ELEVEN

LAW SCHOOL

DURING THIS TIME, something else happened in my life that I could never have predicted: I went to law school. During college, a professor or two of mine mentioned that they thought I would make a great lawyer. It was a compliment, but I didn’t really take it too seriously. As my graduation from college drew near, however, I started looking into it more seriously. I now had my bachelor’s degree in public safety management, with a concentration in criminal justice. I could do good work with that degree, but how much more would I be able to do with graduate school on my resume? I saw there were folks who had previous criminal convictions who were lawyers or were taking the bar exams in their state. I didn’t know whether the loss of my civil rights in Florida would impede my ability to practice law. What I did understand was that, even if you had a checkered past, you were still able to go to law school. And that that sounded like a thrilling intellectual place.

The drive to go to law school came from the desire to understand as much as I possibly could about the law, in order to be of more service to others. I didn’t know if I was going to be a lawyer or not. There were so many hoops you had to jump through. When you graduate from law school with a past like mine, they put you through a fitness review where they pepper you with all types of questions to determine if you have been rehabilitated. Have you risen to a level where you’re able to be an attorney? I felt comfortable in my answers, but when the subjective judgment of other people is involved, there’s always a possibility that things won’t go your way.

I could understand why they would want to grill me. Being an attorney is a very serious profession. People are often at their most vulnerable when they deal with an attorney. Sometimes a lawyer can be entrusted with overseeing a lot of money. You might end up with insider knowledge because your clients are revealing a lot of information to you, and you can’t take advantage of that knowledge for your own personal gain or the gain of someone who’s close to you. You have to be as honest as the day is long, because as a lawyer you are an officer of the court. A lawyer does not have to place a hand on the Bible, like those who testify in a trial do when they swear that whatever they say is the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Once you’re sworn into the profession, you are always under oath, in a sense, and the court takes what you say to be the truth.

At times I thought Well, if I were a lawyer, what would I do? I would be a solo practitioner who represented people who could not afford me. I wasn’t going to law school so I could make the most money. If I did charge a six-figure retainer like some kind of Johnnie Cochran, I would make sure I was worth it. But a few of those clients would allow me to do my real work, which would be to take on people who had been wronged. Clients like the grandson of an old friend growing up: he had just been framed for murder. He couldn’t afford a top-flight attorney who was dedicated to him and not juggling dozens of state-assigned cases. I imagined representing him and helping him get treatment to get his life back together. I would keep him from getting caught up in our criminal justice system. That’s the type of lawyer I wanted to be.

That was the frame of mind I had when I matriculated at Florida International University College of Law. At the end of the day, I wanted to help people. I wanted to make a difference. That included my fellow classmates. You hear all these horror stories about how competitive law school is, how people tear sections out of law books so nobody else can read them. I told my new colleagues, “Listen, I’m not here to be better than you. I’m here to be the best that I can possibly be. What that means is if there’s an opportunity to help you be the best that you can possibly be, that makes me better.”

In my own small way, I was out to change the culture and perception of law school. In general, I don’t believe we have to tear each other down in order to get ahead in life. I don’t believe we have to deny others access in order for us to get ahead. I wasn’t going to try to hide something from a classmate; I was going to share what I’d learned. I believed that our greatness comes from helping others become great; our strength comes from empowering the weakest among us. To some degree that went against the environment that you find a lot in law school. For example, every class is graded on a curve. Only so many people can get an A, so many a B, a C, all the way down. I found out that it’s not good enough just to be right in law school. You have to be more right than the other person.

I thought this experience might help me with my work on the ballot initiative. That was another area of my life where I had to convince people to see things my way, and not only to convince them but to be the most convincing person they came across. When you have fourteen million voters, it’s not good enough just to be saying, “This is the right thing.” You had to be able to sell your position better than any opposition could, or better than any widespread misconceptions would.

The first year of law school was similar in many ways to undergraduate school. There were some basic core courses you had to take: Common Law, Legal Writing, Contracts, Civil Procedures, Criminal Law. These are the foundations of everything that follows in your next two years. Going into law school, one of the things that I heard was how you couldn’t work during your first year. They discourage you from taking a job because school is so hard and intense. I just couldn’t give up the rest of my life though. I had to continue to manage the three-quarter-way house and mentor folks there, because that played such a big role in my sobriety. I had to go on with my advocacy work. Asking me to not do that work was like asking me not to breathe.

That first year of law school is the make-or-break year. That’s when most people drop out. My first semester, I didn’t do so well in my Contracts class. Maybe I had too many other things going on; I don’t know. But they put me on academic probation. They let me know that I could not finish my first year under a certain GPA. That put even more pressure on the second semester, but I had a certain degree of confidence that I was getting the hang of things, and besides, in my second semester, I was going to get to take a class I knew a lot about, unfortunately: Criminal Law.

Of all the classes I took my first year in law school, Criminal Law was the one I really took to. A lot of the things the professor and the readings talked about I had some knowledge of, as I’ve been arrested multiple times and have also appeared before judges, and I had also helped so many other people in prison with their appeals. Because my real-life experiences made that course not too difficult for me, I took some time to mentor some of my classmates all through the semester and especially when it came time to take the final exam.

One of the things about law school is you don’t have any way to measure how well you’re doing in a particular class because you only take one exam at the end. You go to lectures throughout the whole semester, and then at the end you sit for a huge, three-hour exam. That’s it; whatever you get, you get. You don’t know, say, halfway through, if you’re weak in one area. There are no hard indicators that you’re not getting it, nothing glaring that would give you the opportunity to make adjustments.

At the end of the second semester, we had three weeks to study for our exams. A lot of students in our Criminal Law class separated into study groups to help each other. They would pass around written chronological outlines that covered everything that was discussed in class, from start to finish, with key headers for the different subjects within the course. There are various methods of studying. What I did was to connect with a few folks, and we found a room to lock ourselves in and we would lecture to each other. We went over the material, piece by piece. When it came to be my turn, a lot of it was in my head, so I could just lecture from memory.

We got through the study period and went ahead and took the exam. In law school, when you take an exam, you can feel good about it, but you never know what you’re going to actually get for a grade, so there’s a lot of anxiety. I remember at the end of my first semester, I kept checking the student portal trying to see how I did. They take so long to post your grades. The professors have to read through each exam, and then compare them all to each other to figure out that dreaded curve, so there’s a lot of work for them to do. Meanwhile, you’re just going crazy. School is over; you’re waiting on your grades. I had promised myself that I was not going to go through that torture again at the end of the second semester. Instead, I was going to get away, leave the country. I decided to go on a vacation back to the Virgin Islands. I had not revisited my birthplace since I left as a little kid. It felt like the perfect place to enjoy myself and block out all this law school stuff.

I did manage to relax and be a tourist while visiting. Midway through my vacation, I got a call from a classmate. He was speaking very excitedly, and our phone connection wasn’t that good, but I heard him say, “Oh my God! I just wanted to call and thank you for tutoring me. I ended up getting an A in Crim Law.”

When I heard that, I felt good because I’d been able to help out a colleague. This wasn’t just fluff on my part. I truly believe that service to others is the best way to do God’s will. I also felt good because I figured that if I knew the material well enough to help someone else get a good grade, then that meant I was going to get a good grade in the class as well.

Plus, it was Criminal Law—that’s my bread and butter! If I don’t know any other subject, I’m going to know Crim Law, because of my experience. Right after that call, I got a call from another guy who said he got a B+. So I started putting things together. If he got an A . . . and he got a B+ . . . I know at the very worst, I got a C+. If I get a C+, I’m good. That means I survived my academic probation and made it out of year one.

After that second call, I broke my self-imposed moratorium on checking my grades and went into the online student portal. I was scanning my grades to see what I got in Crim Law, because that was the immediate reason I was there; it was like I couldn’t even see the other grades. It was an F. I remember refreshing the screen, going back out and coming back in again. This has got to be a mistake. Out of all my classes for the entire year, the one that I was most confident in was Criminal Law. I was confident almost to the point that I may have been a little cocky about it. This was my class. I went back in for the fourth or fifth time and saw there was still an F there.

Was it a mistake? Did law schools make mistakes? My mind was blown. Could this be straightened out? The next thing I did was go into my emails, and I found one there from the school. The email basically told me that I had been dismissed from law school. It was not a mistake. That’s when the roof caved in.

All I can remember thinking was, I am a recovering addict. I am far away from home. There’s money in my bank account to get as much dope as I want. My hotel room was right above a bar. In my room, in fact, were six bottles of Cruzan Rum that I had purchased for my family. I am reading an email telling me I’ve been kicked out of law school. Thoughts are racing through my mind. How can I face people? I can’t go back to the continental United States. There are so many people who are counting on me, who are proud of me for overcoming so much in my life and getting into law school. There were articles written about me. People were inspired. All of this and it turns out I’m just a fraud. How can I look people in the eye?

It was the perfect storm, one of only two times that my recovery has been seriously tested, the first one being the Spider-Man Massacre. Luckily, something kicked in. They tell you that whenever you’re feeling like you’re getting ready to relapse, pick up the phone and call your sponsor. I called Frank at the three-quarter-way house. I had to tell him the situation I was in and how I was feeling. Maybe he could give me some guidance on what to do. I had previously gone to an AA meeting in Saint Croix; for some reason I hadn’t been able to find an NA meeting. Maybe Frank would tell me to find the very next AA meeting?

I called him and he picked up. As soon as I said, “What’s up, Frank?” he started fussing about a whole bunch of stuff that was happening at the recovery house while I’d been gone. He was telling me about all these different situations with our clients while I was waiting my turn to speak. But that turn never came. With each little vignette Frank shared, I started obsessing about my own situation less. I never got to tell him what was going on. Just hearing his voice and hearing what was going on with the guys took me out of my funk. It really pulled me back from that relapse I was about to have.

One of the things that I discovered during recovery was that speaking up at a meeting was not just for the other people at the treatment center; it was also for you. It might actually be more for you than for the other people there, because it helps you stay grounded. When you’re talking, you find yourself saying some things you weren’t thinking consciously but that needed to come out and that made a whole lot of sense and really applied to you. The other thing is, when you’re leading a meeting, you develop a sense of responsibility to the people who are in front of you, responding to your leadership.

Listening to Frank talk, I found my commitment to showing up for our guys. My continuing to live right was for them as well, because if I was talking to them about recovery and I relapsed, that could be harmful to them. They could say to themselves, “Man, look at this guy. He seemed to be doing so well. He was talking all that good stuff about recovery, but he still couldn’t stay clean. If he can’t, what makes me think I can?” That reminded me that maybe everybody else in the world might say that I’m no good because I flunked out of law school, but I knew one thing: there were some recovering addicts who still saw value in me. I still had something to offer, if to nobody else then to the people who were coming through our recovery house trying to stay clean. They were going to see me take a huge hit but keep on ticking. They were going to see me maintain my sobriety through this episode.