Legal News

29 Cent-per-Hour Jailhouse Lawyer Under Investigation

By Dan Slater

The saga of jailhouse lawyer Michael Ray, the feel-good movie legal story of the year, has run up against a new antagonist: South Carolina’s Attorney General Henry McMaster. According to this AP story, the authorities are investigating Ray, who helped a fellow inmate win Supreme Court review of his drug possession case, for practicing law without a license.

Here’s what happened: Ray, 42, who’s 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 pro-se litigant 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, the man who, in about an hour from now, will argue the Supreme Court case of Exxon v. Baker.

Now, according to Rauch Wise, a South Carolina lawyer who represents Ray, the authorities are looking into whether Ray is guilty of unauthorized practice, a crime that carries up to two years in prison and a $5,000 fine. “I sit there and do all this work, and I never get the Supreme Court to grant mine,” Wise said. “He may be a better lawyer than I am.” Ray, a member of the ABA, is a certified paralegal who reportedly plans to consult for a criminal defense firm if, and when, he’s released in April.

In a letter to the AP, Ray said he was surprised by the investigation. “With no disrespect to [people] up in Columbia, I think somebody may quite possibly have missed the year in law school covering the Constitution and federal law,” he wrote. “Anyone who knows me already knows that I certainly love a challenge.”

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on February 27, 2008 (boomark / email).