Nixon also encouraged him to go back to his hometown, where he had deep roots, because that’s where the fight was. made me realize that, if I wanted to be part of the change, I had to become a lawyer.” “I thought I would write a great history book about the civil rights movement,” Blackburn says, explaining why he chose University of Alabama. Nixon, who organized the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955 after his secretary, Rosa Parks, was arrested for sitting in the white section of a bus. His mentor was African-American civil rights leader E.D. Eventually, we develop a careless attitude about felonies.”īlackburn grew up in Northwest Texas in the ’60s and ’70s, and his heroes were the leaders of the civil rights movement, which drew him to Birmingham, Alabama, after high school. “This is where it starts: that careless attitude about due process. They plead guilty so they can get back to work. The vast majority don’t even get a lawyer. “Real injustice starts on the misdemeanor level, and it’s perpetuated daily. “Some people will look at this as a waste of time, but to me that’s the kind of grassroots work that lawyers need to be doing,” says the Amarillo native, who returned after college in Alabama. “I believe that staying connected with the New York people will compromise the work of criminal justice reform in this state,” his resignation letter stated.īlackburn has switched, in sports parlance, to playing “small ball.” His three-attorney firm, Blackburn & Brown, just filed a class action suit against the city of Amarillo for locking up people who can’t pay traffic tickets. It’s also one reason Blackburn resigned from the organization last May. That was exactly the kind of case the Innocence Project’s New York headquarters wanted its name attached to. Blackburn spearheaded the Timothy Cole Act, which made Texas the highest-paying state when it comes to compensating the wrongly convicted-$80,000 for every year incarcerated plus a lifetime annuity-after they’ve been freed. You know how many wrongful convictions they’ve had to overturn? One.”Īfter founding the Innocence Project’s Texas chapter in 2005, Blackburn got the first posthumous DNA exoneration in Texas for Timothy Cole, who was wrongly convicted of rape and died in prison. … Half of the judges are former public defenders. “Their public defenders are paid well, so they attract talent from all over the country. He offers the Colorado criminal-justice system as an example of one that works well. “OK, maybe one or two.”īlackburn was named the state Bar’s Criminal Defense Lawyer of the Year for 2002-2003 after he cleared 38 poor, black Tulia residents who had been convicted on drug-dealing charges after being arrested by a rogue police officer. “I have never seen a wrongful-conviction case that had a good lawyer representing the defendant in trial,” he says. Why is this so? Blackburn blames an underfunded and overmatched public defender system. Even the 52 figure was just a fraction of the “thousands of innocent people” sitting in Texas prisons today, according to Amarillo criminal defense and civil rights attorney Jeff Blackburn. Last year, the state led in exonerations, with 52 wrongful convictions overturned New York was a distant second at 17. 1 in the nation-by far-but it’s not exactly something to brag about.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |