The Jailhouse Lawyer

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Copyright © 2025 by Calvin Duncan and Sophie Cull

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What A Wonderful World

Words and Music by George David Weiss and Bob Thiele

Copyright © 1967 Range Road Music Inc., Quartet Music and Abilene Music

Copyright Renewed

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Reprinted by Permission of Hal Leonard LLC

Cover design: Stephanie Ross

Cover images: (prison cell and books on floor) Shutterstock; (open book) Getty Images

Book design by Daniel Lagin, adapted for ebook by Cora Wigen

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Duncan, Calvin, author. | Cull, Sophie, author.

Title: The jailhouse lawyer / Calvin Duncan, Sophie Cull.

Description: New York: Penguin Press, 2025. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2024043986 (print) | LCCN 2024043987 (ebook) | ISBN 9780593834305 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780593834312 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Duncan, Calvin. | Jailhouse lawyers—Louisiana—Biography. | Lawyers—United States—Biography. | Legal assistance to prisoners—United States. | Law—Study and teaching—United States. | Criminal justice, Administration of—Corrupt practices—United States. | Judicial error—United States.

Classification: LCC KF373.D83 C85 2025 (print) | LCC KF373.D83 (ebook) | DDC 340.092 [B]—dc23/eng/20240918

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2024043986

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2024043987

Some names and identifying characteristics have been changed to protect the privacy of the individuals involved.

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Contents

Dedication

Prologue

Part 1

1982

1983

1985

1986

1987

Part 2

1988

1989

1991

1994

Part 3

1997

1998

1999

2002

Part 4

2007

2009

2010

Part 5

2011

Acknowledgments

Bibliography

Index

About the Authors

_152342777_

Prologue

Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.

For twenty-three years, I served as an inmate counsel, or jailhouse lawyer, at Angola prison in Louisiana. I was incarcerated there for a murder I did not commit; I learned the law in its shadow.

For many of those years I taught a law class, and of all the literature I recited to my students from the front of the room, this line from Dickens was the one I quoted most.

I learned it not from reading David Copperfield, but John Irving’s The Cider House Rules, a novel about an orphan named Homer Wells who, like me, grew up without any memory of his mother. Like Homer, my and my sister’s efforts to belong in somebody else’s home were largely a failure. From the ages of six and seven, we knew we were on our own, and no help was coming.

As a teenager, it became apparent that my circumstances weren’t going to improve, only my ability to take things I was lacking. I protected my younger sister by stealing food and clothing for her, and getting into fights with boys who paid her too much attention. I stole televisions to make sure I had enough cash to pay my own bond if I got arrested, so I wouldn’t have to call on my aunts. Being a man didn’t mean escaping the streets, only surviving them.

In prison, the notion of being a man narrowed even further. In that environment, the whole goal is to rob you of your concept of self. To the guards, we were children. To the lawyers, we were a means to an end. To the institution, we were a source of job creation. To each other, we were a conquest. Being willing to kill to protect my body from interference—that was being a man.

I was lucky enough to survive that chapter of prison life. At Angola, in the Main Prison, I saw some of the older guys reading books, and I started to wonder if perhaps a man is someone who liberates his mind by reading. So I read Martin Luther King Jr., Dante, and Harper Lee. I spent my time with guys who were focused on helping themselves and helping others. I became friends with Woodfox, Hooks and King, Mwalimu, Gary, Norris, Checo, and Wilbert.

None of us had any realistic chance of getting out of prison at that time. Good conduct wasn’t going to help us. Getting a certificate wasn’t, either. Our fates were sealed. We were all serving life sentences.

But that didn’t stop us from asking the question: What makes a man?

We had come to understand how ludicrous it was that our identities as Black men were reduced to our behinds. No one asked: What do you stand for? Or Are there any rights you have that are worth fighting to protect? Nobody expected us to live honorable lives, but we weren’t willing to succumb to that view.

So we helped each other get our education. We taught each other the law. We drafted bills for the legislature and organized our families to support their passage. We invited judges and lawmakers to meet with us at the prison. We published investigative journalism. We led reentry programs. We sent money home to each other’s children. And when miracles happened and some of us started getting out of Angola, we made sure we never forgot the men we’d left behind.

When I finally made it out of prison, I learned not to talk about it. You realize people don’t want to hear it. Even those of us who were inside together will only mention certain things. We can’t share too openly about our experiences, because we’re still maintaining the version of ourselves that we crafted inside.

A few days after my release, I met a young Australian woman named Sophie, who worked with me at a law office in New Orleans. We were taking trips to Shreveport, Louisiana, to campaign alongside churches and civil rights organizations for the removal of a Confederate flag from the local courthouse lawn. On these car rides, I finally found a place where I could talk honestly about my experiences. Sophie asked me about my life in prison and listened to my stories with openness. Having the opportunity to share without being judged helped me take stock of my life. Instead of being Calvin the inmate lawyer, or Calvin the innocent man, or Calvin the orphan, or Calvin the returning citizen, I started to see myself as a man in full. When we decided to work on a book together, we went about it the truest way we knew: my personal account, shared with my friend, who had a deep appreciation of the forces I was up against. If my journey has taught me one thing, it’s that God puts unexpected people in our lives at the moment we need them the most.

We as a society don’t get to hear stories of Black men helping each other. Perhaps if people were allowed to tell, and to hear, such stories, then we would be more inclined to ask why our country devalues Black children the way we do. Why we make a point to figure out if the whales are coming too close to the shore, or if the eagles aren’t hatching enough of their young, or if the bees are dying off, but when it comes to the conditions experienced by Black boys in our neighborhoods, we already seem to know all we need to know.

I want the world to know that a group of Black men, in the darkest place in America—the incarceration capital of the world—rose above our situation to help each other.

May these pages show that it’s the people from whom we expect the least who, in the face of impossible odds, do extraordinary things.

Calvin Duncan

1982

Calvin had a sixth sense for being watched.

He calmly folded the jeans he’d been holding against his waist and scanned the workwear supply store.

The other students from the Job Corps campus rummaged through piles of flannel and cotton, still giddy at being chosen to come down the mountain. They were allowed to spend their clothing vouchers only once every few months.

Calvin met his supervisor’s eye and noticed the same feeling of foreboding that had woken him that morning, an old warning from childhood that signaled the approach of danger.

The doorbell chimed, and a customer walked in. The cool draft sliced through his unease. This wasn’t New Orleans, he reminded himself. He shouldn’t always expect the worst.

Calvin. His supervisor gestured him over. We need to get back to campus.

What’s happening? he asked.

You’ve got visitors.

Years later, when certainty was

slipping away from him, Calvin would think back to his time on Mount Hood and be sure of only three things:

First, the lake. Not Timber Lake, the official name of the Job Corps campus where he studied, but the crescent of water at the campus’s middle, too small to have a name. He passed it each morning on his way to the welding workshop, still and iridescent—a map to find his way home.

Second was the quiet. Or rather, the sounds of quiet: pebbles scraping under his boots and snowdrifts gathering on the dormitory roof—moments of solitude that taught him what peace felt like. A lesson he tucked beneath his ribs for safekeeping.

And third, those three words: You’ve got visitors. The ending of the story he had worked so hard for, where he made it out of New Orleans to seize a future of his own making, and the beginning of this story, the one he couldn’t seem to escape, when they came looking for him on the mountain.

The students grumbled their way

onto the minibus. Calvin found an empty row and sank low in his seat, hoping the other boys wouldn’t suspect he was the reason for their early return.

As the bus pulled onto the road, he sat quietly, listening to his classmates joke and harass each other.

Who would come all the way to Oregon to see him? Not his family. Not even Mamie would make a trip like that.

His mind hurtled back to a phone call with his aunt Brunetta months earlier. He’d only called home twice since leaving New Orleans in January. Mamie, his sister, was the reason he bothered at all.

I saw your face on the news. Brunetta’s fearful tone had caught him by surprise. A white boy got shot near the Quarter, and now the police are looking for you.

I wasn’t near any shooting, Aunty, he protested.

But she wouldn’t let it go. You think I don’t know the face of my own child? That was your photo. You keep your head down, you heard me?

He had pushed the call out of his mind, sure the police would realize their mistake and move on.

But what if they didn’t?

As Portland’s suburbs receded into farmland, a snowcapped peak rose in the center of the bus’s windshield. Normally, the sight filled Calvin with awe, but today it left him unsettled.

Oregon had never been part of his plan. Six months earlier, he wouldn’t have known where to find the state on a map. He never imagined a world of towering mountain ranges, ferns as large as palm trees, pristine river water he could drink from a canteen. Yet at the first sight of Mount Hood, he knew he’d escaped New Orleans just to find it. As though it had been in his sights all along.

A product of President Johnson’s Great Society, the Job Corps trained young people in vocational skills while giving them a place to live. Students were usually referred there by school counselors or juvenile courts, but Calvin had sought out the opportunity on his own, aware of the program from an earlier stint at a campus in Texas when he was sixteen.

Though unfamiliar at first, the mountain’s beauty quickly pulled Calvin in—the bird chatter at dawn, morning frosts, the smell of leaf litter on his path to the welding workshop.

While he felt somewhat distant from the other students, it didn’t take long for him to find his place. Most boys at Timber Lake were from rural towns in Oregon, with a few kids from California; only Calvin came from the South. Early on, he befriended a boy from Oakland who confided in him about a debt he owed to an older kid over unpaid weed. Calvin offered to settle it with a fight, and they had remained allies since.

The students began their days with classes to prepare for their GED exams, then spent their afternoons learning a trade. At night, they played basketball in the gym or snuck into the woods behind the dormitories to shoot dice and box; on weekends, they explored a three-mile stretch of beach on the Columbia River called Rooster Rock. When summer brought berry season, Calvin delighted in the fruit at nearby farms, the purple juice staining his fingers for days. Beyond the lush scenery, however, it was the quiet that captivated him most. Much later, he would remember Timber Lake as the first place he felt safe.

As the bus began its ascent, gears groaning at the winding road, Calvin felt a sense of calm. The trees outside his window rose like a fortress.

Twenty minutes later, they turned down a dirt road, and the campus came into view. On one side, the dormitory buildings dotted a gentle rise. On the other, old-growth pines gave way to a narrow lake the color of the sky.

In the quiet of early mornings, before the campus was fully awake, Calvin would sit alone by the lake, thinking of his sister. He imagined her passing by the old-timers on her way to school—the ones who perched with their lines on the flats of the Mississippi, waiting for a tired catfish to give up the ghost.

He wished Mamie could have experienced Mount Hood with him. If only people from New Orleans could see this place.

When the bus pulled to a stop, he noticed Bob Hartsuyker, the campus head counselor, standing at the entrance to the administration building.

Another sign something was wrong.

The boys clambered out in single file, one playfully punching Calvin’s arm on the way past. Calvin waited a beat, then walked over to Hartsuyker.

Two detectives from the local sheriff’s office are inside. The counselor’s usually cheerful expression was drawn.

Calvin crossed his arms, fighting his fear. Perhaps sitting down with the detectives would help. If the Oregon authorities realized he had no connection to the crime, the New Orleans police would continue their investigation elsewhere.

He followed Hartsuyker into the building. Mack Ferrick, the campus director, met them at his office.

Inside, two men were waiting: one lanky and stone-faced, the other round with small, watchful eyes. The round one directed Calvin to sit across from him at the long conference table, while the tall one posted himself by the door.

Calvin maintained an outward calm, but their presence unsettled his resolve. It wasn’t the prospect of being questioned that bothered him—he’d had more than a few brushes with the law. It was the intrusion. New Orleans wasn’t supposed to follow him here.

When they were six and seven years old, Mamie and Calvin had unexpectedly lost their mother. Though their father was living, they knew the world as orphans. They spent years being shuttled between aunts, sleeping on floors in crowded apartments and squirreling meals from neighbors’ houses. At ten, Calvin began shoplifting food from corner stores; at sixteen, burglarizing houses. He didn’t mind his stints in juvenile detention—he saw friends and received three meals a day—but he hated leaving Mamie alone. Each was all the other had in a city that seemed bent on destroying them.

Earlier that year, Calvin seized a chance to leave New Orleans, no small feat for a teen in his position. After hitching a ride to Los Angeles, he stayed with his cousin until the Job Corps sent him to Oregon. Leaving Mamie behind wasn’t easy, but she was the reason he was compelled to go. Once he could send money home, she could plan her own escape.

His other motivation was his daughter, Ayana, born shortly after he arrived at Timber Lake. Ayana’s mother, Earline, was Calvin’s high school sweetheart, and though they were no longer together, she still relied on him for support.

Ayana’s birth had sharpened Calvin’s ambition. He had earned his welding certificates and was on the path to a high school diploma. By the end of the year, he wanted to graduate from the Job Corps and enlist in the military. Seeing the Pacific Northwest inspired him to do what most of his peers couldn’t imagine: travel the world, survive his twenty-first birthday, make a life for his family.

Yet New Orleans had a way of ruining things, which is what worried him about sitting down with these men.

I’m Lieutenant Reed and this is Detective Peterson. We’re from the Clackamas County Sheriff’s Office, said the round deputy. Here to ask you a few questions.

Calvin nodded.

I understand that you’re known here as Calvin Jones. Are you, in fact, Calvin Duncan?

He hesitated, unsure if he wanted to answer their questions. Uh-huh.

Three years earlier, he’d been expelled from the Job Corps in Texas for fighting. When he decided to rejoin the program out West, he forged his cousin’s birth certificate and used his surname.

Neither Hartsuyker nor Ferrick blinked at the deputy’s question, already aware that Calvin went by Duncan. Many students used more than one name.

How long have you been here?

About four months.

Did you ever reside in Louisiana?

Yeah.

We’re here about a murder in New Orleans. We need to ask you some questions about the night it happened.

Calvin studied the deputy doing the talking, the one named Reed. His cheeks were the color of a ripe tomato.

He sensed Hartsuyker surveying the officer in his periphery and recalled their first conversation, where Hartsuyker offered an orientation of the campus. The counselor advised Calvin to avoid the small towns at the mountain base, especially after dark. Clackamas County was a rural area in a state that, for much of its early history, had forbidden Black people from living there. That threat had felt distant from within the campus confines—until now. He swallowed, suddenly understanding the danger.

I don’t know anything about any murder, he told Reed.

We have information from the New Orleans police suggesting you and your friend were involved in a robbery on August 7, 1981. Do you wish to make a statement?

No. Like I said, I don’t know nothing.

The deputy’s eyes narrowed. The police from New Orleans say you do. Why don’t you make it easier on all of us and tell the truth?

Calvin shrugged. ’Cause I don’t know what you’re talking about.

Did you have any knowledge that you were wanted by the police?

Yeah, my aunty told me it was in the news.

Reed glanced at his partner, who scribbled on a notepad. An eyewitness identified you as the perpetrator that night.

Who?

A woman. She was with the person that you and your friend killed. She says there was a scuffle for the gun, that you fired. Who’s the other person that was with you?

Calvin recognized the officer’s move. He turned to Hartsuyker, who shot him a regretful look.

I don’t have nothing more to say, he told the deputy firmly.

Reed’s nose and mouth curled like he smelled something rotting. Why did you leave Louisiana in the first place? Because the police were looking for you?

I came here for the Job Corps, to learn welding. I’m signing up for in the military.

That’s a good story. I think you needed money. I think you robbed this man, and when he resisted, you panicked and shot him.

Wherever you’re getting that from, it’s wrong. Calvin’s intuition urged him to flee the office, though he dared not run.

Mercifully, Ferrick interjected. He’s told you everything he knows. I think that’s enough.

Reed pushed back his chair. We’ll have to finish this down at the jail, then.

I didn’t have nothin’ to do with it, Calvin protested. You have the wrong guy.

It doesn’t look that way to the New Orleans police, I’m afraid. Calvin Duncan, aka Calvin Jones, I am placing you under arrest—

Calvin turned to Ferrick. Mr. Mack, they have the wrong guy!

Ferrick looked shaken. You’ll have to go with them for now, Calvin, but we’ll get this sorted out.

A mix of fear and embarrassment rose in Calvin’s chest.

Please, don’t handcuff me here, he pleaded with Reed. I don’t want the others to see.

The deputies led him out of the rear of the building to shield him from the walkway to the dormitories, but by the time they reached the patrol car, Calvin could feel the stares of his classmates at his back.

Ferrick and Hartsuyker stood by while the lanky officer opened the rear passenger door and motioned for Calvin to get in.

Calvin stopped short at the sight of the dark cabin. The smell of the worn vinyl seats made him want to vomit.

He lifted his gaze to the lake, clinging to the image of the still blue water until the officer pushed him down into the back seat.

This is a mistake, he told himself. I’ll come right back.

Calvin craned his neck toward

the shadowy outline of his aunt Brunetta’s face. He could see her lips moving through the glass pane, but the swirl of voices and body odor made it difficult to focus. He was desperate to get back upstairs.

I let you out of my sight and look what happens… she spat into the window speaker, arm stretched out against the wall.

Brunetta reminded him of a mafia boss, hard-nosed and always focused on an endgame beyond his view. She would defend him to the hilt when the police were involved, then seemed to forget him the rest of the time. He often wondered why he and Mamie had ended up with her—why she was so determined to be the guardian of children she couldn’t care for.

Boy, let me tell you somethin’. Brunetta turned her voice low, and now he could hear her every word. "You in a place where they fuck over boys. You beat their fuckin’ ass."

He pushed a knuckle into his eye. He didn’t know what she meant by that, and he didn’t want to.

None of this was happening the way he’d imagined. He thought the Oregon authorities would question him and then return him to Mount Hood. Instead, they’d left him for over a week in a solitary jail cell before handing him to two officers from the New Orleans Police Department. No one—not the sheriff’s office in Oregon, nor the judge who signed the extradition order, nor the New Orleans detectives who came to collect him, seemed to care that he knew nothing of the crime. On the contrary, they treated him as though he was already condemned.

Brunetta said she would return with some boxer briefs and put a few dollars on his account. Then a deputy took him upstairs and sat him on a chair in the hallway.

Central Lockup was part of a sprawling collection of austere buildings near the corner of Tulane Avenue and Broad Street that made up the Orleans Parish Prison. Calvin had been there before. When he worked in the French Quarter, the police had arrested him more than once for obstructing the sidewalk while walking home from a late shift, throwing him in their patrol van along with other Black kids they wanted out of the tourist hotspot. He could usually count on Brunetta to get him out by morning, charges dropped. But this time, he wasn’t going anywhere. He’d been booked on a charge of first-degree murder.

Minutes turned into an hour. His mind raced with questions. How did he end up here? Who was the person he was accused of killing? The television news reported the victim’s name was David Yeager, but Calvin had heard nothing else about the man. Why did the police decide he was a suspect, and what made them want to come all the way to Oregon to arrest him? Probably because the murder happened on Esplanade Avenue, he thought.

Finally, two deputies came to collect him. They pulled him aside and ordered him to take off his jail uniform of army fatigues. Calvin fixed his eyes on a point on the wall, trying to conceal his rage while the deputies moved their gloved hands over him. They snickered at his nakedness the way his cousins used to snicker at his sores during a bout of Indian fire. He swallowed hard, knowing he would have to endure this torment every time he was moved within the jail. He retreated in his mind to Timber Lake, willing the memory to steady him.

The deputies told him to dress and returned him upstairs to the third floor of the House of Detention. Built in 1965, the House of D was where individuals were held in custody until their first court appearances or until they made bond. Everyone was lumped together, regardless of their alleged offenses, from DUIs to serious assaults. With minimal oversight and guards delegating authority to favored detainees, it was a chaotic environment where physical strength often prevailed.

The deputies shoved Calvin into a hallway and waited as he walked to the third cell. When he was first moved there late the night before, he was too exhausted to take in his surroundings, still hopeful that he would be bonded out.

Now he counted ten beds and two toilets, with as many as thirty men packed inside, and as he stepped forward—hearing the door slide shut behind him—he knew he was on his own.

The strongest men had already claimed the bunks, and the extra mattresses on the floor were also occupied. Disheveled men in the throes of withdrawal and wide-eyed teens, the most vulnerable of the bunch, had to sit on bare concrete by the toilets, where vomit and feces were backing up in the bowls. Calvin choked at the stench.

Surely, this was the place Brunetta had warned him about.

He noticed an old classmate from high school across the cell and nodded, but the boy quickly looked down at the floor. It wasn’t a coincidence that Calvin would see people he knew in jail. For many in his circles, stints in prison were a part of life—a sign of luck, even, because at least you hadn’t been killed on the street.

With the deputies out of sight, Calvin watched as the more formidable men sized up their marks, coaxing the younger ones with promises of protection. When necessary, they flashed a shank. They extracted what they wanted with ease: jewelry, a pair of shoes, a blow job. Calvin was stunned to see his former classmate having sex within minutes of the cell door closing. He wasn’t sure whether to call it rape. He only knew he would never presume that older men deserved respect again.

Cortisol had been flooding Calvin’s brain for two days straight. Despite his weariness, he stayed alert through the night, watching for any movement from the corner of his eye. Whatever happens, he thought, I’m gonna leave this jail a man.

The following day, while some of the men were out on the tier, Calvin