 Welcome to Free Thoughts, I'm Trevor Burris. And I'm Aaron Powell. Joining us today is Sean Hopwood, Associate Professor of Law at Georgetown Law Center and author of Lawman, My Story of Robbing Banks, Winning Supreme Court Cases and Finding Redemption. Welcome to Free Thought, Sean. Thanks for having me. What is it like to rob a bank? Everything in your body is telling you to get out of that bank. Just think of like the most anxious anxiety-ridden moment of your life and then times that about a hundred. And what's weird is, sitting here telling you now, I can't imagine going to do that now because my life is so different. But 20 years ago, I was a much different person and very crazy and wild and at the time it sounded like a solution to some problems and it turned out not so much. And your first bank robbery was, you tell in the book about dropping a toolbox, was that what it was? A toolbox. It seemed like a very advanced bank robbing strategy. Actually, your whole first bank robbery seemed very advanced. Very advanced for two young 20-year-olds who had no idea what they were doing. How do you end up robbing a bank? Well, you mix in some immaturity, no purpose. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life, some depression, some alcohol and drugs and a bunch of other young, stupid, immature 20-year-old men. And you combine that and what came out was five armed bank robberies and me and five or six people robbing all of these banks together over the scope of a year. Were these banks near where you lived? No, they were, well, yes, they were all in Eastern rural Nebraska, but they were all banks that were so small and the towns were so small that they didn't have any local police departments, which is why the reason we went there rather than going to a big, huge office in a big city where as soon as you hand over a note or walk in with a gun, the police are going to be there in two or three minutes. We decided to go to these rural towns. And you did have a gun? I had guns in all five robberies. Yeah, but they were fired? No. So that probably helped with your sentencing, maybe? Yeah, it helped a little bit. If they had been fired, I think I would still be in federal prison. You discuss how is the, so your friend, Tom, he only did the first one. He was a very old childhood friend of yours. And then you, but you kept going and it seemed like you got more careful. I was an overachiever. Yes, just like you are today, yes. So maybe you're not exactly not the same person. You still go all the way when the call comes. So you kept going and it got more careless the way you describe it. Very careless. I was never under any illusion that we weren't going to get caught. That's an interesting point of this. He's just like, I'm going to do this until I get caught. I just kind of knew that this was eventually going to end and it kind of tells you where my mind state was. My thought was when they come to get me, probably be a shootout, I'll be dead and therefore I'm not really worried too much about the consequences. And you know, when you don't care about the consequences of your actions on yourself, it's really easy to forget about the consequences of your actions on others. How much money did you steal? They called together, it was $175,000 over five banks. Did you like live high on the hog? Well, it's much easier to spend money when you don't earn it. And yes, we just, it was a nonstop party for a year. Every stupid thing that you could ever think to buy, we bought. And I don't know where my friends and people I was around thought the money came from because they saw me living a lavish lifestyle and not working. So I knew it was going to come crashing down at some point. So when you were caught, you didn't get a trial, as most prisoners do not get a trial. You pled to, I mean, as unarmed robbery did you plead to? Pled to unarmed robbery and then the use of a firearm during one of the robberies. Okay. And if I had pled guilty to one more firearm charge, people think the bank robberies is what I got the time for. I got seven years, three months for the banks. I got five years for one gun. If I had been charged with use of a firearm during the other four robberies, I would have been looking for just the gun charges at a mandatory minimum sentence of 85 years. Geez. And you then found yourself in Illinois, I guess. Yeah, federal prison in Illinois. Nebraska doesn't have a federal prison, so. And it wasn't maximum security. It doesn't sound like from the book. No, it was a medium-high security. So one level down from maximum. So what does that mean practice? Well, a little less violent. It was a place where there were people with outdates. Most of the people in the max, they may have an outdate, but an outdate that's 40 or 50 years away or several life sentences. So there were people with outdates at my prison, which meant that there was a little less violence because people eventually wanted to go home. But for the most part, it was prison kind of like what people think prison is like. And there were a lot of boredom, a lot of violence, and your movements controlled in every single way. What is the first night in prison like? First, not a lot of sleep because you don't know what's going to happen the next day and you kind of just takes a while to figure out what prison is like. And you don't ever really feel comfortable in prison, plus you don't really want to because if you do feel comfortable in prison, that probably means that's where your focus is rather than on getting out. But it's not a place where there's a lot of peace. How did you end up getting into being a jailhouse lawyer effectively? Bad luck. I'm kidding. Yeah, so I got a job in the prison law library so that I could get out of the kitchen where I was scrubbing tables, which wasn't much fun. And the kitchen's one of the most dangerous places in the federal prison because even though there are prison guards watching, there are things like knives and all sorts of things you can use as weapons. So I got a job in the prison law library and for the first six months there, I wanted nothing to do with the law. I just checked out books. When I did pull down one of those books, they were big and intimidating and thick and when I did read them, it felt like they were written in another language. And I didn't think much about having a career in law. And then June 26th of 2000, the Supreme Court handed down a decision called Apprenda Veni, Jersey. And I, along with every other federal prisoner in the country, thought maybe this could lead to a sentence reduction. And all of a sudden I had a lot of motivation to try and learn the law on my own and try and figure this all out. What is that decision? What are they saying in Apprenda? They said that facts which increase your maximum sentence, much to me, prove to a jury beyond a reasonable doubt. And I had pled guilty to unarmed bank robbery, but had been sentenced and had my sentence enhanced based on the gun, even though I also got a gun charge. And so my thought was, well, if I had to actually plead guilty to armed robbery to get that enhancement, this violated Apprenda. It turns out I was right, but it took five or six years for the rest of the criminal justice system and the Supreme Court to get there. So by then it was too late to help me. Because your case was finished? Yeah, because my case was finished. But what I found was I really enjoyed the process of solving these legal puzzles, writing out the solution. And then once I started winning cases, I found out I really enjoyed helping my fellow prisoners get time off their sentence. You didn't have an undergrad degree either. I did not. I did not. But you did that. I had never done any writing other than letters to people when I started this kind of venture. And I just learned by reading lots of good books and lots of lawyers sent in briefs that were really good, people like Seth Waxman, and I just tried to emulate what they did. Is there, I mean, the success that you had and the praise that your legal writing received show an enormous, almost like something natural talent for this stuff. Is there a point at which, so you started reading the legal stuff and you started doing this for this very practical reason, but was there a point at which it kind of ticked over into like intellectual curiosity or you discovered that you also just had an affinity for it? No, very much so. So I was a solid C student in high school, did not do very well in part because I didn't really care and it was not interesting to me and not challenging. And the law was challenging from the get-go and I really got drawn in and realized that my writing ability, it took many, many years to get that to where I would be proud to say I wrote something from several years ago. But as far as analytical ability, I kind of felt like I got that right away. And I could see arguments and I could see arguments that lawyers were making that were wrong and most of the cases I won were ineffective assistance to counsel cases where lawyers had made mistakes. When you're in a prison, it seems like, and I think you write in the book that the first year or so, I think you say something like you move past the I don't care about my life stage and you start thinking about a future and some sort of... It seems that that's a lot of the problems that occur in prison for prisoners. Violence to other types of abuses is because there's no hope or something like that. Did you get hope from the law? And you also, of course, were corresponding with your future wife, which gave you some hope too. Was that really important? Well, that was part of it. It's really hard to get up and kind of seize the day, so to speak, when you're facing a 20-year mandatory minimum sentence. In the federal system, you know you're going to, even with good time and good behavior, you're going to serve 17, 18 years of that. It's really hard, especially for someone that's 20 or 21 or 22, to think, oh, I need to be working on myself today to get myself ready for release when the amount of time you're going to serve is equivalent to the amount of time you've been alive. So it is very hard. But the closer you get to the door, the more you realize, or at least you should realize that, whoa, I got to start thinking about life on the outside. And for me, I made it through the first couple of years, and then I started winning cases in court and corresponding with my now wife and having a great mentor in Seth Waxman, who is a former Solicitor General of the United States. And all of those things led me to make quite a few changes. And the fact that I just grew up. I was 22 and 21 when I committed these crimes. By the time I hit 25, 26, 27, I was in a different place, like most young men are. And that's one of the reasons why these long sentences don't really serve society well, because people tend to age out of crimes, because they just mature, and everyone knows this intuitively, but the criminal justice system has not really caught up to that. Talk about your fellow prisoners. You mentioned some of them, but if you mentioned, I think, a sort of wonderful way that you became one of the welcome wagon for the prison, you give new prisoners good bar of soap and a toothbrush and things like that. So if I was coming in and you were walking me through like a tour guide and saying, these are these people, how would you introduce someone to federal prison? Yeah, so that's a really interesting thing about prisoners. They're very generous. So when you come in, people did that for me. Somebody brought me. I was going to go take a shower, and somebody stopped me and said, oh my gosh, don't walk in the shower barefoot. Like, don't ever do that. Here's a pair of shower shoes. Same in the dorm rooms. Yeah. Yeah. There are certain things you just don't do. Here's a toothbrush. Here's toothpaste, because you aren't going to get to the commissary, the store for several days. And so people did that for me, and I would see prisoners constantly returning the favor. Some of it was based on race, where you grew up. We had a group of guys that were from Nebraska that tended to look out for black or white or Hispanic prisoners, but that they were coming from Nebraska. And so what you find is there is a sense of tribalism even in federal prison. And you have to know these rules about where you sit for lunch and who you talk to and all these things. And the consequences are so severe. So I reached across to get a cup of milk one morning. Reached across someone's tray, literally put my arm over their food, and the guy wanted to kill me. This thing in the morning said, if you ever do that again, I'm going to take this tray and beat you over the head with it. And you know what? I learned my lesson pretty quickly. And it's funny, because prison there is far more respect for people than I ever see like here on the Metro in D.C., where people will almost kill each other for a seat or to get out of a car to go to their important job. And it's not like that, because the consequences of being rude and disrespectful are so immediate and severe. So is that a ... I guess the reasons for that is that just a factor of there's naturally going to be violent people in prison. And so you're just, you know, you just behave this way because you don't know who might be violent. So it's better to just treat everyone as they might be. Or is it, do you get acculturated into that? Like so did you or other prisoners who weren't that way come to behave that way over time too? Yeah, I just think you learn very early on in prison that respect is very important. That's all these guys got. Some of them have no family. Some of them are doing several life sentences. All they have is respect. And you realize really early on that that's how you behave. And if you don't, there are consequences. Are there a lot of innocent people in prison, do you think? Or I guess would be a secondary question, because a lot of you might think with the federal innocence project and things like this that there are a lot of innocent people in prison. Do you think that that's true? I didn't see a lot of what you would call factually innocent people in federal prison. But what I saw were thousands of people who sentences were increased based on bogus things. Like back when I was being sentenced, it was mandatory guidelines, mandatory sentencing guidelines. And the only way you really got out of those was if you cooperated. So what would inevitably happen is the people that were cooperating and would embellish drug amounts, make drug amounts up, try and recruit other people to cooperate their story to the prosecutor. And you would see people like my friend John Davis, who I write about in the book, who the police found 0.4 grams of methamphetamine in his house, but he was sentenced to 14 pounds of methamphetamine based solely on the testimony of a bunch of drug addicts who were looking to get their own sentences reduced. And if John had been sentenced to the 0.4 grams, he would have done a year or two. But instead, he was sentenced to 14 pounds, and he was a first-time offender given a mandatory life sentence. He's the one who referred to as hater. Yes. Yeah. And at one point, he actually confronted one of the, I don't know, snitches the right term, informants or you call voice box. That's a fascinating story. Yeah. So we walked into the cell and John approached this guy and said, do you know who I am? And the guy's like, no. And he's like, really, you don't know who I am? And the voice box, because he had his larynx taken out from throat cancer, says, no, I don't think I've ever met you. And John pulls a piece of paper out of his back pocket and says, well, then why did you tell the prosecution you bought two pounds of methamphetamine from my house, and you even described my dog at my farm? And the guy started crying and basically broke down the entire story, how John's co-defendants had paid him $1,000 or $2,000 to cooperate what they were saying against John so that they could all get time off. Because like I said, under mandatory guidelines, the only way people were getting out from under these 10 and 20 and 30 year sentences was to cooperate. And it didn't look like to me, at least in Nebraska, that there was a lot of quality control from the U.S. Attorney's Office, and they would just take whatever anyone said and trot them into court, and that's kind of how the system worked. In fact, it was so bad in Nebraska that they had a term for this. It was called jumping on a case, on someone else's case, even though you knew nothing about them. And John is still in prison. And John is still sitting in prison serving a mandatory life sentence. How does that work? So if they find, just from the procedural standpoints, if they find a vanishingly small amount of methamphetamine, and that's all the cops have actually found, how do you then argue in court, like, well, no, in fact, what he actually had was this amount that we didn't find? Yeah. Well, so they got him for conspiracy, and they had, the jury found over 500 grams was involved in the conspiracy, which the federal system sets, that set a statutory minimum of maximum of 10 years to life. And then the judge back then could find whatever he wanted, or she wanted, as far as facts that produced a bigger drug amount by a preponderance of the evidence at sentencing. And that's what you get sentenced to, is whatever fact-finding the judge does then. And they brought some of these people out. And yeah. And you said back then? Well, so it's a little different now, because there's advisory guidelines. The Supreme Court in 2005 finally bought the argument that I had presented to my judge in 2000 and declared the guidelines unconstitutional. And so now the judges can depart from the guidelines. And there's not so much pressure on people to run to the prosecutor to get a lower sentence, because they feel like, I don't have to cooperate, I can just plead guilty and then try and convince the judge to not send me away for 20 years. Back then, that didn't happen. So you have quite a lot that these sentences are too punitive, they're too long, and that's something that we at the Cato Institute, you know, sentencing reform is an important thing. But is there among the prisoners, so of course, many prisoners probably think that their own sentences were too long because of the sorts of things you just described or other factors, but is there a sense among the prisoners that in general criminal sentences are too punitive, too long? Yes. I felt that way. I actually, with my 12-year, three-month sentence, felt like I got a pretty good deal when I got to prison and saw these young African-American men with nonviolent drug cases, not involving firearms, doing 20-year mandatory minimums for crack cocaine. I felt very lucky, but you quickly realize that the sentences on the whole are just far greater than they need to be to protect the public. And, you know, one of the things I argue about with people all the time is this notion of general deterrence. You sentence someone long so that it deters everyone else. I don't think that actually is a thing. And the reason is, you know, I never met anyone in federal prison who knew the amount of time they were facing, and the sorts of people that commit these crimes are people with drug addiction, alcohol addiction, mental health illness, impulse control issues are all four, so they're not rational actors. But even if they were, to try and figure out the amount of time you had faced for a federal crime, you'd have to research and find the one of 5,000 federal criminal statutes, determine the statutory minimum and maximum, and then you'd have to go to a 500-page guideline manual that judges and lawyers misapply every day in federal court. And to think that anyone actually does that and weighs that out before they commit a crime, I just never saw it in 11-plus years of being in the criminal justice system. Well, I do that before I commit every crime. I got all the law books, every sort of thing to put together. I know, but Jeff Sessions thinks that the general deterrence, that's why we have to have these long sentences is because it tells everyone else not to do this. And I just have never seen any evidence either empirically or anecdotally that says that that actually happens. It seems so nonsensical that it, that that's what happens and that these long sentences actually deter people. That it, to me, it just makes it clear that it's not, that say someone like Jeff Sessions, who, you know, just last week or the week before ordered federal prosecutors to always seek maximum penalties, that it's not about deterrence. It's just, it's like, it's punitive. It's just, it's a, you know, they just feel like people need to be punished and punished harshly and they want to do it, which is also partly why it's hard to argue against it because it feels like so all that the argument's about it doesn't deter things and it has these terrible effects is like, well, but so what? Because we're punishing them and they deserve it. Well, I think there is, I see that a lot too. And I think there is a fundamental mismatch between people that are politicians, lawyers, and federal judges who on the whole, all of those groups of people are generally rule followers. The problem is they're the ones that set the laws and assume everyone else is going to follow the rules. And the majority of Americans are not rule followers. Walk out into the street and just watch people walk across the street when the sign for not walk is not on or speeding laws or any of the other laws. You know, we've got millions of people that use an illegal substance every day in this country. And so there always seems to me to be a mismatch between what someone like Jeff Sessions thinks the world should be and what America is actually like. How did you get involved in your first Supreme Court petition for the first time? Yeah, so a friend of mine from Nebraska, John Fellers, came to me one day. This is in prison. This is in prison. And you know, I had been self-studying the law for like 18 months at this point. So set the scene where you're in the prison yard. We're in the prison yard and he comes and says, you know, the A-Circuit just denied my appeal. He had gone to trial on a conspiracy to distribute methamphetamine, received a sentence that was the same as mine, 12 years. You know, I walked in five banks with guns, got 12 years. He sells a little meth and gets the same amount of time as me. And he says, you know, I lost in the A-Circuit. I want to file to the Supreme Court and I called my lawyer and he says, we've got no chance of winning in the Supreme Court. But as many lawyers like to do, he said, John, if you give me $12,000, I'll throw something together to file in court. And John just didn't think that that was a great idea. But he had to do some convincing because at that point I had filed, I think, one or two habeas petitions. And I knew enough to know that filing a habeas petition in Federal District Court is not the same as convincing the United States Supreme Court to take a case. And I was hesitant to do it because I didn't think I could. And John was persistent and I said yes. And I spent two months basically working on his case day and night and pecked out that petition on a prison typewriter. And we sent it off and I largely forgot about John Feller's in his case because I knew the odds were against us and John had transferred to another prison. And one morning I'm walking out to the recreation yard at 6.30 and a friend of mine comes running and screaming out of the housing unit. This being Federal Prison, the first thing I thought was, what did I say to this guy yesterday? He wants to come fight me at 6.30 in the morning. But you don't usually go to a fight carrying a newspaper in your hands. And what he had was a copy of the USA Today saying that the court had granted John Feller's case. How unlikely that was given that he had filed pro se without a lawyer. And it actually quoted from the brief that I had written out on a legal pad and then pecked out on a prison typewriter. And, you know, I had no idea what it would lead to, but it was on the whole as far as prison days go. It was a pretty good day. You actually, there's a little, you wrote a note on the cover of the brief to the court. Yeah, yeah. We prepared a cover letter. And I just said, and I don't actually have a copy of that and I don't know if the court does or not. But the letter just said, hey, I know you get lots of these from prisoners all over the country. Most of them have no merit. They're hard to read. But this case actually does have merit. It's really interesting issues. Take a look at it. I have no idea if that played any role, but. I think it could. I mean, having, there's so many pro se. It is, you got to get them to take notice. Yeah, yeah. And, you know, that's the whole ballgame up there because they're getting braced from all over the place. And, you know. So what was the issue in John's case? The issue was the police. John had been indicted, which means it started adversarial proceedings, which means his Sixth Amendment right to counsel kicked in. And the police came to his house, knocked on the door. He opens the door and they say, listen, John, we're here to talk about your involvement in methamphetamine conspiracy. They don't tell him he's indicted. They don't read a Miranda warnings. And then they just sit there as John starts to make incriminating statements. They then arrest John. They take him 20 minutes to the jail. They put a Miranda warning in front of him. As they're asking him the same questions, they had asked him at the house and he signs the Miranda warning, repeats the same answers, and that was all used at trial against him. And the question was whether they had violated his Sixth Amendment rights by not reading him Miranda when they arrested him at the house and whether that also tainted the subsequent interrogation at the jailhouse because John thought, well, you know, I let the cat out the bag once. At that point, it doesn't really matter if I invoke Miranda or not. I'm screwed. And so he went forward and the court said unanimously 9-0 that the first interrogation violated his rights. They kicked, they punted on the second issue, sent it back down to the A-Circuit. The A-Circuit ruled against John but why he was there, Booker came out that said the sentencing guidelines were unconstitutional. So he went back for re-sentencing but we lost on the trial issue. And this time Seth and Wilmer Hale filed the cert petition to the Supreme Court and the second time they denied it. Which I always tend to remind Seth about. You may have argued 80 cases but I think I probably, you should let the jailhouse lawyer handle that one. So after the cert petition was granted, of course, lawyers all over would love to take any of those cases just to argue in front of the Supreme Court but you happen to get, as you mentioned, Seth Waxman who is one of the biggest lawyers in town and then amazingly, you were kind of brought in as co-counsel. You were in jail on conference calls and they were sending you briefs for comments but you had to comply with all the weird prison rules. What was that like? Well, Seth tells it like this. Federal prisons are very used to lawyers calling in to communicate with their clients. Federal prisons are not accustomed to is lawyers calling the jailhouse lawyer of their client. And so it did present some problems but we worked through it and yeah, the Seth and the lawyers at Wilmer Hale made me a part of the team and I'm forever grateful because I think a lot of people with Seth's background, you know, Harvard undergrad, Yale Law School, Gates, I think a lot of people would have said, hey, Mr. Dale House lawyer, great job getting the case granted but we'll take it from here. And that is the exact opposite of what Seth did and I found out many years later after I got to meet the people at Wilmer Hale that they actually had a nickname for me. I was in-house counsel as in the big house. So what kind of, when you were collaborating with them, what kind of work were you doing? You know, probably little of nothing of help to them. Looking back at it now, I was just writing notes about, you know, I was by this point pretty familiar with the record factually so I would help with that with some of the legal arguments. I remember at one point they called and we had a conference call with Seth and three lawyers from Wilmer Hale and I'm on the phone in the office of my prison counselor and they're asking and saying, you know, arguments next week, are there any questions that you think the justices might ask that we're not thinking about? And I just remember thinking, I've been self-studying the law for 18 months with no undergrad degree, no law school and here I've got a former solicitor general asking me questions like this and my response was, I have no idea. And of course that was in the first time though because then you had a second petition. Yeah, then I had a second petition that was granted in part because the lawyers from Wilmer Hale stayed in contact with me long after John Feller's case was over and so they gave me the heads up that there was another case in the court that was similar to one I was taking up with a friend of mine and that was because of that that I kind of tied the case I was working on to that case and when that case won, my guy won and got remanded back. And that was just a GVR? Yeah, a GVR. And then I started winning cases kind of. Grandvacate and remanded by it is what that means. This is kind of all over. Federal district courts, I won a case in the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals and in the last couple years I was basically running a law firm from prison where I'd have 10 clients at once and one prisoner who woke up every day and basically went to the typewriter and typed out briefs that I was drawing up by hand. You had paralegals and associates working for you. I had a staff. Who was your staff? I was thinking of prison nicknames so this is, you know... So that would have been Glenn. He was a guy from Nebraska in on an interesting case because he was a white guy in on a crack case which I don't think I'd ever seen that happen before. He and his brother were there twin brothers from Omaha and he was good at typing and so the guys that wanted me to do work would just pay him to type out the briefs so that I could sit in my cell and teach other people how to do legal research and things like that. Yeah, I taught a couple classes in the education department. Prison was a little skittish about that just because, you know, they want people to learn the law but not too well and one of the things I realized early on was if I stuck with working on criminal cases the prison pretty much left me alone. So when you start suing prison guards in civil rights cases that things can go really bad. I'm curious. You're doing all this legal research and writing. Did you have access to like Westlaw or Lexis Nexus? I wish. I wish. I probably appreciate Westlaw like no human being on the planet. No, it was all books. It was and it was, you know, it's not an exact science. So, you know, you have to read basically a hundred cases for every two that you find that are on point, which is not very effective and not, you know, is very time consuming. But for someone that doesn't know the law it required me to read a whole lot of law that wasn't relevant to the case I was working on and I was like a sponge. So it actually on the long run made me a really good lawyer but I wouldn't recommend it to anyone. You kind of touched on this a little bit but it seems that with the stories you tell and you talk about I think his name is Marvin Marvin Brown just people in unfortunate circumstances and you get the sense and you've done this so much but that so many of these people in federal prison are there with bona fide legal complaints. I mean, you know, in the sense that there are these pros and cons you know, we know about the prison lawyers and everyone wants to kind of roll their eyes and say, okay, well, you know, you have the hard criminal justice, hard law order people saying, oh, then the prisoner is going to file like 50 appeals on the stupidest things but you get this sort of sense that there's a lot of bona fide legal complaints especially given the fact that public defenders really just are so strapped for time that they overlook things constantly. They are and it takes a lot of dedication to litigate one federal case appropriately and Marvin Brown today that's still my favorite case I've ever worked on. Melvin came to me two weeks before his habeas petition was due and said, hey, look at this and he had been sentenced as a career offender at the age of 22. How you're a career offender at 22, I don't know but he was a young African-American man who had been caught with like 3 grams of crack and was given a 16 and a half year sentence in federal prison and the problem was that one of his prior convictions didn't actually count and the career offender was really because he pled guilty that was the only part of the case that really mattered and the lawyers and the probation office just didn't look at it and when we filed it the judge ordered the probation officer to respond first before the US attorney's office. The probation officer just came back and said, we missed it and the prior lawyer said I missed it and then the government came back and filed a one page response and said we agree he needs to be re-sentenced and he was re-sentenced to five years and eight months. And if you hadn't got involved that would not have happened. He would still be in prison. He's not in prison anymore. He's not in prison anymore and he bought me a typewriter ribbon and a copy card. $14 I think he said. Yeah, yeah. $14 he got almost 11 years shaved off his sentence. How many people do you still talk to from either who are still in prison, I know Aaron John, or people who have been released, do you still make contact with them? Oh yeah, I'm in contact with quite a few of them. I mean most of my closest friends got out never committed another crime, never had any problems again and never went back. There are some that have gone back but I tend to keep in contact with all those guys. I lived with them for in a very intimate setting for 10 years so they are in some ways like family to me. So how did you, I mean your path after prison has been pretty interesting. Yes. So what happened after you got out? I was a normal law school student. Absolutely, yeah. So what year did you get released? So I got released to a federal halfway house in October of 2008. Height of the recession. No one find and work, let alone the guy that just did 11 years in federal prison and quickly realized not a great need for knowledge of the U.S. Supreme Court in Omaha, Nebraska even amongst the lawyers. They just aren't filing many breaks to the Supreme Court. So I couldn't get a job with lawyers or law firms but I found this job for a document analyst at Cock-a-Legal Brace which is this company that prints Supreme Court breaks for lawyers all over the country. Something I am we are very familiar here with and we work with them all the time. I know I know that's where I first learned about Cato was working at Cock-a-Legal and I worked there and I worked on a case with a professor from Michigan Rich Friedman who was litigating a confrontation clause case and he asked me one day and said you know an awful lot about the confrontation clause. You must be a lawyer because this isn't something that one studies for fun. I said well I'm not a lawyer rich and I'll tell you some story about my story but don't freak out. So I wrote him a really long email, told him and he did freak out but in a good way and after he argued his case in the Supreme Court he told Adam Liptak at the New York Times about my story. Adam wrote a story in February of 2010 and life hasn't been the same for me ever since. But you did end up going to law school? I did end up going to law school at the University of Washington and got a full ride scholarship through the Gates Public Service Law program there and then after that I went to Go-Clark for Judge Janice Rogers Brown here in D.C. on the D.C. Circuit. It's a every turn in the story it's crazy and I mean having lived it it must feel that. It feels that way to me it really does. There are moments I wake up and feel like I can't believe this is happening and I'm the one living it and it's unbelievable. There's even a love story in it. I mean it's all it gets it's unbelievable. And now you're at Georgetown? Now I'm at Georgetown at the Appellate Litigation Clinic which I'm just finishing up a teaching fellowship there where we have 16 students and we take cases on appointment to the 11th Circuit the 4th Circuit and the D.C. Circuit and I've argued a few cases and just a few weeks ago prepared one of my students who argued in the D.C. Circuit before Judge Brown and yeah it's been a just one of the funnest jobs I've ever had. Have you in law school and did you do clinic work and stuff to continue helping are you still focusing on the pro se kind of side of things? I did so I did the innocence project but I was also moonlighting as an appellate practitioner through law school. I did wrote a lot of briefs for other lawyers. Without your name on them. Without my name on them. I know exactly what that feels like. That's what I've been doing here for seven years. I would tell you that there was one cert petition I prepared basically all in class sitting in the back row. I don't learn very well by lecture so I would get bored very quick so I would start writing briefs in the back row and not something I would recommend to my students but it worked for me. And you also had two kids. I also had two kids my son was born the first year I was out of prison and my daughter was born the second day of law school and now my wife's in law school at Catholic University. Oh really is she going to try and pursue some more type of... She is. She wants to work on prisoner cases and criminal cases. She'll probably do some appellate work with me and it would be good times. So what is the plan at Georgetown? Would you be pursuing helping build out the awareness is that part of the clinical stuff or awareness of the plight of prisoners in the pro se world? Yeah, so I'm getting ready right now to make the transition from clinical faculty to full time tenure track faculty which means I'll be writing a lot fewer briefs and writing more law review articles but Georgetown was pretty aware of what I wanted to do when they hired me which is teaching and writing scholarship is one component the other component is sentencing reform especially federal criminal justice reform since Georgetown's literally three blocks from the hill and then if there are opportunities for litigation where I feel like I can make an impact I will continue to do some of that as well. I really enjoy arguing appellate cases on behalf of one client one criminal defendant and so I don't think I will ever fully get away from that. Did you ever consider becoming an attorney a defense attorney in the private sector? No, I thought about becoming a public defender but I worked for the federal defender's office in Seattle one summer and I really enjoyed the work but what I realized was it was really hard on me to go to sentencing and be seated next to the client because I know unlike everyone else in that building exactly the sort of punishment that client's going to face and that it doesn't end once they're done with prison you know when we moved from Seattle to DC I was denied my whole family was denied apartments at various places because of my felony background so I know the punishment these men and women are facing and it was just really hard for me to do that day in and day out. What do you think most people should realize about the criminal justice system that you don't currently realize? How completely arbitrary it is especially the federal system who gets charged federally and who doesn't is completely arbitrary and then even built within that there's a lot of arbitrariness about how congress rights statutes I just wrote a lot of you article on this about how many of them are vague and ambiguous and courts tend to always expand statutes to cover the crime rather than narrow them and so there's just a lot of some of the people that get caught up in it aren't much different from the person that gets charged in state court and gets a year or two and prison is released and the person charged in federal court does 10 or 20 years and what do you think people can learn from your story? Well what I tell them is everyone goes through pretty profound changes between the ages of 20 and 40 like 20 when I committed the crimes maybe I'm now dad husband and if we know that we know that people make profound changes why do we think prisoners can't and if the answer is one people that commit crimes are inherently evil then we have to root out that fallacy if the other answer is well the prison system makes it so people can't be redeemed because it makes it worse not better well then that says something not about those individuals but about our criminal justice system and its failings Do you think that there are meaningful opportunities and now for reforms for criminal justice reforms I mean session seems to make it harder but do you think that are you optimistic at all? I am especially at the state level because I think a lot of the states have had success in pairing back their criminal justice system in time their crime rates have not gone up which is always you know I don't think there's a great correlation there but politicians tend to look at things like that and make the correlation regardless and so I do think that I don't think this administration is going to put much of a dent in that on the federal side I don't know I mean part of me thinks with sessions as attorney general it will be hard but on the other hand at least he's not still you know he kind of killed the bill the last time around and at least he won't be there anymore and I like to think that if people just understood it a little better that they would realize that this is kind of a win-win for everyone Thanks for listening This episode of Free Thoughts was produced by Test Terrible and Evan Banks To learn more visit us on the web at www.libertarianism.org