The jailhouse lawyer

If Duncan's life story were a movie, there would be many points where it would reach a crescendo of vindication. It is in those times, when often minor or grotesquely bureaucratic details bear him back to the circumstances of his past, that The Jailhouse Lawyer will stagger readers at both Duncan's resilience and the deep flaws of the legal system. In 1982, Duncan left his hometown of New Orleans for a Job Corps station in Mount Hood, Oregon. But, as Duncan puts it, New Orleans "had a way of ruining things." New Orleans police had tracked Duncan down for a murder that had taken place before he left the city. A shaky eyewitness testimony led to a quick conviction. This is followed by decades of navigating the serpentine legal system, advocating for himself and others as a jailhouse lawyer, and crafting motions and studying case law from inside Angola's law library. While The Jailhouse Lawyer, written with coauthor Sophie Cull, is told from a third-person perspective, Duncan's distinctive voice shines through. The inmates he helps along the way showcase that, though Duncan's story may be remarkable, it is sadly not unique. Readers will come away changed--angry, heartened, and galvanized.

A memoir on the making of a literal "jailhouse lawyer." Wrongfully arrested and convicted of murder in New Orleans, which at the time had "the highest rate of wrongful convictions in the nation, with nearly all the victims being Black men who…grew up poor," Duncan served for 23 years in Louisiana's notorious Angola prison and other institutions. He might have done his time at the Orleans Parish Prison, but, he writes, he wanted access to Angola's more extensive law library. Well before being transferred there, he petitioned the Louisiana Supreme Court for a law book, a motion denied because it had not first been adjudicated in a lower court. A sympathetic judge gave him a copy all the same, and Duncan was off to a career as an inmate advocate, regularly filing petitions and lawsuits on his own behalf and that of his fellow prisoners--the first suit being "over the jail's failure to provide him with a high-fiber diet," soon followed by motions to provide mental health treatment, end beatings and arbitrary punishments, and improve medical care. Known as the "Snickers Lawyer" for taking payment in candy, he became a self-taught expert on constitutional issues. Naturally, he recounts, he was targeted by guards and wardens for his legal activism, even as he proved essential to Angola's population; in time, too, he found a few unlikely allies among the staff. Duncan's well-told story is full of fraught moments of abuse both physical and judicial, though it has something of a happy ending in that, after earning a law degree after his release, he was exonerated of the crime and has since been fighting for other prisoners to "have meaningful access to the courts." An eye-opening look at prison life from the point of view of a true warrior for justice. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.