Being born in a negative context can often condition people's lives, but despite the adversities we all have the possibility of twisting destiny.
that happened to
Jarrett Adams (42)
who in 1998 was wrongly accused of sexual abuse for
which he was sentenced to 28 years in prison
.
What is striking is that Jarrett was imprisoned at only 17 years old.
In the prison library, the young man found law books that helped him obtain his freedom a few years later, in 2007.
“Everyone has a constitutional right to an effective advocate.
So my constitutional right was violated by not having an effective defender," Jarrett told
CNN
years later.
He is now a lawyer and helps people with wrongful convictions.
This is his story.
Jarrett Adams was jailed at just 17 years old.
fighting against the current
Jarret Adams was born in 1981 south of
Chicago, United States
.
Her father was in and out of jail and her mother battled drug addictions.
Despite everything, she Adams always liked sports and she was very intelligent in school, from which she graduated in 1998 with only 17 years of age.
Due to her good grades, she was awarded a scholarship to the
University of Wisconsin-Whitewater
.
But everything was going to change after attending, along with 3 friends, a university party.
Three weeks after the celebration, Jarrett found a card from a police officer on his doorstep.
A girl at the party had accused Adams and her two friends of rape.
A few days later,
Jarrett and his friends were arrested for alleged sexual assault
.
“We were totally innocent.
That was an absolute and total lie.
I realized very early on that it had nothing to do with the truth.
We were all black and a white girl accused us of rape," Adams said in an interview with
CNN
years later.
Jarrett, despite being a minor, was tried as an adult in the Wisconsin court.
He was the only defendant who did not have the money to hire a defense attorney, and they had to assign one to him.
Finally, in 2002, Adams and one of the defendants (the other was acquitted) were sentenced to 20 years in a maximum security prison, but the judge gave Adams an additional eight years because he refused to apologize.
Jarrett did not have the money to hire a lawyer, so they had to assign one to him.
A hope from the darkest place
After being depressed for 18 months, Jarrett became good friends with a cellmate.
Without knowing it, that person was going to be key in his life.
The inmate recommended that Adams go to the law library to find out why his own defense failed.
Once she found the right books, she learned that her public defender violated her rights by failing to locate and call a witness: “Everyone has a constitutional right to an effective defense attorney.
So my constitutional right was violated by not having an effective defense attorney,” Jarrett said.
Once the flaw was found, he took the trouble to write letters to many lawyers to achieve a representation that would allow him to be free again.
Finally, in 2004, he received a response from a lawyer in
Milwaukee
.
Over the course of six months, Adams worked with the practitioner to begin drafting a habeas petition, laying the groundwork for an argument that would ultimately succeed in the Court of Appeals.
In 2006, eight years after Jarrett's arrest, his defense argued the case before the Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit in Chicago.
The court unanimously overturned Adams' conviction.
In February 2007, after eight years, he
was finally released.
Adams was released in February 2007.
He found
a purpose
In May of that same year, Adams began studying law at the
University of Chicago
and
in 2015 officially graduated as a lawyer
: “I may have graduated from Loyola Law School in Chicago, but I started law school at the Wisconsin Department of Corrections,” Adams said.
Before long, he was hired by
the Innocence Project
to conduct defenses for wrongfully prosecuted men of color.
Blacks make up just 13% of the
United States
population , yet half of innocent people convicted of crimes and later exonerated are black, according to a study published in 2017 for the National Registry of Exonerations.
Adams was exonerated, but one of his co-defendants never had the charges dropped, while the third was never convicted at all.
That is why the lawyer knows how important it is to urgently address system failures.
In 2015 Jarrett Adams officially graduated as a lawyer from the University of Chicago
“I strongly believe that the problems with our criminal justice system will only get better when we infiltrate the system, which means more black judges, more black prosecutors, more black lawyers, black youth, that's what we need, and I hope my story I got to that movement," Adams told
CNN.
One of the most popular cases that lawyer Jarrett Adams took was that of Kevin Balley, who served almost 30 years of an 80-year sentence for a murder in 1989 that he did not commit and thanks to the lawyer he was able to prove his innocence.
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