Jailhouse Lawyers. Mumia Abu-Jamal

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СКАЧАТЬ off to discuss cases with interested guys deep into the night.

      His reputation reached far and wide; men knew that he could be trusted to write their writs or advise them on where and how to lodge an appeal, when no other person on earth seemed to care. Every so often, a guy would come back from court and announce that Steve’s advice was correct; he had received a new hearing in his case, or sometimes a new trial. Steve seemed to take such news with genuine equanimity. If he obtained an ego boost from such news, it never showed. He seemed nonplussed about his considerable talents and brushed off praise like dandruff. This seemed all the more remarkable in the context of prison’s all-male milieu, where machismo often demands egotism.

      Once, he was compared to another legendary jailhouse lawyer, an older white guy named Mayberry who won more civil cases than most lawyers do in their entire careers. It is rare to open a case report that doesn’t begin or end with Mayberry in the citation, or at least mention him in the text.

      Steve demurred.

      “I don’t even compare with that dude, man. I mean, he has spent a lifetime in these joints, filing cases from here up to the Supreme Court. His stuff is in the casebooks, man. He done made more law than street lawyers.”

      When the speaker wouldn’t accept his assessment, Steve went even further.

      “Dig this—I can’t even hold a jock strap to that dude, man. I might know this or that about the law—and at that, only criminal law—but this dude knows criminal law and civil law, back to front. I don’t, man.”

      When the speaker once again protested, Steve politely closed the door.

      “I ain’t got no ego about this stuff, man. I will help a brother, but I’m also helping myself. I learn when I look at other cases, man. But I don’t trip on it, man. I ain’t got no ego about the law, man. That’s they law; it ain’t our law, dude.

      “They make that shit up as they go along.”

      Such an assertion may sound shocking, but is it?

      We, as Americans, believe that laws are decided by judges (or justices) of the courts. Essentially, judges say what the law is.

      But history teaches us that it ain’t always so. Let us briefly examine the case of Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad (1886).³ When California sought to tax the wealthy railroad companies, the companies went to court to defeat the challenge. The case went all the way to the Supreme Court, which, not surprisingly, ruled in favor of the rich.

      What is remarkable isn’t that they did it, but how they did it.

      If one peruses the text of the opinion, one will find no reference to what is now regarded as its central holding: that corporations are persons within the meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, and are thus entitled to full constitutional protections.

      How can that be?

      It seems that the court reporter, whose duties are to record the proceedings, introduce the opinion in the printed text, and then publish the official opinion, cited a remark made by the court’s Chief Justice prior to oral arguments. In what are called the headnotes⁴ to the case, chief court reporter J.C. Bancroft Davis wrote, “The defendant Corporations are persons within the intent of the clause in section I of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, which forbids a State to deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”⁵

      But headnotes only serve as a convenient summary of the actual case. This recap is sometimes referred to as a syllabus. In any event, they are not part of the case. No judge or justice writes a headnote, nor is the court bound by any part of it.

      Writing headnotes is the duty of the court reporter, who, while a court employee, is not a judicial officer.

      Yet Davis’ assertion became the law—and it stands to this very day. Now, to return to our deeply held belief that judges make laws, that’s true—to a point. Perhaps it’s truer to say that judges make such laws as their law clerks allow.

      I say that because these law clerks, usually stellar twentysomething grads of the nation’s most prestigious law schools, perform a dazzling array of judicial duties, so much so that such a credential virtually ensures one’s future as a law professor or practitioner. Indeed, law clerks have a habit of being recycled in later life as Supreme Court justices (which makes sense, for haven’t they already done the work?). Perhaps the best-known of recent years was the late Chief Justice William Rehnquist, who was a law clerk for Justice Robert Jackson of New York.

      What do law clerks do? Former law clerk Edward Lazarus wrote a book about his experiences during what he termed the “dog days” of the court’s term, March and April. He lists some of the duties of the law clerks:

      [D]rafting majority opinions, drafting dissents, drafting concurrences (opinions that agree with the result reached by the majority opinion but for somewhat different reasons), writing “bench memos” (which help a Justice prepare for a case the Court is about to hear), writing post-oral argument memos (which amend views set forth in bench memos), commenting on draft opinions, dissents, and concurrences circulated by other Chambers, recommending which new petitions for certiorari the Court should grant, and advising on emergency applications, often including last-minute requests for stays of execution.⁶

      Given that insight, who really makes law?

      There is a considerable distance between the offices of a court clerk and the prison cell, yet the vagaries of the clerk’s duties visit profound consequences on the inmate. For many men in Huntingdon State Prison, that distance of class, space, and power was bridged by the intercession of a committed jailhouse lawyer.

      Steve Evans taught what he learned about the law to as many men as he found were patient enough to study. There are now dozens of people all around the state who have learned from him.

      The problem was, as much as he tried, Steve couldn’t get anything really cooking on his own case. It’s the bane of jailhouse lawyers. They seem to be able to help everybody but themselves. With his aggravated assault case—Steve said he shot a dude who was trying to shoot him—he couldn’t buy a new trial. Yet, win or lose, he continued to try to get a good result. He fought as long and as hard as he could.

      Steve never obtained the key to his own case, and maxed out—did the maximum sentence. As he prepared to leave Huntingdon Prison and return to his beloved family home in Virginia, he was served notice of a long-forgotten federal detainer—a legal order forbidding his release to anywhere but federal custody—and snatched straight into federal custody, where his fight for freedom began anew.

      This was not to be. Disheartened by the turn of events, after nearly a decade of living in the hole, smoking—as he used to joke—“like a Cherokee,” rarely exposed to fresh air or sunlight, Steve died of lung cancer while imprisoned in Lewisburg Federal Prison in Union County, Pennsylvania, near Bucknell University.

      Before he died, one of his students, a remarkable autodidact named Warren Henderson, would make his teacher proud—as well as break his heart.

      Warren Henderson

      Warren was a young man who came to Huntingdon after the ruinous street wars of the 1970s had raged like a tsunami through North Philadelphia. Like far too many coming from the city’s СКАЧАТЬ