After the steel doors clang shut, you trudge down the shiny cement corridor in your State-issued clothing, between two towering correctional officers, to the tune of the clackety black-bulb, spittle-cleaned boots, harmonizing with the jingle-jangle of the keys and cuffs, while static from the radio drowns out your thoughts. As you trip over the silver jewelry on your ankles, you know then, your goose is not only cooked, it’s burnt. You’ve been buried so deep in the prison system, it will take an engineering crew with earthmovers and LiDAR topography scanners just to reach you deep within the confines of a maximum-security penitentiary. The criminal justice system[i], designed to convict and punish, uses the coarseness and abrasiveness of the prison uniform scraping against your raw flesh as a gentle reminder of the might of the prosecutor’s pen.
Your procedural due process rights will be denied as often as the ambitious prosecutor can conveniently do so. You turn your life over to an indifferent public defender, while the State hides exculpatory evidence, and in zero-to-sixty, you accelerate down the highway to justice, careening out of control with a public defender – complaining about the low pay ($12,000 for death penalty trials) – at the wheel, only to crash and burn with a life sentence conviction. Your chance of overturning a life sentence is 2% or less. I had a death penalty trial, with a 57% greater chance of conviction[ii] than a murder trial. My attorney failed to defend me, as he represented the State’s witness against me before trial, and my J & S (judgement & sentence), with a sentence of 73 years, tells me I can be paroled when I am 119 years old, if I can afford the parole costs. Heck, I could barely afford to maintain myself in a cell without heat or plumbing for the entire winter with temps hovering around zero degrees.
That’s the situation I found myself in, almost 24 years ago. I knew next to nothing about criminal law. In college, I had taken one business law class, which was one more than the rest of the 600 inmates. Yet, everyone came to me for legal advice. I had a reputation to live up to. So, I volunteered as the jailhouse lawyer, defending inmates at their disciplinary hearings to prevent them from being thrown into the dungeon (i.e. segregation) or having street charges that would extend their stay.
In the “pink jungle” (i.e. women’s prison), most of the women’s disciplinary reports involved either drugs, tobacco, or sexual misconduct reports (which read like soft porn). Over ten years, I had every major misconduct report either dismissed or lowered to “failure to follow published rules.” This was due in part to my writing skills. As the appeals process overturned major and sometimes minor reports, I learned how to organize my thoughts and arguments into a logical and compelling narrative. My pen became my newest and best friend. Among the inmates, my reputation grew, but so did the administration’s hostility towards me. I walked around “campus” with a bullseye target on my backside: cells tossed, law books burned or destroyed, hygiene items thrown in the trash during serious shakedowns, and worst of all, potato chip bags and the prison currency – the ubiquitous ramen soups – brutally crushed right before my eyes. I cried.
But I continued to win in disciplinary proceedings despite the onerous and petty prison officials. Every book burned resulted in my acquiring two more. I studied criminal law by ordering the free jailhouse lawyer’s manual[iii] given out by advocacy groups, and often by reading others’ legal pleadings, court opinions and decisions. Ordering every case in legal letters, decrees or memorandum opinions, including the “Order Denying Petition,” I began to see the logic and sometimes, even the beauty, of the American judicial system. It reminded me of being a kid, first you go to Dad, if you can’t finagle what you want from him, you go to a higher power – Mom – but if that doesn’t work, you’d address the Supreme Court of the Family Unit – Gramma and Gramps. Eventually, you’d win if you had the patience to persevere, similar in concept to the judicial system.
At night, while prisoners played spades for big bucks – ten ramen chili soups – and the pods reeked of cannabis smoke (brought in by entrepreneurial officers), I spent every evening reading U.S. Supreme Court decisions, like Strickland v. Washington, and Cuyler v. Sullivan. I memorized every significant passage, writing it over and over again, in a green-colored composition book with dog-eared pages. I deconstructed the holdings, the dicta, and used a borrowed Black’s Law Dictionary to understand legal terms such as, “Motion for Summary Judgement,” “Dismissed without Prejudice,” and “Habeas Corpus.” I dreamt of the Sixth Amendment, the Due Process Clause, and the Equal Protection Clause. I borrowed a Latin book from the prison library. I learned that a court could “sua sponte”, or rather, of its own accord, take corrective action in criminal or civil rights cases. I read all night, each night, until the blood vessels in my eyes burst.
Determined to teach myself the law, I took each subject, with all the key precedential cases, highlighting the holdings and the logical arguments eloquently argued by jurists (i.e. judges). After dissecting no less than 3,000 cases, I started to understand how they think; beginning with what is arguably the most important issue to overturn a criminal conviction: “Ineffective Assistance of Counsel”, or simply the “ineffectiveness” claim (80% of all the issues brought to habeas courts). Over time, I mastered the subject matter. The law, through the biological process of osmosis[iv], seeped into the darkest recesses and lobes of my brain, illuminating the most salient arguments, and with the power of the pen, I had the knowledge of how to write arguments in a compelling manner that would sway judges. The pen I wielded, so artfully during disciplinary proceedings, and after years of arduous work, became the device to not only set me on the path to freedom, but others, wrongfully charged or suffering under illegal sentence, too.
In 2007, I began with the state courts, securing early releases for inmates based upon good, very good behavior, and personal achievements. The first judge returned my motion with suggestions as to how to succeed with early release motions. Six months later, he granted the request, allowing one woman to leave six months early. Chalking up successes over the years, I carved each one into my bunk, a permanent tribute to the power of the pen.
Night classes at the prison also helped me relearn the art of creative writing. Learning how to craft a creative defense, not another formulaic murder mystery, became my focus.
My skills grew exponentially, until I easily defeated the two managing directors from the Law Office of the Public Defender (L.O.P.D.) in arguments to the courts. The L.O.P.D. fought against the court appointing counsel to represent two inmates on their issues of competency and ineffectiveness. Pleased to see some of my efforts result in women walking out of prison, thrilled to resume their lives, I continued to bring about changes in the local criminal justice system, as hundreds of other jailhouse lawyers and prison advocates do daily across America, in some of the worst, sub-standard housing and prison conditions, suffering, as I have, under racist and sexist management.
Brick by brick, we dismantle injustice by the power of the pen. In the famous case of Gideon v. Wainwright, a jailhouse lawyer’s power of the pen changed the Constitution: In the 1960’s, a semi-literate prisoner would scribble his objections about his one-sided trial in Florida onto thin tissue paper, eventually reaching the United States’ Supreme Court Justices, his actions revolutionized the criminal justice system in the process, ensuring that every indigent defendant be appointed defense counsel at their trial.
[i] The criminal justice system is designed to prosecute and convict. The public defenders are placed under the purview or oversight of the Justice Department, whose purpose is to prosecute and convict. Prosecutors have tremendous funding and resources to seek convictions, while public defenders are allocated a fraction of the funding. I was told by my own public defender that the State had no money for my defense, therefore I would be denied D.N.A. expert witnesses for one of the largest D.N.A. cases in the state’s history. The State would falsify the D.N.A. report, with the help of the police (case documents available online).
[ii] “The Effect of Death Qualifications on the Propensity of Jurors to Convict: The Maryland Example,” by authors R. Seltzer, G.M. Lopez, Marshall Dayan, and R.F. Canan, 1996, Howard Law Journal, p.35.
[iii] The warden destroyed one of the manuals, informing me that prisoners are not allowed legal books or materials to be sent in to us. Our prison libraries comprise just a few dictionaries and old copies of prisoners’ books.
[iv] Webster’s New World College Dictionary, Fourth Ed., Wiley Pub., 2007, p.1020, os-mo-sis, 3rd definition, “an apparently effortless absorption of ideas, feelings, attitudes, etc., as if by biological osmosis–osmotic–adj.”
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