Legal News

Law Blog Jailhouse Lawyer of the Day: Michael Ray

By Dan Slater

In Shawshank Redemption, one of the Law Blog’s favorite buddy flicks, there’s a plot-line in which Tim Robbins — who plays the wrongly-convicted accountant, Andy Dufresne — uses his education to help fellow inmates obtain their high-school diplomas. We were reminded of this heartwarming tale while reading about jailhouse lawyer Michael Ray.

Ray, a former paralegal who is nearing the end of a six-year sentence for real-estate fraud, has no college or law school education. Yet he drafted an appeal for Keith Lavon Burgess, who is in prison for crack posession. Ray argued that a 20-year mandatory minimum sentence was inappropriate for Burgess because his prior drug conviction was a misdemeanor, not a felony. Against all odds, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear the case, which will be argued by Stanford Law School Professor Jeff Fisher. A successful appeal could reportedly cut Burgess’s sentence in half, the NLJ article says.

Ray, the article says, conducts his own CLE by reading legal journals and joining legal associations, including the ABA. “They’re probably not super proud to have me as a member,” said the 42 year-old Ray, “but I do pay my dues every year.”

The Law Blog connected with Professor Fisher, a former Justice Stevens clerk who now runs Stanford’s Supreme Court Litigation Clinic, to ask how often a jailhouse lawyer actually wins cert at the Supreme Court. “My sense,” said Fisher, who has never spoken with or met Ray, “is that the Court grants a pro se petition maybe once a year, or once every two years.”

We’ve written before about pro-se litigants, but we’d love to pick up the discussion again. We imagine jailhouse (and other) diaries are filled with tales of pro-se disappointment, but anyone had any big-time pro-se successes? Let us hear about ‘em!

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on February 08, 2008 (boomark / email).