And so, I give you Barry Scheck:
co-founder of the Innocence Project,
godfather of the Innocence Movement, savior of many,
inspiration to all.
Ladies and gentlemen, Barry Scheck.
President Herbst, Chairman McHugh, Dean Fisher, distinguished faculty,
graduates of the Class of 2014,
families and friends of the graduates of the Class of 2014,
faculty and administration of this
distinguished law school, it is indeed an honor and a privilege to share this day with you,
but I must, as the winner of the
2014 men's basketball pool,
at 99 Hudson Street,
beating out all the geniuses from the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and the Mexican American legal Defense Fund, I
want to personally thank
Kevin Ollie, Shabazz Napier, and the great Husky team.
I really did win-I got $349,
for yet another thrilling championship. So this is your first post law school lesson:
you'll never go broke
betting on UConn basketball,
especially the Lady Huskies.
But enough,
sincere, but admittedly shameless pandering to the UConn community.
Why don't we talk about your reality?
I know many of you have
substantial loans from your college and law school education that you have to pay.
When I graduated law school at the University of California at Berkeley in
1974, I was able to pay my law school tuition,
this is true, from winnings at the Oaks Club Poker Parlor in Emeryville, California.
But as my wife reminds me all the time, the tuition was $400 a semester.
That's a state school for you, right?
Today, the yearly tuition at Berkeley is
close to $55,000.
I know you are entering what must be considered historically a
depressed labor market for the employment of lawyers.
The legal services sector lost 1,200 jobs in April according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics.
In May of
2007, just before the Great Recession,
the legal Sector had reached a peak of
1.18 million jobs.
Today, seven years later, there are 43,600 fewer jobs than in May of
2007. Now if you just want to go out and hang a shingle as
community lawyer in general practice who does wills and real estate
paperwork or incorporate small businesses, you now have to compete with legalzoom.com
or other online methods.
A longitudinal study of the graduating law school class of 2000 finds that
24% percent of law graduates are no longer practicing law.
The gap in pay for doing public interest work,
defending the poor, or working in government service
versus doing legal work for moneyed interests has never been greater.
You do not need to read "Capital in the Twenty-First
Century," the new best-selling analysis by French Economist Thomas Piketty,
to understand this worldwide problem of widening inequality and its
implications for the American legal system in our country.
You only need to read the last issue of the ABA journal, and this is a quote:
"Public defenders and prosecutors in Massachusetts are so poorly paid, that they are among the working poor,"
according to a study by the State Bar Association.
Assistant district attorneys in the state earn
$37,500 a year, and public defenders earn
$40,000 according to a study by the Bar Association's
Blue-Ribbon Commission on Criminal Justice Attorney Compensation.
Starting pay for these lawyers should be raised to $55,000 the report said:
"Sadly, the lowest paid person in a Massachusetts courtroom is a newly minted
Assistant District Attorney," the report says,
"Working up from the bottom, the next lowest paid employee in the courthouse is the custodian, and the third lowest paid
person in the courtroom is the public defender."
The state prides as a leader in many fields including the law,
"But in the compensation of criminal justice lawyers it ranks dead last,"
the report says.
Martin Healey, Chief Legal Counsel for the Bar Association
told the Boston Globe that many public defenders and prosecutors work second jobs,
often in the hospitality industry,
"They are working as bartenders, as waiters, as waitresses," he said, "They are not living an
extravagant lifestyle."
So in light of these realities,
will I now, as you suspected all along,
have the temerity,
the unmitigated chutzpah, to traffic in law school
graduation clichés,
to urge you to defend the poor, to do public interest work, to work in the public sector,
or do something with your time and legal knowledge
(whatever career path you choose) to save our planet, our republic, and the cause of justice?
Will I have the nerve to assure you that
your abilities,
that applying your abilities to a just cause that truly helps the
disadvantaged will provide you energy and passion that in the words of Thurgood Marshall,
"In recognizing the humanity of our fellow human beings, we pay ourselves the highest tribute"?
Will I have the nerve to do that? Well of course I will.
But at least I hope to make an
evidence-based argument, relying on the life stories of the people who chose to come celebrate your graduation
with great hopes for your success.
People who you should regard not just as role models,
but also mentors.
My argument starts with Judge Karen Goodrow,
who is here with us today as you saw.
Karen, as she has said many times in talks with young lawyers, came from a family
where there was no
expectation or support to attend college,
much less law school, yet she did it,
doing all kinds of jobs to pay her way and
taking out substantial loans.
When she graduated law school she became a public defender here in Connecticut.
She paid off her loans, and as far as those of us who work in the Innocence Movement are concerned,
the rest as you have heard is history.
She formed the Connecticut Innocence Project within the Public Defender's Office;
she helped exonerate James Tillman, Ken Ireland, and Miguel Romano along with her
fabulous team that have all been introduced with you today and her wonderful
successor Darcy McGraw, all of them here; and
with the assistance that has already been noted of our wonderful policy director Steve Saloom,
Karen and her colleagues have passed statutes in this state
establishing a right to post-conviction DNA testing,
mandatory videotaping of interrogations,
mandatory best practices for eyewitness identification procedures,
a compensation bill for the wrongly convicted.
You know these are reforms that look in the state of New York, we're still working on these
fifteen years in, you got it done.
But these reforms, as
Dean Fisher has told you, not only protect the innocent, but they enhance the capability of law enforcement
to identify the person who really committed the crime.
Every single day,
these reforms
that the Connecticut Innocence Project helped enact
increase public safety and
they help to ensure a more just and fair criminal justice system.
Now by the way, a lot more needs to be done.
It's terrific that Kevin Kane is here, and we've all been talking about it.
There are two rules that the ABA has adopted
in its new rules of professional responsibility, Rule 3.8 G and
3.8 H, and these are ethical obligations that
post-conviction, a
prosecutor, when there is material evidence of innocence that he or she knows about should disclose it, and
if there is clear and convincing evidence of innocence,
the prosecutor should work with people like the Connecticut Innocence Project
to do something about it, something that you're already doing here in this state.
But it should be the law, you shouldn't be the tenth state to adopt
3.8 G and H, and I know that there are discussions going on right now about forming what we like to call
Conviction Integrity Units, where the defense and the prosecution
work together on a joint
reinvestigation of cases with
agreements about what should be disclosed and what should not be disclosed work together
to try to find out if due process were violated or an innocent person is convicted, and
that's the way that we'll advance on non-DNA cases.
As hard as it may have seemed it sometimes to get
exonerations with DNA cases, the non-DNA cases,
that is really where the action is and that is where we'll really learn so much about
how we can get rid of error and injustice in our system.
So,
Karen Goodrow, that's my case,
working as a public defender, she paid off her loans, got it done.
She raised a family,
last year, she became a judge, and
she's also terrific fun, down to Earth, and totally honorable: that is a model in a robe, a
mentor and a role model for you.
Now my argument next turns
to Dean Fisher, and
Marshall Pomp stole a little bit of my thunder here,
but you really have to recognize
Tim Fisher, he went to Yale and Columbia Law School.
He spent much of his time developing expertise in construction law, trust and probate,
municipal law, UCC articles two, three, and four, subjects that I vaguely remember from two bar examinations that I took
forty years ago.
He practiced in a series of corporate firms, culminating in being the managing partner of
McCarter and English; yet when you look at his career path, at
every stage of his career as a corporate lawyer,
Dean Fisher was deeply involved in social justice issues
that made our system and society better.
He dedicated himself to prison condition litigation. Nothing tells you more about the
health of a society, it's always been said, then how we treat people and prisoners.
And he was lead counsel in a lawsuit that closed Montville Jail
and corrected conditions at Niantic Correctional Facility.
He took on significant process issues concerning speedy trial and
alternative dispute resolution.
He was a leader in marriage equality
litigation. He helped Habitat for Humanity and
innumerable
nonprofits across the state function
strategically and efficiently.
For years he's done
exemplary work for the Connecticut Bar Foundation, and we in the Innocence Movement are
especially indebted to Tim for having McCarter and English literally take in the Innocence Project
at its inception
so that it could survive, function, and flourish.
In an era when law school applications, let's be honest, are plummeting, and the value of legal education
itself is being severely questioned, Tim has chosen to dedicate his
extraordinary talents to being dean of this wonderful law school. Let me tell you
as a contemporary,
becoming a law school dean in this challenging environment means you are courageous,
unusually optimistic, and perhaps a little crazy in the best sense of the word.
So if you are going to choose a corporate law career path,
and you want to do well and do good, I
submit to you Dean Fisher as a role model and a mentor.
But the strongest evidence that I can marshal to make my case that
whatever career path you choose after law school should involve;
that you should involve yourself right away in some passionate commitment to a just cause-
not the day after tomorrow,
or after you finish your first job or after you pay down all your loans, but right away, and
my evidence comes from James Tillman,
Ken Ireland, and Miguel Romano,
three exonerees from the Connecticut Innocence Project.
Ken Ireland did twenty-one years in Connecticut prisons and jails
for a sexual/assault murder he didn't commit.
He was convicted based on false informant testimony, unreliable forensic evidence, and
exonerated by DNA testing which identified the real assailant and Ken didn't even know.
Ken is still waiting
compensation for his wrongful conviction, going through this claims process,
and it's moving a little too slowly for our taste, yet when you meet Ken
you will find a
soft-spoken, thoughtful man who does not express outrage,
anger, and bitterness that you would expect from someone who has endured such a terrible injustice
for so long.
He works at the Capitol Region Education Council, spends a lot of time volunteering at NPR
and Connecticut Public Television because among other things,
their programming gave him sustenance and joy during his incarceration.
Miguel Romano did eighteen-and-a-half years in prison for a murder he did not commit.
He was also convicted by false informant testimony and exonerated by DNA that identified the person who really committed the crime and others.
When Miguel was released-when he went to prison, his three children were quite young.
When got out, he was a grandfather many times over.
Family means everything to him, and as you heard he's at his daughter's graduation. He also awaits compensation for the Claims Board.
James Tillman,
Connecticut's first exoneree,
did sixteen-and-a-half years in prison for a sexual assault he did not commit that occurred right here in Hartford.
If the reforms we have in place today,
governing eyewitness identification and videotaping interrogations, had been in place in 1989,
I am confident James would have never been arrested or convicted.
He was exonerated by DNA evidence and the real assailant, somebody who at some point in time was in the same prison as James,
was identified and has pled guilty.
You should go down to the Hopewell Baptist Church here sometime and hear James sing in the choir.
I have never spent a moment with James
when he wasn't ebullient.
No other word describes it.
He is such an energetic and joyful person, you would never, ever guess that
he spent so many years
locked up in maximum-security prisons for a crime he didn't commit.
These three men,
all from different racial and ethnic backgrounds, and with distinctly different temperaments,
will all tell you they have no time and no
use for being bitter
about the colossally bad hand they were dealt.
They transcended that bitterness
long before they were liberated from prison.
Spend some quality time with these exonerees, and you realize that being weighed down by the
nagging and petty grievances and frustrations of your personal or professional lives is
really just silly,
just beside the point, just wasted energy.
Spend some time with these exonerees, and you come to understand
even if they don't wear it on their sleeves or hit you over the head with it
that they are all
passionately committed
to making sure
that what happened to them
doesn't happen to anyone else again, that all that pain must have a purpose.
If you spend time with them, and you really pay attention, you will realize immediately
that whatever your spiritual stance towards the world,
every second of this life is both precious and precarious,
and you will be inspired to correct injustice anywhere you find it.
You know the mantra: "An injustice anywhere is an injustice everywhere."
And since you have all been well-trained
to think as lawyers, you are perfectly situated to act tomorrow, if
you just allow yourselves
to feel it and see it, if you just stay alert and pay attention.
In fact, it is a very exciting time to become a lawyer. Just look at the field I know best: criminal justice.
Dramatic changes is in the air, and we've reached a real inflection point.
Voices from the left and right are decrying the
unfairness and ineffectiveness of mandatory minimum sentences, mass incarceration, over-criminalization.
Rehabilitation and reentry are no longer dirty words or neglected goals.
Two weeks ago the National Research Council issued a detailed study on these matters
that's worth reading and a great road map for reform.
The National Institutes of Standards and Technology and the Department of Justice
have finally agreed to do something meaningful about the
2009 National Academy of Science report that found aside from DNA testing most forensic evidence
disciplines, including
fingerprints, ballistics, and other pattern evidence, lacked proper scientific validation.
After the fifty-year anniversaries of Gideon and Brady decisions, we now see renewed determination
to improve the quality of indigent defense and crack down on law enforcement misconduct.
Now of course I could regale you with a torrent of information about how dire these problems still are,
not to mention the intractable problem of
racial bias in our system, but I choose to emphasize the positive movement,
not just because it's wishful thinking, because it's really there and
it must be supported.
It's all a matter of how you choose to
look at the world of law as you enter what can be if you want it,
a very noble calling.
Now Friday night, I had dinner with my daughter
who is a second-year law student, and
I told her that I was coming here to give this commencement talk, and in her own inimitable way
She told me that I really knew nothing about commencement exercises and graduation speeches
because I had not read or
"checked out" a commencement address by the late David Foster Wallace in May
2005 at Kenyon College, and she told me was the only half-decent commencement speech
she'd ever heard and she was aghast that I had not read it and as usual she had a very good point.
So here's a small excerpt of what Wallace told the
Kenyan Undergraduates in May 2005:
"Twenty-years after my own graduation,
I have come gradually to understand that the liberal arts
cliché about teaching you how to think is actually
shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea.
Learning how to think
really means learning how to exercise some control over
how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose
what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience.
Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life,
you will be totally hosed."
So let me update this
for a UConn Law graduation in
May of 2014.
You will soon have a license to practice law, a
cudgel to correct injustice.
If you don't stand for something,
you'll fall for anything as a lawyer.
Choose to construct meaning from your own law school experience.
Don't get totally hosed. Thank you very much.
