, a civil rights firm. Right after the New Year, I head abroad again, this time for three weeks in London, where I will research and start writing my law school thesis. I practically live at the Old Bailey, the Central Criminal Court of England and Wales. I spend much of my time on the balcony overlooking the gallery of the main courtroom. At first, I’m thrown off by all the barristers—lawyers—wearing white powdered wigs. As part of the course, I put one on myself. I want to say I look dignified, but when I show it to Joi, she cracks up.
I become fascinated by the differences between the British criminal justice system and ours. At one point, I’m assigned to follow a particular barrister while she works two different cases, one as a prosecutor, one as a defense attorney. As I observe her, I’m struck by how effectively she argues both sides. That’s how it works in Britain. Our system in the United States has become adversarial, emphasizing winning, not fairness. In Britain, barristers need to show balance and have empathy for both sides of the law, which we don’t do.
We put our focus and our money into one side—incarceration. The United States recently quadrupled the budget on corrections. That makes no sense. We should be putting more money into education—early childhood through high school—for kids who live in poor neighborhoods. Studies show that educational programs reduce crime. We should be investing in those programs and in teachers, not in prisons. As I discovered when I got put into segregation twice for no reason, when you build prisons, you have to fill the beds. I go back to my room and jot down notes for my thesis, which I title “An Adversarial System Robs the Justice System of Justice.”
I return from London, work on my thesis, complete my courses, and realize I’m too late to apply for a traditional clerkship. I talk to Steve Art, my supervising attorney at Loevy & Loevy. He suggests I ask Judge Williams if she’ll create a public interest fellowship for me on the condition that I find my own funding.
“Steve, I’m going to need something like twenty grand.”
“I know.”
“Where am I going to get twenty thousand dollars?”
Steve shrugs. “We’ll do a GoFundMe campaign.”
“Go Fund Jarrett for a fellowship?”
“Catchy.”
We set it up. We don’t raise twenty. We raise thirty. Judge Williams creates the fellowship, and I go to work as a law clerk, as I discover, an extremely rare position for a person of color.
* * *
—
At my law school graduation, I walk feeling a sense of accomplishment if not completion. I have finished seven years of school while working full-time. I have fallen in love. I have traveled the world. I have won awards. I have worked with prominent judges and attorneys, but I have so much more to do. I know I’m just beginning. It’s as if I have climbed a set of steep stairs, only to find a door to an unknown room facing me. Then I hear my name. I glance at my small cheering section of family and friends. I step forward, accept my law school diploma, and shake hands with the dean of the law school.
* * *
—
That summer, I begin the final leg of my journey. Passing the bar, getting a job, practicing law. Being a lawyer.
Being a lawyer.
That is who I am, in my essence, at my core.
A lawyer.
But it’s more than that.
I imagine a little kid sitting on his front porch in a neighborhood like the one I grew up in and I want to say to him, “If I made it, you can, too. Your success is not limited to becoming a ballplayer or an entertainer. You have other options. You can find other dreams.”
* * *
—
Commuting from Chicago to the Southern District of New York, I work my clerkship with the Honorable Judge Deborah Batts. One day, back in Chicago, as I sift through some paperwork in the courtroom at the Seventh Circuit, the court calls a case out of Milwaukee. The attorney steps to the lectern and introduces himself.
Rob Henak.
I jerk my head in his direction.
The attorney, a sturdy-looking man with a friendly face and a wide smile, begins arguing his case.
I have never met Rob in person, but I will never forget working with him on my habeas petition when I was in prison. I picture all the letters we exchanged, his red lines slathering the pages of my drafts so much that it seemed as if he’d dunked them into a can of red paint. He started the process of my reversal. He accepted a fee much lower than he deserved, and he helped me beyond any thanks I could give him.
The hearing ends. As Rob approaches the elevator, I catch up to him.
“Hey, Rob,” I say.
“Yes?”
“Jarrett Adams.”
He pauses for a second, fighting to recall the name.
“Remember me? You helped me when I was locked up.”
He drops his briefcase.
“Jarrett.” He grips my hand with both of his. “Of course, I remember you.” He pulls away, takes me in, that wide smile spread across his face. “Are you—?”
“I just finished law school.”
We stand by the elevator, talking lawyer to lawyer, oblivious to the people swirling around us.
* * *
—
A couple months later, I propose to Joi. I whisk her away to the Dominican Republic, plan a romantic getaway, strategize the perfect time to pop the question. In a comedy of errors, almost everything goes wrong with my plan, except for the most critical part. She says yes.
We plan a romantic, exotic destination wedding in Costa Rica. But my family squelches that idea. They hold an intervention.
“We thought you’d all like to go to Costa Rica,” I say.
My mother and
aunts respond in a chorus.
“Uh-uh. No. Not gonna happen.”
I look at Joi helplessly. I give it one last feeble shot.
“Costa Rica is so—?”
“Do you not read the news?” my aunt Honey says.
“Yes. You know I do.”
“I’m seventy-eight, she’s seventy. We are not getting on a plane and going to some exotic place so we can get that Zika virus.”
A long pause.
“We’re all going to be part of this thing. You’re getting married here so we can all pitch in and help. We’ve waited too long to see this day.”
I look at Joi again. She shakes her head, trying to contain herself. For a second, I wonder if she’s crying, and then I realize she’s trying not to burst out laughing.
“Okay, let’s forget Costa Rica, and let’s say, for argument’s sake, we agree on Detroit—”
“No. Pick some place in the middle.”
Now I shake my head. Joi takes my hand and smiles at my family.
“That’s exactly what I was thinking.”
* * *
—
We end up getting married twice.
First Judge Williams marries us in her chambers in the Seventh Circuit.
As Joi and I walk out of the courthouse, I pause. This place, I think. This is where the judge granted my certificate of appealability, where Judge Williams gave me a fellowship, and now where I got married. Surreal. Storybook.
We hold our second wedding ceremony in Michigan City, Indiana, midway between Chicago and Detroit. After repeating my second, even more emphatic “I do,” I careen from guest to guest, embracing friends and family, losing myself in a constant pulsing of pure love. At one point, I see my mother standing with Carol Brook, the two women in tears, propping each other up. My two mothers—the godmothers of the mothers’ mafia—cling to each other and sob.
“Look at our boy,” one of them says—maybe my mother, maybe Carol. It doesn’t matter.
* * *
—
In the summer of 2016, my fellowship with Judge Williams concludes, and I take a job with the Innocence Project in New York, working cases of people who have been wrongfully convicted. As I begin the work, I think about the scores of letters I wrote in prison, asking lawyers for help. Now I find myself in a position to answer letters from inmates. In some weird way, I feel as if I were looking in a mirror at my younger self.
Vanessa Potkin, the head of the litigation department, hires me, and an attorney named Bryce Benjet takes me under his wing. For the first eight months, I do nothing but read and analyze cases and learn how to litigate by going to court and watching. Bryce makes certain that I spend as much time as possible in court.
“If you’re not around water,” he says, “you can’t expect to get wet.”
One day, I enter the courtroom to observe a case being litigated. I head to the first two rows, where the attorneys always sit. A burly guard—a white man—follows me all the way to my seat.
“These rows are reserved for attorneys,” he says. “You have to sit in the back row.”
I want to shout, “Back of the bus, right?”
But I exhale slowly to compose myself, reach into my wallet, and hand the guard my ID. He looks at it for a long time, deciding, I believe, if the ID is fake.
“Okay,” he mutters, giving back my ID.
I know. Black people can’t be lawyers. They’re the defendants, right?
I almost say that.
* * *
—
“You’re ready,” Bryce says.
He assigns me as co-counsel with him and another attorney on our case with Richard Beranek, a case we’re confident we can win. Richard, who has a record of sexual assault, has been convicted of a rape he insists he did not commit. He’s currently serving a life sentence for that crime at Green Bay Correctional Institution. A prison I know too well. Now, practically ten years to the month that a judge overturned my case in Wisconsin, I sit in another Wisconsin courtroom awaiting our evidentiary hearing on Richard Beranek. I sit between Bryce and our other co-counsel from the Wisconsin Innocence Project, Keith Findley, the same attorney who argued my case ten years ago in the Seventh Circuit, which led to my release. Neither of us can stop grinning.
“Crazy,” I say for about the tenth time.
“Talk about coming full circle,” Keith says.
Keith and I have stayed in touch over the years through text and email and occasional phone calls. We’ve both had an inkling we would someday meet as lawyers and possibly work together on a case. And now here we are.
Crazy.
“I thought you said you would never again set foot in the state of Wisconsin,” Keith says.
“I said I would only set foot in this state again—as an attorney.”
He asks me to catch him up on my past few years. I tell him about Rome, China, London. I tell him about Joi and living in New York.
“It’s just crazy that I’m sitting here with you, on this side of the fence.”
“Did you tell your mother you were going back to Wisconsin?”
“Oh, man, that was a hard conversation.”
“What did she say?”
“She said, ‘The minute you get out of that courtroom, you go right back to the hotel room and you stay there. You don’t answer the door, you don’t answer the phone, you don’t do anything. You hear? Don’t even get ice.’ ”
Keith cracks up.
“She was serious,” I say.
* * *
—
“I remember you.”
The night before the hearing, Richard Beranek, late fifties, his pale white skin nearly transparent, his eyes placid blue and penetrating, leans into me and offers up a thin smile.
“From where?” I say.
“Gladiator School.”
“Green Bay.”
“I met you in the law library,” he says.
I search my memory. “I don’t think I did any legal work for you.”
Richard keeps his narrow smile locked in. “No. The line was too long.”
“Now I remember. I couldn’t get to you. Well, Richard, I got to you now.”
Richard’s smile fades.
“I want you to know something,” he says.
He waits so long to speak I wonder if he’s forgotten his thought. Then he leans in further and says in a hushed voice, “I am not lying. I admitted when I was guilty before. I pleaded guilty. I can understand how you could believe that I’m lying now. But I’m not. I didn’t do it.”
“I know you didn’t do it,” I say. “That’s why I’m here.”
“Okay,” Richard says. Satisfied, he leans back in his chair.
I flip through Richard’s paperwork and frown at a number on the first page. I’ve read the number before. I want to verify it with Richard.
“The Innocence Project started with you—how long ago?”
Richard Beranek stares into me with his placid blue eyes. “Eight years.”
“Wow. I know how hard it is to wait. I certainly know that.”
“I’m not going anywhere,” he says.
* * *
—
I don’t dare go out of my hotel room. I don’t care if I’m well into my thirties, I am going to listen to my mother. I stay in my hotel room and I pace. I stop at the window, spread the curtains, peer outside. Then I pace back across the room, sit at the edge of the bed, pick up the TV remote, and flip through channels, not concentrating, my mind on the past.
I picture myself in prison, sitting in the law library. Li’l Johnnie Cochran–Looking Mofo with the Glasses. My reputation, my jacket, which evolved into my identity. I learned a valuable lesson then that holds to this day. Prosecutors and judges rush to convict. But overturning an unfai
r conviction takes forever. There are no shortcuts. You are attempting to prove that something a court determined to be true is actually a lie. There is no direct path to that. You go forward, backward, sideways, and sometimes you go in circles. You take one step forward, five steps back. Emotions rip at you. Your client’s and yours. Frustration. Fear. Rage. Sometimes all at once. The only way to ease those emotions is with patience. You need so much patience. Even more, you need faith.
I think about Dimitri. He never caught a break. He filed too late for his appeal. He finally got released from prison three months after I did. To this day, he remains labeled a sex offender. I wish I could defend him as his attorney, but because he and I were part of the same case, that would be a conflict of interest. I do advocate for him, speaking on his behalf, giving him my opinion, trying to guide him through the process of removing that stain permanently from his record. When we speak, I hear his frustration and rage. I leave every conversation feeling his emotions and thinking—
Three young Black men.
Three defendants accused of the same crime.
Three different outcomes.
All innocent.
Eighteen years after being convicted of a crime he never committed, Dimitri is still paying the consequences of a breach of justice, of blatant racism, of a broken, biased system. He’s not asking for anything extreme or outlandish. He simply wants equal justice. That’s all. No more. But no less.
Sitting on the edge of the bed in this hotel room, having just taken on my first client as a lawyer, I consider that term—“equal justice.” Those two words should be the core of our judicial system. A given, not an aspiration. The criminal justice system spends as much money as it needs to get a conviction. Instead, the system should spend that amount of money on getting it right.
Redeeming Justice Page 28
