Redeeming Justice

by Jarrett Adams

  * * *

  —

  Eighteen years have passed.

  Still no complete exoneration for Dimitri. To this day, he remains a sex offender, his name on a registry, for no reason.

  How do I tell Dimitri to be patient?

  How do I tell him to have faith?

  * * *

  —

  A man rapes a woman at knifepoint. She smells alcohol on his breath. He’d been drinking. She can’t identify him at first because he made her turn away. A year later, after two tries, she identifies Richard from a photograph. He fits the profile. He’d been convicted of sexual assault before. That time, he’d been drinking and admitted his crime. He owned it. He said he did it and he had to do something about his drinking.

  But he insists he didn’t do this rape. He swears he was nowhere near the scene of the crime. He was in a different county. The FBI finds a man’s hair in her bedroom. The hair goes into evidence. The hair sits in an evidence room for nearly thirty years, unclaimed, untested for DNA.

  We go through the evidence and discover the hair that was found in the bedroom. We ask that we do a DNA test on that hair. While we wait for a response, we do a DNA test on Richard’s hair.

  The court resists. We have to petition and fight to get the hair in the bedroom tested. They argue that the hair should not be admissible as “new evidence.” We win that battle. We test the two hair strands. To a 99.99 percent certainty, lab experts determine that the DNA found on the hair in the bedroom does not match Richard Beranek’s.

  It takes one year to bring Richard to this evidentiary hearing. By now, my improbable journey from wrongful conviction to lawyer has drawn the attention of the national media. NBC News and Lester Holt follow me, Keith, and Richard into the courtroom in Wisconsin. When the segment airs, the four-minute story shows me meeting with Richard in a legal visit and sitting in court about to hear the judge’s decision. By necessity, it leaves out the grunt work that got us to that point. You don’t see me months before, poring over two thousand pages of paperwork, police reports, witness testimonies, slogging through eight years of documents and court filings. Since my days as an investigator, I have learned to be methodical and meticulous. I live by this credo: do your job, take all the time you need, and get it right. No wonder they call my profession the “practice of law.” This job will never be perfect; it will always be a process. One night, late, my eyes blurry from reading court transcripts, I say aloud to the empty room, “Man, Bryce, my first time out, you really threw me into the deep end. Remind me to thank you.”

  I mean that.

  * * *

  —

  In 2017, based on the new DNA evidence we provide, the court in Wisconsin reverses Richard Beranek’s rape charges and releases him.

  I have won my first case.

  21.

  Forward

  In the fall of 2017, I come to a momentous decision. I decide to start my own practice. The Innocence Project takes on cases based on DNA evidence. I’ve learned that a number of wrongful convictions are simply not DNA based. I see a need to venture out and tackle those cases as well. I know that starting my own practice is risky, that you don’t make big money by righting wrongful conviction cases. I’m not looking to make a killing. I’m looking to make a living.

  I need seed money, but not one bank will give me a loan. I can’t prove that the color of my skin has anything to do with loan officers turning down my applications, but I don’t meet one loan officer who looks like me. I decide to forgo renting an office and set up shop at home. I hang my own shingle—the “Law Office of Jarrett Adams”—in a corner of our apartment. Almost immediately, I take on the cases of Terence Richardson and Ferrone Claiborne. Despite being found not guilty of murdering a police officer in rural Virginia, Terence and Ferrone are serving life in prison on a completely fabricated drug conspiracy charge.

  The very next night, I lie in bed and stare at the ceiling. My first case, on my own. I know my clients are innocent, but even so I have to consider it a long shot. All attempts to exonerate innocent people or reduce extreme sentences are long shots. I murmur this to Joi before we go to bed, my anxiety pulsing through the room.

  “They are long shots,” she says. “But without you, they have no shot at all.”

  “I don’t know if this is going to work, Joi. Did I do the right thing? My desk is a piece of wood and some cinder blocks in the corner of our living room. Maybe I made a mistake.”

  “Listen to me.” Joi rolls over, leans on her elbow, and looks me in the eye. “Do you have trust and faith in yourself?”

  “You know I do.”

  “Do you have trust and faith in God?”

  “Yes.”

  “You can’t have it both ways. Either you believe in yourself and in God and you believe this is going to work, or you don’t. Which is it?”

  Before I answer, my wife nestles into my side.

  “Do everything the way you always do, with all your heart and all your passion, and it will work out.”

  I stare at the ceiling. She rolls over on her side. After a while, I hear the soft hum of her breathing. She’s out. I lean over and kiss her forehead.

  “I’m not doing this for the money anyway,” I say.

  * * *

  —

  February 2020.

  “Man, man, man.”

  I wait on the line for Mr. Claiborne, Ferrone’s father, to catch his breath and for his sobs to stop. The man has gone through so much while his son sits in prison. Now I’ve told him that we still have a long way to go.

  “I’m sorry, Jarrett,” he says after a while.

  “It’s okay, Mr. Claiborne, take your time.”

  “How—” Mr. Claiborne swallows and then whispers into the phone. “How much longer, Jarrett?”

  “Maybe another year.”

  “I can’t do that. Ferrone keeps calling me, asking me for money to help him out. I can’t—I can’t tell him I don’t have any more money. It’s gone. All of it. You know how much I spent over the past twenty-five years trying to get him out? Take a guess.”

  “I couldn’t, Mr. Claiborne.”

  “Three hundred thousand dollars. That’s all of it. Everything I have. Every dime. I drained my savings, my retirement. Liquidated my 401(k). I have no more money.”

  “I’m so sorry. I don’t know what to say. I wish I could make the court move faster.”

  “What do I tell Ferrone? He calls me and he screams, ‘Why is this taking so long? I’m innocent. I didn’t do anything. Where are the results? I need to see results.’ ”

  I close my eyes and shake my head. I really don’t have an answer. I say the only thing I can.

  “Tell him to please try to hang in there. We may have gotten a break. A new prosecutor has been assigned the case. An African American. Maybe she’ll be sympathetic.”

  The line goes quiet. I hear the echo of Mr. Claiborne sniffling. I know how he feels. I heard the same anguish in my mother’s voice as she waited for something—anything—positive to happen in my case. I also know what Mr. Claiborne is going through financially. I watched my family burn through money they didn’t have to pay for my lawyer and to post my bonds. I don’t know what to say to Mr. Claiborne, how to calm or encourage him. I know personally what it feels like to hemorrhage money. I have been working Ferrone’s and Terence’s cases pro bono. I pay my paralegal, who has a family, out of my own pocket.

  But I refuse to rush. We have to play this right. We have to file when we have everything lined up perfectly. When you file is as crucial as what you file. I’ve learned that lesson—that strategy—by observing lawyers such as MiAngel and Bryce. We have to file when I know we can win. I know we can win with this new prosecutor. And I do know how hard it is to wait. And wait. And wait for what feels like never. Every day that passes is another day
without justice.

  “We have to be on the same page, Mr. Claiborne. We have to form a united front. You have to tell Ferrone to have faith. Tell him to pray. Tell him it worked for me. God continues to save me in spite of myself.”

  “Please, Jarrett,” Mr. Claiborne says, his tears coming again, his voice raw. “I just want my son to come home before I die.”

  * * *

  —

  To replenish his retirement account, Mr. Claiborne signs up for extra hours at the plant where he works, putting aside fears of the pandemic. I continue working the case. Then I get a call from one of his relatives.

  Mr. Claiborne has contracted COVID-19.

  As I write these words, he is on a ventilator, clinging to his life.

  I pray that he survives to see his son released from prison.

  * * *

  —

  March 2020.

  Madison, Wisconsin.

  My client list has grown. I have received a number of calls from the families of inmates in Wisconsin. Others come from inmates I remember from my time in prison. More than ten years after my release, they remain locked away in Waupun, or Dodge, or Green Bay for nonfatal offenses. Some have been incarcerated for decades. I know these people. I talked to them. I played basketball with them. By now, many have become the walking dead. They wake up, slouch to the chow hall, pick at their food, return to their cells, and drop onto their cots, curled up like snails, waiting for time to pass, for time to end. They have waved the white flag on their lives. I have never seen prison as a place for corrections. I see it as a warehouse for human beings.

  I get these calls and hear their stories, and I know I have to help them. After the first few calls, I realized that I’m doing exactly what I did when I earned my nickname Li’l Johnnie Cochran–Looking Mofo with the Glasses. I’ve outgrown the “Li’l” part and become a card-carrying lawyer, but I’m still helping inmates with their legal work, still breaking it down for them, still hearing the voice of the first inmate I helped: “He good with the legal work.”

  * * *

  —

  I stop to take in the grandeur of the Wisconsin State Capitol. An imposing dome lords above four ground-level wings that spread in each direction. A bronze statue of a woman holding a globe stands on the very top of the dome. She symbolizes the state motto: “Forward.”

  I smile.

  “Forward.”

  That could be my motto.

  I take Joi’s hand and we walk inside the statehouse and into a courtroom. I pause again at the courtroom door, this time to gather myself.

  “Surreal,” I say to Joi.

  A few minutes later, I stand in line with six other attorneys who will be admitted to the State Bar of Wisconsin. A judge says my name and calls the lawyer I have asked to administer my lawyer’s oath, the man who will swear me in.

  Keith Findley.

  I turn and face him. He smiles as if we were in on some private joke, which, in some way, we are. Keith has fought for me, and we’ve fought battles together. We have vowed to continue to try to do right, or at the very least to try to undo wrongs.

  Before reading the lawyer’s oath, Keith speaks to everyone assembled in the courtroom: “No one is more deserving than Jarrett Adams to be admitted to the Wisconsin State Bar. No one has traveled a more circuitous route. Jarrett is a man of great perseverance and great moral character. I am honored to call him my friend and to administer the lawyer’s oath.”

  Keith turns back to me. I shift my weight, and for one moment my body hits pause and a memory seeps in. I see myself on the last day I spent in a Wisconsin jail. I promised myself and my mother that if I ever came back to the state of Wisconsin, it would be as a lawyer. I have kept that promise and begun working on another promise I made to myself and to God. In prison, I met dozens of men who were much more than their convictions. As a member of the State Bar of Wisconsin, I want to chip away at the stigmas attached to these men until they are defined not by what they have done but by who they are now and who they may become.

  And then I see myself as a twenty-seven-year-old, walking through my neighborhood, remembering the changes I saw on those streets. Drugs came in and burned through our neighborhood like a raging fire. Buildings were abandoned and boarded up. Homes became crack houses. Crack ripped families apart. Crack divided us, bankrupted us, killed us. Then an army of police rushed in, took us away, incarcerated us, with society’s approval. We became disposable. We became invisible.

  My attention shifts back to the courtroom, where the same system that disposed of me is about to proclaim me a lawyer. I accept that change—real change—will come slowly, one tiny step at a time. But you have to commit to taking that step. I picture my grandfather Buddy, and I hear him say, “You got to keep going, Jarrett. You can’t go back. Keep moving forward.”

  I look Keith Findley in the eye, exhale, and blink back my tears. Then I raise my right hand.

  To the strength of the Black women—to Sugar, Honey, and Peaches, for never giving in, and refusing to let me give up!

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  “You armed me with strength for the battle.”

  Psalm 18:39

  Without hesitation, I first thank God for gifting me with the resilience to struggle, survive, sustain, strive, and then thrive. There were times along my journey when I questioned my faith and asked, why me?, not realizing that you ordered each step, and when I was unable to walk, you carried me.

  Mom, I’ve never forgotten the words I said to you that day in court. I rise every day aiming to make sure that I leave a lasting mark on the same system that stole as much from you as it did from me. I am fueled by your endless love, your unbreakable belief in the man you raised me to be, your undeniable selflessness, and your unbreakable strength. Thank you will never be enough.

  To my family—Sugar, Honey, Bill, Harold, my aunts, uncles, cousins, brothers, and sisters—I never stood alone on my journey and cannot thank you enough for your endless support and encouragement. We’ve shared many frustrations, disappointments, and tears of pain. I’m extremely grateful to now share in this moment of joy and gratitude with each of you.

  To my Joi—you are simply extraordinary. It takes a wife like you to unveil the soul of a man like me. I do not thank you nearly enough as I should and yet you give endlessly and pour into me and my vision constantly. You showed me how to transform from a sole man on a mission to one-half of an unstoppable team. I’m grateful to your family for helping to craft the woman who makes me better every day. God blesses me in unbelievable ways through you. With God and our hustle, there is nothing impossible for us.

  To my fellow “Jailhouse Lawyers”—keep up the fight. I acknowledge and salute you for your tenacity, passion, and determination to overcome despite the odds being stacked against you—against us!

  To the people who made Redeeming Justice possible, starting with the team at CAA, especially Anthony Mattero, my superb agent. You believed in me and my story from the very beginning and found us the perfect home. Thank you.

  To everyone at Convergent: Tina Constable, who supported and encouraged me from proposal all the way through production; to all those in editorial, publicity, and marketing; and a huge shout-out to Derek Reed—thoughtful and thorough reader, gifted editor, constant champion—countless, heartfelt thanks.

  Finally, to Alan Eisenstock—simply put, there’s no book without you. Your artistry turned this lawyer into an author. Thank you for helping me tell my story.

  My journey has been blessed by several individuals who have helped clear a path forward and sometimes create one when the road seemed to run out. To the Honorable Judge Ann Claire Williams, Deborah Batts and Patricia Holmes, Keith Findley, John Pray, Barry Scheck, Peter Neufeld, Carol Brook, MiAngel Cody, Mike Golden, Mike Monico, Linda Mattox, Linda Bathgate, and many more professors, mentors, coll
eagues and role models whom I’ve been blessed by along the way. Your contributions have led me to where I am today. I’m forever grateful to each of you for your choice to step up, instead of standing aside. I commit to paying it forward and never forgetting to reach back and lift someone else up.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Jarrett Adams was falsely accused at the age of seventeen and ultimately wrongfully convicted and sentenced to twenty-eight years in a maximum-security prison. After serving nearly ten years behind bars and filing multiple appeals, Jarrett was exonerated with the assistance of the Wisconsin Innocence Project.

  Jarrett used the injustice he endured as inspiration to become an advocate for the underserved and often uncounted. As a first step, he earned his Juris Doctor from Loyola University Chicago School of Law in May 2015 and started a public interest law fellowship with Ann Claire Williams, judge for the Seventh Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals. This is the same court that reversed Jarrett’s conviction because of his trial lawyer’s constitutional deficiencies. Jarrett also clerked in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York with the late Honorable Deborah Batts.

  Jarrett’s remarkable story has captured both local and national media attention. An adjunct professor at the Loyola University Law School from 2014 to 2015, Jarrett is a recipient of the 2012 Chicago Bar Foundation’s Abraham Lincoln Marovitz Public Interest Law Scholarship.

  He also won the National Defender Investigator Association’s Investigator of the Year Award for his work with the clemency petition of Reynolds Wintersmith ultimately granted by President Obama.

  Jarrett launched the Law Office of Jarrett Adams, PLLC, in 2017 and practices in both federal and state court throughout the country. His story of incarceration, exoneration, and redemption has been featured widely in the media, and he has become a sought-after motivational speaker for athletes, students, inmates, attorneys, and others.