The Jailhouse Lawyer

Calvin Duncan was nineteen when he was incarcerated for a 1981 New Orleans murder he didn't commit. The victim of a wildly incompetent public defense system and a badly compromised witness, Duncan was left to rot in the waking nightmare of confinement. Armed with little education, he took matters into his own hands.

At twenty-one, he filed his first motion from prison: "Motion for a Law Book," which launched his highly successful, self-taught legal career. Trapped within this wholly corrupted system, Duncan became a legal advocate for himself and his fellow prisoners as an inmate counsel at the infamous Louisiana State Penitentiary, Angola. Literature sustained his hope, as he learned the law in its shadow.

During his decades of incarceration, Duncan helped hundreds of other prisoners navigate their cases, advocating for those the state had long since written off. He taught a class in the midst of Angola to empower other incarcerated men to fight for their own justice under the law. But his own case remained stalled. A defense lawyer once responded to Duncan's request for documents: "You are not a person."

Prison reform advocate Sophie Cull met Duncan after he was finally released from prison; he began to tell her his story. Together, they've written a bracing condemnation of the criminal justice system, and an intimate portrait of a heroic and brilliant man's resilience in the face of injustice.