Redeeming Justice: From Defendant to Defender, My Fight for Equity on Both Sides of a Broken System

Product Description

“A moving and beautifully crafted memoir.”—SCOTT TUROW “A daring act of justified defiance.”—SHAKA SENGHOR “Nothing less than heroic.”—JOHN GRISHAM   He was seventeen when an all-white jury sentenced him to prison for a crime he didn’t commit. Now a pioneering lawyer, he recalls the journey that led to his exoneration—and inspired him to devote his life to fighting the many injustices in our legal system.

Seventeen years old and facing nearly thirty years behind bars, Jarrett Adams sought to figure out the why behind his fate. Sustained by his mother and aunts who brought him back from the edge of despair through letters of prayer and encouragement, Adams became obsessed with our legal system in all its damaged glory. After studying how his constitutional rights to effective counsel had been violated, he solicited the help of the Wisconsin Innocence Project, an organization that exonerates the wrongfully convicted, and won his release after nearly ten years in prison.

But the journey was far from over. Adams took the lessons he learned through his incarceration and worked his way through law school with the goal of helping those who, like himself, had faced our legal system at its worst. After earning his law degree, he worked with the New York Innocence Project, becoming the first exoneree ever hired by the nonprofit as a lawyer. In his first case with the Innocence Project, he argued before the same court that had convicted him a decade earlier—and won.

In this illuminating story of hope and full-circle redemption, Adams draws on his life and the cases of his clients to show the racist tactics used to convict young men of color, the unique challenges facing exonerees once released, and how the lack of equal representation in our courts is a failure not only of empathy but of our collective ability to uncover the truth. 
Redeeming Justice is an unforgettable firsthand account of the limits—and possibilities—of our country’s system of law.

Amazon.com Review

Redeeming Justice is a testament to both the gross inequities plaguing our justice system and the determination that brought Jarrett Adams’ life full circle, from defendant to lawyer. Adams was barely 18 when an all-white judge and jury sentenced him to 28 years in prison for a crime he didn’t commit. That was the beginning of Adams’ battle to prove his innocence in a judicial system that is not only racist but also inherently biased against the poor. Adams recounts his years of incarceration with a disproportionate number of fellow Black men, how he came to study the law, his eventual exoneration, and the years that followed when he struggled to acclimate to “normal” life. But he persisted in reaching his goal and, against all odds, became a lawyer for the Wisconsin Innocence Project. Evoking emotions ranging from outrage and shock to hope and vicarious pride,
Redeeming Justice is a real-life phoenix-rising story you won’t want to miss.
—Seira Wilson, Amazon Editor

Review

“[Brings] to life the horrors of the criminal system through the eyes of someone readers feel they know: a person who loves and is loved. And the links between [Adams’s] experiences and his choices are clear and stark: His observations of lawyers helped usher him into a career as one, just as his experience of wrongful accusation spurred his interest in exonerating the innocent. . . . The intimacy of Adams’s writing illustrates the inherent violence of our carceral system in a way that would be impossible without his firsthand experience—and without his willingness to share it.”
—The Washington Post

“In a moving and beautifully crafted memoir, without hyperbole or rants, Jarrett Adams compellingly demonstrates the institutionalized racism of the American criminal justice system. When you finish, you will be grasped by two emotions: unbounded admiration for the author and a need to scream ‘We must do something!’”
—Scott Turow, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Pres