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I mean, c’mon—seriously! What in the hell is a “jailhouse lawyer”?

Depending on your station in life, the term is apt to evoke a variety of responses. Disbelief. Laughter. For some, perhaps confusion.

Jailhouse lawyer? The term implies a dissonance, a kind of contradiction in terms.

Yet, even if some shun the title, there are tens of thousands of men and women who actually are such a thing, and like most people, they are heir to all the winds of whim, good and bad, competent and incompetent, large-hearted and petty.

Years ago, before I entered the House of Death, I interviewed a man in Philadelphia’s Holmesburg Prison who was quite opinionated on the subject. His name was Delbert Africa, a well-known member of the revolutionary MOVE organization, who soon would face a de facto life sentence in Pennsylvania’s dungeons for being among nine people who had the temerity to survive a deadly police assault on their home and headquarters on August 8, 1978.¹

Delbert Africa was an eloquent interviewee who spoke with a distinctive country accent, his conversation peppered with passion, reason, and commitment. He spoke disparagingly of jailhouse lawyers, and when I asked him why he felt this way, he responded, “Them dudes get in there, read alla them law books, and before you know it, they be crazy as hell!”

“What do you mean, crazy?” I asked.

“Well, they may not be crazy when they get here, but after a while, after a few months of reading that shit, they go down to City Hall, and when they see that them folks down there in City Hall, in the System, don’t really go by that so-called law, well!—it plumb drives them dudes crazy!”

“Yeah, man, but why it drives ’em dudes crazy?”

“’Cuz they cain’t believe that the System don’t follow they own laws!”

“But why?” I continued.

“It drives they ass crazy ’cuz they cain’t handle the fact that the System just make and break laws as it see fit! How many treaties they done signed with the Indians? Ain’t a one of ’em they done kept! Some of ’em broke ’em befo’ the ink was dry on ’em old treaties! Them the same folks who run this System today! If they couldn’t keep a treaty with Indians when they first got here, what make you think they gonna keep they so-called law today, especially when it come to me and you, man?”

“Bro—I get that; I understand that. But what’s up with them crazy jailhouse lawyers—I don’t get that.”

“They go crazy becuz, Mu, they really believe in the System, and this System always betray those that believe in it! That’s what drive them out they minds, man. They cain’t handle that. It literally drives them out they mind. I see ’em around here, walkin’ ’round here dazed, crazy as a bedbug!”

It took me a while, but I got him. When he told me those words, I was a free man—as free as a Black man can be in America—and working as a reporter and producer for a Philadelphia public radio station. When Delbert Africa broke it down for me, I had no idea that, years later, his words would take on such significance.

His words flew back to me like a pigeon to its coop when I was in the prison law library speaking with a younger man named Qadir who was on death row with me. Qadir was a prodigious legal researcher. He read criminal cases constantly and researched his own case to the nth degree. He knew the relevant case law, the pertinent statutes, and had tightly studied precedents that reflected on the issues in his case.

As he discussed the matter with me and showed me the case citations and excerpts from those cases to support his argument, he asked my opinion. I had been on death row longer than he had, so I ventured that he may have been correct in what the state court opinion said, but that alone wouldn’t determine the outcome of his case. He was especially focused on the fact that his capital jury had surreptitiously broken sequestration—the court’s order that the jury be separated from the public for fear of tampering—and was certain that because they crept out of their hotel rooms and partied with other hotel guests until dawn, a new trial would be granted.

Qadir was adamant.

“Look, Mu—here it is, right here, in black and white! A jury can’t break their sequestration—it’s a direct violation of a judge’s order!”

“I hear you, Qadir—but, just ’cuz somethin’ is written there in those books, don’t mean the Supremes [shorthand for the Pennsylvania Supreme Court] gonna grant you relief.”

“Yes, it do, Mu! It do! Here it is in black and white, man! They gotta grant me relief!”

“Qadir—”

“They gotta—it’s right here!”

“Qadir—”

“Can’t you see that, man? It’s hornbook² law—they gotta give it up!”

“Qadir—Qadir! They do what they wanna do, man! Just ’cuz it says something in one case, they don’t have to go by that case, man. I agree with you, that you got a damn good argument—and you should prevail—but I don’t go for that ‘gotta’ rap.”

“You wrong, Mu! You wrong! Here it is right here! They gotta give it to me! No ifs, ands, or buts! It’s in black and white!”

Qadir would not, indeed, could not relent. Nothing I said could get through.

It would be months, perhaps a year, after our law library debate, that the Pennsylvania Supreme Court finally delivered its lengthy opinion. It affirmed both the convictions and the sentence of death. In dry, distanced legalese, the judges explained away the wayward jury. The defendant could not prove any prejudice derived from the jury’s escape from the hotel during its sequestration.

Within days, Qadir was heard muttering and blathering stuff from his cell about “the Mothership” coming to pick him up, to fly him away from death row. It took days, perhaps weeks, for men around him to talk him down, to bring him around.

His mind, unable to accept the court’s decision, had snapped. He was right on the legal precedents, but what did it matter?

While I was being held at Huntingdon Prison in central Pennsylvania, a volunteer lawyer visited who wanted to assist me in a civil action, and we discussed the law.

He was giving me the drill, telling me his opinion on what the law was on First Amendment³ issues, and I replied, “Man, the law ain’t nothing but whatta judge say the law is.”

The lawyer abruptly stopped his discourse and stared.

“What’s wrong, man?”

“Uh—nothing . . . but why did you say that?” “’Cuz that’s what I see, man. You could have an issue, and it be on all fours with a issue in a case. You be right, and you know you right! The judge shoot you down. Now, what’s the law? What’s written in that law book, what’s written in that case, or what the judge say?”

“In my first year of law school, that’s exactly what my law school professor used to teach! I’m just surprised to hear you say almost the same things.”

“Damn! And I didn’t have to go to law school to learn that, huh?”

All across America, there are many men and women in county jails and state and federal prisons who are active, working jailhouse lawyers, but most of whom have never spent an hour in a law school class. They have learned, in their own way, what the “law” is, hard-won knowledge earned through years of experience in the fight.

This is the story of law learned not in the ivory towers of multibillion-dollar-endowed universities, surrounded by neatly kept lawns and served by the poor, who clean, sweep, and wash their cares away. It is law learned in the bowels of the slave ship, in the hidden, dank dungeons of America—the Prisonhouse of Nations.

It is law learned in a stew of bitterness, under the constant threat of violence, in places where millions of people live, but millions of others wish to ignore or forget.

It is law written with stubs of pencils or with four-inch-long, rubberized flex-pens, with grit, glimmerings of brilliance, and with clear knowledge that retaliation is right outside the cell door.

It is a different perspective on the law, written from the bottom, with a faint hope that a right may be wronged, an injustice redressed.

It is Hard Law. These are the stories from that voyage.

Mumia Abu-Jamal

Death Row, USA

January 2009