After his exoneration, Jarrett Adams (JD ’15) seeks justice for others

The data on the incarcerated population in the United States appear to support that account. According to the Prison Policy Initiative, more than 42 percent, or 840,000, of the nearly 2 million people incarcerated in the United States are Black, even as Black people represent only 14 percent of the population. Many inmates are poor, with inmates earning 41 percent less, on average, than non-incarcerated people of similar ages, which makes it especially difficult for them to afford skilled and dedicated legal representation.

Adams wants to change that. After being exonerated, he vowed to go to law school and become an attorney to “serve those behind bars who have been locked up for minor crimes, serving unconscionably long sentences, and those who have been wrongfully accused, people like Terrence and Ferrone,” he wrote in his 2021 memoir Redeeming Justice.

More than that, he made a commitment to educate others about the injustices he experienced and, in so doing, improve what he views as a flawed justice system—one that often falls short of its ideals of preserving public safety, ensuring fairness, and upholding the rule of law.

“What’s really wonderful is he came to law school and wanted to make a difference in the world, to convert his pain into purpose, and he has done that,” said Michael Kaufman, a former dean at the Loyola University Chicago School of Law who is now the dean at Santa Clara University School of Law. “And he’s done that in a way that’s incredibly powerful and meaningful to people who really have benefited from his help and will benefit from his help immensely in the future.”

Adams is quick to extend such praise in the opposite direction. Raised in a deeply religious Baptist family, he credits Loyola’s Jesuit values—crucially, standing in solidarity with the poor and marginalized as a “person for and with others”—for deepening his resolve, not just to defend the rights of individuals denied justice, but also to stamp out the underlying causes of injustice. His work is closely aligned with the law school’s broader educational vision.

“Using our Catholic Jesuit mission as foundation, our law school trains students to become lawyers capable of using their skills, talents and treasures to transform the world,” said Michèle Alexandre, the dean of the School of Law. “We feel very privileged to stand in the tradition of this five-hundred-year-old Jesuit legacy of using education as a source for enlightenment, for healing and for addressing injustice.”

Even on the surface, Adam’s achievements are the stuff of a crisply tailored Netflix special. While taking night classes at the School of Law, he worked as a full-time investigator at the Federal Defender Program for the Northern District of Illinois. Working with federal defender MiAngel Cody he helping to secure the clemency of Reynolds Wintersmith under former President Barack Obama in 2013 at a time when clemencies were almost unheard of. After earning his JD and passing the bar, he started a public-interest law fellowship with the esteemed Ann Claire Williams, a former judge for the Seventh Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals.

Later, he became the first exoneree to get a job as an attorney for the Innocence Project, a highly regarded litigation and public policy organization that uses DNA testing to prove wrongful convictions. Then, in 2017, he took an even bigger leap, launching the Law Office of Jarrett Adams to tackle civil rights matters and wrongful conviction cases—like Claiborne and Richardson’s—that lack DNA evidence.

Adams is also, with another exoneree, Antoine Day, a co-founder and board member of Life After Justice, a nonprofit that works to empower wrongfully convicted individuals through strategic litigation, policy research, and holistic mental health services. Members of the board have collectively served nearly 90 years incarcerated for crimes they didn’t commit.

“They’re not just faces on a poster,” said Joi Adams, who is married to Jarrett and serves as the organization’s executive director. “One of the parts of our mission is to build an ecosystem of support for people who’ve been wrongfully convicted and their loved ones. We start in the courtroom and end in the therapy room and beyond that.”

But to appreciate any of Adam’s accomplishments, you need to understand his story.

Li’l Johnnie Cochran with glasses

Adams grew up in a sprawling two-story house on a corner lot near Chicago State University. His mother, Lois Adams, and his father divorced when he was young, and he was raised by a small domestic village that included his grandparents, mother, and two aunts, Josephine Scott and Catherine Varner. He went to a Baptist church, sang in the parish’s “Sunbeams Choir,” and listened to his grandmother read passages from Our Daily Bread, a Christian devotional. He was raised, he told me, by strong, proud women who sought to protect him.

But over the years, the South Side neighborhood deteriorated under the social and economic fallout of the crack epidemic. With her children’s safety in mind, Lois, who worked for the Department of Housing and Urban Development, moved the family multiple times to flee encroaching violence. Adams, who went to five schools in seven years, graduated at age 17. He registered for community college, but was unsure what he wanted to do.

Then came the night he says he’ll never forget.

In early September of 1998, he and two friends, Dimitri Henley and Rovaughn Hill, drove from Chicago to a party at the University of Wisconsin in Whitewater. As described in greater detail in Adams’s memoir, they spent some time playing video games in the dorm room of a student, Shawn Demain. Later, each of the three men, Adams said, had consensual sex with a woman living in the dormitory.

Weeks later, Hill, Henley, and Adams were arrested and charged with first-degree sexual assault. Adams was transferred to Cook County Jail, granted a court-appointed lawyer, and extradited to Wisconsin for an arraignment hearing.

After an initial mistrial without prejudice (meaning the case could be retried), Hill’s hired attorney, Jerry Boyle, filed a motion in appellate court claiming, for double jeopardy reasons, Hill shouldn’t be tried again. Court-appointed attorneys for Adams and Henley decided not to join the motion and gave no reasons as to why. Hill’s case was thus severed from Adams’s and Henley’s, a fact that would later prove consequential.

While Hill was awaiting his appeal, Adams and Henley’s attorneys proceeded to retrial, adopting a “no defense” strategy on the basis of inconsistencies in the accuser’s story. “This is a slam dunk case,” Adams, in his memoir, recalled his attorney saying. “We know the girl is lying. It’s obvious. The evidence supports you.”

The jury, all white, didn’t see it that way. Both men were found guilty. Adams, at 17, was sentenced to 28 years in prison.

While incarcerated, Adams witnessed countless unspeakable atrocities. Vicious gang fights. Bloody ambushes. Humiliating strip searches. Above all, a pervading sense of hopelessness and despair.

How did he endure? At first, he recounted, by compartmentalizing his days at Waupun Correctional Institute, the first of several Wisconsin prisons where he was held, into a series of rituals. He played basketball and chess, lifted weights, and found work as a chef in the prison’s kitchen. In his bunk at night, he put on his headphones and listened to Tupac Shakur, torn apart by songs like “Dear Mama.”

During the day, he devoured books and went to chapel, comforted by prayer and the words of the psalms. But in a strange way, Adams found himself growing accustomed to prison, slipping into its rhythms, rather than actively working toward his release.

Then one day, his cellmate, a tall, heavyset white man called Pops who had overheard Adams’s phone calls home and sympathized with his plight, asked to see his case file. Pops ran the prison law library and noticed that Adams’s attorney hadn’t called a key witness, Shawn Demain—an inexcusable error, as he was a disinterested party who could corroborate Adams’ account of the night. “Ineffectiveness. Your lawyer failed to do his job,” Pops told Adams, as described in the memoir. “Strickland v. Washington. Look up that case.”

Adams did, and his distillation of its legal ramifications opened a crack in the case.

While he and Henley were serving their sentences, Hill, who lost his double jeopardy appeal, was slated to have his case retried. Around this time, Adams wrote to Boyle and told him about the relevance of Demain’s account. Boyle located Demain and discovered a statement he made to police that was withheld from the defense. The buried statement undermined the accuser’s allegations and led to the dismissal of all charges against Hill.

The new evidence also prompted Adams to draft a letter to Milwaukee criminal defense attorney Rob Henak, whose name Adams had seen frequently in local newspapers for successfully appealing cases. In the letter, he asked Henak for assistance drafting a habeas petition claiming his constitutional rights had been violated. Henak agreed to help, and Adams began spending entire days in the law library, not only polishing the habeas petition for a federal court filing, but also writing letters and petitions to attorneys and prison authorities to help inmates appeal disciplinary tickets, reduce their sentences, or reverse unfair court decisions.

Adams soon developed the nickname Li’l Johnnie Cochran with Glasses. Emboldened by a string of victories as a jailhouse attorney, he doubled down on his own effort at exoneration. Using a Brother electric typewriter his mother sent him, he drafted succinct, two-paragraph cover letters to private lawyers and organizations in the hope they might be able to represent him in a federal appeal, pro bono.

“I think that was my maturation within the system and the law: learning how to be able to articulate myself without anger…getting to the point to earn people’s attention,” he said.

Somewhat miraculously, the letter writing campaign worked. More than six years into his incarceration, an envelope from the Wisconsin Innocence Project arrived at the door of his cell. Keith Findley, the organization’s cofounder, and a group of University of Wisconsin law students in the exoneration program wanted to take the case, which they found troubling on many fronts.

Three Black men and an all-white jury. Conflicting and spurious accounts from the accuser and her roommate. Paper-thin evidence. The state’s case against Adams simply didn’t add up.

“Even by the word of the young woman who was alleging assault, it didn’t sound like an assault,” Findley said. There was “no use or threat of force.” Moreover, a three-page police statement from Demain, who knew neither the victims nor the three accused men, and who corroborated the young men’s story, “was never called as a witness and never even spoken to by defense counsel.”

“And the students looked at [the case files] and they said, ‘This case is a horrible injustice,’” declared Findley.

The team filed a habeas petition based on claims of insufficient evidence and ineffective assistance of counsel. A federal district court denied the petition, but the U.S. Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals reversed the decision in June 2026, and on January 28, 2007, Adams, now 26, walked out of Jefferson County Jail a free man.

“What will you do?” his mother asked as she and his stepfather drove him to their home in Chicago’s south suburbs.

“I’m going to be a lawyer,” Adams said.

Called to serve

That, of course, was easier said than done. Released with no money and few immediate prospects, Adams moved in with his mother and stepfather. He found work as a handyman, but faced innumerable obstacles getting back on his feet. Trouble getting a state ID. A credit check that turned up a Wisconsin prison as his last known address. A debt of $12,000 in unpaid parking tickets tied to his impounded Chevy, which was left abandoned when he went to prison.

Meanwhile, the wider world had become almost unrecognizable. People now communicated with cell phones and text messages. Buildings and homes in his old neighborhood had been demolished. His nephew, a baby when he was incarcerated, was now nine years old. His friends, well into their twenties, had apartments, cars, girlfriends, and families. He had none of that. He felt lost and behind.

“In prison, I was a lawyer,” he writes in his memoir. “On the outside, I feel helpless.”

But, on a frigid winter day, he walked into South Suburban College, where he met a guidance counselor, Linda Bathgate, who listened attentively to his story and encouraged him to enroll. He was awarded the One Million Degrees scholarship and excelled in his courses, particularly public speaking where his presence commanded the room.

He went on to earn his bachelor’s degree at Roosevelt University on a full scholarship, and was soon introduced to Carol Brook, the former executive director of the Federal Defender Program for the Northern District of Illinois. Inspired by his story and intellect, she hired him as an investigator, literally bringing him to tears in her office.

“That job changed my life,” Adams said. “It gave me access to health care, which was access to mental health care. It gave me financial stability, so I could move out of a bad neighborhood, 92nd and Merrill.”

In 2012, he enrolled at the Loyola University Chicago School of Law, supported by the prestigious Chicago Bar Foundation Abraham Lincoln Marovitz Public Interest Law School Scholarship. Three months before orientation, Ann Claire Williams, a former judge for the Seventh Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals who is now a consulting attorney at the law firm Jones Day, invited him into her office and asked him to share his story at a fundraising gala for the nonprofit Just the Beginning—A Pipeline Organization, which Williams helped found to provide a pathway to law school for students of color.

Joi, then an attorney for Holland & Knight LLP and the co-host of the gala, was out of earshot when Adams spoke movingly to some 800 prominent lawyers, judges, and politicians in the Marriott hotel ballroom. However, in an unlikely twist of fate, he was seated at her parents’ table. They were smitten even before she was. “Don’t lose track of this young man,” Joi’s father told her.

At first, Joi kept him at arm’s length, but his natural charm and altruistic ambition soon won her over. “Jarrett and I have similarities in our desire to make an impact,” she said. “I couldn’t have gotten where I am without the purpose of doing bigger and better for the world that I’m in. That’s my fundamental belief.”

For Adams, the next few years were a whirlwind. While courting Joi and working for the Federal Defender Program, he dove into his criminal and civil rights law coursework at Loyola. Night classes [Loyola now offers a Weekend JD program for working professionals] allowed him to earn money to support himself while in school. He also volunteered on a project led by former Loyola Law School Dean David Yellen to investigate prisoner abuse allegations against former Chicago police commander Jon Burge.

Yellen had been assigned by Chief Cook County Criminal Courts Judge Paul P. Biebel Jr. as a special master to identify legitimate claims of torture from among hundreds of complaints submitted by incarcerated men who alleged they gave forced confessions under police duress.

Combing through letters and court records of prisoners, Yellen and the students unearthed horrifying accounts of inmates being held at gunpoint, suffocated with plastic bags, and genitally probed with electric prods. Their work, along with that of civil rights organizations like the People’s Law Office, laid the groundwork for at least 20 overturned convictions, including those of four people on death row.

“The Burge case was shocking because it was so systemic,” Yellen said. “So many people had to know that he was doing this kind of stuff, and the code of silence within the department fell over it for such a long time.”

The brutal accounts may have astonished his cohorts, but Adams read them differently. “I witnessed it in my neighborhood. Guys who were kidnapped, essentially,” Adams said. “They’d be gone for two or three days in a police station, and they’d come home claiming that they had concussions because they were hit in the head with phone books. Because what can’t a phone book leave? Marks.”

Adams told me his entire law school experience, including summer trips to Rome, London, and parts of China, was “humbling and motivating,” but it was his work with Yellen, above all, that helped crystallize his professional focus and shape his views on forced confessions and coerced guilty pleas: “My flame was lit coming home, but it was projects like that, that turned it up,” he said.

Fighting for freedom and finality

Adams insists that Richardson and Claiborne are innocent and that their decades-spanning cases, like those of many wrongfully convicted individuals, is littered with problems: buried evidence, incentivized testimony from lying witnesses, duplicitous political maneuvering— tainted with the outward appearance of racism.

When he took the case, working out of a living room office, Adams knew it would be an uphill battle. Yet when Ferrone’s aunt, Mary Claiborne, approached him at a reentry forum at a church in Petersburg, Virginia, he recognized in the troubled creases on her face the same pain that he’d seen in his mother’s disconsolate expression when she learned of the charges against him. He couldn’t turn her down.

Richardson and Claiborne were charged with capital murder for Gibson’s killing. They initially pleaded not guilty, but the day before their trial, prosecutor J. David Chappell, offered them plea deals. Richardson pleaded guilty to a reduced felony, involuntary manslaughter, and received a five-year sentence. Claiborne pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge, accessory after the fact, and, accounting for time served awaiting trial, was immediately released.

“It boils down to this,” Claiborne said. “We were charged with capital murder. I was under the impression that if you plead guilty, you go home the same day, and it’ll be over with.”

But it didn’t work out that way. Against public outcry from the Gibson family and local law enforcement over what they viewed as overly lenient sentencing, the Federal Bureau of Investigation; the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives; and the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Richmond opened an investigation into the case and charged the men with murder and related firearms charges, along with conspiracy to distribute crack cocaine.

The jury acquitted the men of the murder and firearms charges but found them guilty of the drug charges, which carried a mandatory minimum of 10 years in prison. Judge Robert Payne increased their sentences because of their earlier state pleas, citing as precedent the 1997 case United States v. Watts. Both men were sentenced to life in prison.

If it’s hard to imagine a person pleading guilty to a crime they didn’t commit, Yellen says it’s hardly uncommon. To that point, the Burge case speaks volumes. “A lot of people’s intuition is, ‘I would never confess to a serious crime if I hadn’t done it.’ And we know that’s not true. People do, after coercion, confess to things they didn’t do, and it happens more than rarely,” Yellen said.

In fact, the Innocence Project found that of the 375 individuals later exonerated by DNA evidence from 1989 to 2020 in the United States, 25 percent falsely confessed to a crime they didn’t commit, and 11 percent pleaded guilty to a crime.

Adams calls the verdict a gross miscarriage of justice, the result of a trumped-up case in which federal authorities cut deals with witnesses in exchange for favorable testimony and the U.S. attorney on the case, David Novak, presented the two men as drug kingpins even though police never found any drugs in their possession or records of large cash transactions.

“There are no fingerprints on the gun, there is no DNA, there is no blood, there are no drugs, there are no proceeds from drugs. There is nothing to this case besides testimony of people who had incentives to lie,” he said.

The drug convictions, he told me, hinged heavily on the testimony of incentivized witnesses, many of whom had criminal records. That’s particularly concerning, Joi noted, when preliminary research from Life After Justice shows that at least 31 percent of known U.S. exonerations involved informants who received benefits—such as lifted charges or sentence reductions—in exchange for inculpatory information provided to law enforcement or prosecutors.

Moreover, the murder evidence the prosecution made available, in Adams’s telling, is rife with contradictions. The men were picked up separately, nowhere near the shooting. Neither man matched Gibson’s physical description of the shooter. A key piece of potential evidence— Gibson’s handgun—was rendered immaterial after being picked up by Waverly Chief of Police Warren Sturrup.

Perhaps most troubling is the apparent suppression of 9-year-old Shannequia Gay’s three-page police statement and photo lineup identification of another suspect, Leonard Newby. At the time of the murder, Gay was riding her bike near the crime scene. She is one of the few witnesses, Adams said, without an ulterior motive for sharing her account.

The Biden clemency petition filed by Adams’s legal team maintains that Gay’s statement was obtained by the Sussex County Sheriff’s Office but “never provided to Mr. Richardson or Mr. Claiborne during the course of the federal or state proceedings.”

In the statement, Gay describes seeing a man who was “kind of fat,” with “hair on his chin” and “dreads,” running toward the woods, followed by Gibson. Her description shares similarities to the shooter Gibson described in his dying declaration, as well as to Newby, but not to Richardson.
Even more curiously, Newby’s sister is Evette Newby, a key witness for the prosecution who tipped off federal investigators that she had seen Claiborne and Richardson struggling with Gibson before the murder. “Ms. Newby had an obvious and clear incentive to protect herself,” the petition states. “Her boyfriend, Mr. White; and brother, Leonard Newby…fit Officer Gibson’s exact description of the suspects.”

Together, these arguments convinced Biden to commute the men’s sentences. However, unlike a presidential pardon, the commutation does not reverse Richardson or Claiborne’s convictions. Adams’s next step is to petition Virginia Governor Abigail Spanberger for a pardon based on actual innocence. “They are still being held by the tentacles of the same system that has already stolen an unspeakable amount from them and their families,” Joi observed. “Their employment and future hangs on a successful exoneration.”

Part of the reason judges and prosecutors may seek to preserve convictions like Richardson and Claiborne’s in the face of convincing evidence to the contrary may be a legitimate belief the evidence lacks relevance, weight, or validity. Yet a deeply entrenched and less defensible reason, Adams said, is the adversarial and often politicized nature of the U.S. justice system, in which professional fortunes are tied to courtroom victories and public trust relies on the appearance of moral propriety.

“We have a system that pits sides against one another,” Adams said. “And I don’t care if it’s a spitball contest. When you have that going on, justice loses.”

For now, Richardson and Claiborne are grateful to be free, even if that freedom is constrained by their convictions. Together, they’ve launched a streetwear fashion line called Negus, named after the word for king in the Ethiopian Semitic languages. Claiborne, 50, lives in Richmond, Virginia, with his father, two brothers, and stepsister. He has found work as a janitor and auto detailer. Richardson, 55, lives in Yale, Virginia, with his aunt and works on a packaging crew for Standard Motor Products. Their families, who supported them for the nearly three decades they spent in prison, have accepted them back into their lives with love and grace.

“It was like a breath of fresh air to be able to see my son and daughter again,” Richardson told me. “You get to see them on visits, but when they’re eight hours away, you might only get a visit once or twice a year.”

Adams is happy for his clients, too. When he took the case, working pro bono and paying a paralegal out of his own pocket, he knew it was a long shot. He asked Joi if he was doing the right thing.

“Do everything the way you always do, with all your heart and all your passion, and it will work out,” she told him.

From where Adams stands now, that was sage advice. “I imagine a little kid on the front porch in a neighborhood like the one I grew up in and I want to say to him, ‘If I made it, you can too,” he observed in his memoir. “Your success is not limited to becoming a ballplayer or an entertainer. You have other options. You can find other dreams.”

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