Thursday, March 7, 2019

“Professor Sullivan Deserves Our Respect”

Guest post by David McCallum

[Like the anonymous op-ed in the pervious post, this piece was submitted to and rejected by the Crimson, and has since been make public. It is worth noting that Professor Randall Kennedy's op-ed, which appeared in the Chronicle of Higher Education and is the subject of my post "A teachable moment," was also submitted to and rejected by the Crimson.]

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I spent 29 years in prison for a murder I didn’t commit. I was a teenager when I was put away, not much younger than many of you in college at Harvard. I was exonerated because of the work of Professor Ron Sullivan.

I am not a lawyer. I spent half of my teenage years, all of my 20’s and 30’s, and half of my 40’s in prison, so I missed that time to make a career and many other milestones of adult life I hope students in college can look forward to. I missed decades of my mother’s home-cooked food, taking care of my older sister through her deteriorating health, my friend’s marriages and childbirths and funerals, and the freedom to take a walk outside. But I do know a thing or two about the justice system. I know because I lived it. So please hear me out.

When I was 16 years old, I was questioned for a crime I didn’t commit. I was scared, confused, intimidated, and alone. I knew I was playing handball with my sister and her friends in a park near my home during the entire time this murder took place.

There was no one in the room with me, and I was questioned without a lawyer. The police said if I confessed I could go home. So I gave them their false confession. But when I asked if I could go home, I was put behind bars instead.

Things moved fast in the name of “justice”. It’s still crazy to me how few protections there were against injustice. Sure, I was asked if I wanted a lawyer. After I had already ‘confessed’. Sure, the police let my mother come see me. After I had already ‘confessed’. The system was swift in convicting me. I screamed that I didn’t do it, testified during my trial that I didn’t do it, and had lawyers appeal my conviction until all my appeals were exhausted - but it didn’t matter, because everyone with any power over my freedom at the time thought they knew the truth. It was too late.

So to prison I went. And I spent most of my life there. It wasn’t until Hurricane Carter drew attention to my case that my story started to become high profile. People started paying attention, and Professor Sullivan found me. He was helping the Brooklyn DA’s office at the time with conviction review, and I hand-wrote him a letter asking him for his help. I told him what I had been saying all along: that I was innocent. He listened.

Professor Sullivan personally pored over my file, found every hole in the prosecution’s version of events, saw that there was no valid evidence whatsoever, and he pushed the DA for my release. Professor Sullivan was never my defense attorney and he wasn’t the prosecutor either. He was a good lawyer seeking truth and justice, no matter which side of the courtroom he had to stand on to get it for me.

It takes a celebrity bringing attention to a case or to an issue, like Hurricane Carter did for me, for the holes in the criminal justice system to be exposed. When good lawyers take unpopular stands and defend people assumed to be guilty, like what I read that Professor Sullivan is doing for Harvey Weinstein, people pay attention to how the system works and take the time to dissect what’s wrong with it while he’s doing the same thing from the inside. That’s why when some lawyers called me about this resistance Professor Sullivan is experiencing for his Weinstein representation, I knew I had to respond. The image of Professor Sullivan in that courtroom when I was exonerated is seared in my memory, and I take it as a personal offense that anyone might challenge his capability to achieve justice.

Attention brings scrutiny, and scrutiny brings change. But press isn’t enough. Good lawyers are needed on both sides in order to use this attention to highlight every single problem in the system and to push for change from the inside. We can’t fix a system until we know exactly what parts are broken. When I first saw Professor Sullivan’s TED talk, I was moved to tears for that reason. He gets it, and he’s doing everything he can to identify and fix what’s broken.

I think we can also all agree that if I had someone like Professor Sullivan with me when I was on trial 35 years ago, my life would have been very different.

Innocent people deserve good lawyers from the minute they enter the system. In America, people are innocent until proven guilty. So, everyone deserves good lawyers from the start. If you believe otherwise, you would be supporting the same system that made me lose 29 years of my life to prison. A vigilante system where innocence is determined by public opinion and not evidence. I am a product of the dangers of that environment. Professor Sullivan is pulling us away from it, and I am following him as he creates the criminal justice system this country needs. I hope you will, too.

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