+
upworthy
More

He spent 9 years behind bars for a crime he didn't commit. Now he's taking on the justice system.

He's not the first person to be wrongfully convicted of a crime; he wants to be the last.

At just 17 years old, Jarrett Adams found himself convicted of a heinous crime he insists he did not commit.

For the better part of a decade, Adams has fought for his freedom.

A new story reported by MSNBC's Ari Melber takes a look at his incredible journey, which started all the way back in 1998 and ended (or started again, depending on how you look at it) with Adams graduating from law school after spending nine years in prison.


Melber (right) interviews Adams for this story.

On the evening of Sept. 5, 1998, Adams and two friends visited the University of Wisconsin Whitewater.

The teens traveled from Chicago to the campus, located a little more than two hours northwest of the city by car. Adams and his friends were accused of gang-raping a female student in her dorm room. The three were eventually arrested and charged with five counts of second-degree sexual assault.

"I had no business being up there," Adams told the Chicago Tribune in June 2014. "It was (a) ... recipe for disaster."

While one of the other men accused would hire his own lawyer, Adams and the third man relied on public defenders.

The public defender assigned to Adams' case opted against calling any defense witnesses.

One of the other accused teens was able to hire an attorney who called in an alibi witness. He, unlike Adams and the third defendant, escaped conviction after the accuser's story was brought into question.

In February 2000, an all-white jury found Adams guilty. He was sentenced to 28 years in prison.

For nearly a decade, Adams called this prison home.

Behind bars, Adams spent time in the prison library, learning about the appeals process.

The more he learned about case law, the more he realized that the system was effectively rigged against those who can't afford legal representation.

“There were a lot of young black people in there as a result of bad representation, not knowing anything about the law, pleading guilty to cases where they shouldn't have plead guilty," he tells Melber. “I'm driven now, because not only do I want to prove my innocence, but I also want to advocate on behalf of those who I know were just like me."

Hard work, a unique perspective, and a lot of studying helped Adams secure his freedom.

Stories about overworked, underpaid public defenders like the one who worked Adams' case pop up all the time.

Earlier this year, the American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit in hopes of addressing exactly these types of issues. Their focus was on Fresno County and the State of California, two entities with especially strained public defender resources.

"Lawsuits like [the ACLU's]," lawyer and legal defense advocate Jonathan Rapping told Mother Jones earlier this year, "are really bringing to the public consciousness the fact that there are two very different systems of justiceOne for people with money and one for people without money. I think that at our core as Americans we recognize that that just isn't right."

You may have even seen "Last Week with John Oliver" cover this very topic earlier this year with actors from various cop shows giving dramatic, and more accurate, recitations of a prisoner's Miranda Rights.

After years in prison spent researching the law, Adams won his appeal and had his conviction overturned.

On June 20, 2006, the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals vacated Adams' sentence on grounds that he didn't receive proper representation from his public defender. On Jan. 28, 2007, Adams was released from prison with just $30 to his name.

On Feb. 9, 2007, the charges against him were dismissed.

Adams' story was just getting started.

The appellate court found that Adams didn't receive sufficient representation during his original trial.

He enrolled at Chicago's Loyola Law School. And in May 2015, he graduated.

This summer, Adams took the bar exam. Come November, he'll find out if he passed. In the meantime, he's working as a law clerk at the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals, the very same court that overturned his conviction.

Adams smiles after his May 2015 graduation ceremony.

He wants to help reform the criminal justice system and is clerking for the same court that overturned his conviction.

Once his clerkship comes to an end, Adams plans to put his energy into advocating for the poor and reforming justice policy. In the meantime, he heads up a wrongful conviction clinic at Loyola.

"You have a problem in the criminal justice system where unfortunately it's better to be rich and guilty than it is to be innocent and poor," he tells Melber.

If anyone's determined enough to bring a change to a broken system, that man is Adams.

You can read Ari Melber's full report at MSNBC.com, and you can watch the video below.

A pitbull stares at the window, looking for the mailman.


Dogs are naturally driven by a sense of purpose and a need for belonging, which are all part of their instinctual pack behavior. When a dog has a job to do, it taps into its needs for structure, purpose, and the feeling of contributing to its pack, which in a domestic setting translates to its human family.

But let’s be honest: In a traditional domestic setting, dogs have fewer chores they can do as they would on a farm or as part of a rescue unit. A doggy mom in Vancouver Island, Canada had fun with her dog’s purposeful uselessness by sharing the 5 “chores” her pitbull-Lab mix does around the house.

Keep ReadingShow less
Representative Image from Canva

Let's not curse any more children with bad names, shall we?

Some parents have no trouble giving their children perfectly unique, very meaningful names that won’t go on to ruin their adulthood. But others…well…they get an A for effort, but might want to consider hiring a baby name professional.

Things of course get even more complicated when one parent becomes attached to a name that they’re partner finds completely off-putting. It almost always leads to a squabble, because the more one parent is against the name, the more the other parent will go to bat for it.

This seemed to be the case for one soon-to-be mom on the Reddit AITA forum recently. Apparently, she was second-guessing her vehement reaction to her husband’s, ahem, avant garde baby name for their daughter, which she called “the worst name ever.”

But honestly, when you hear this name, I think you’ll agree she was totally in the right.

Keep ReadingShow less
Innovation

A student accidentally created a rechargeable battery that could last 400 years

"This thing has been cycling 10,000 cycles and it’s still going." ⚡️⚡️

There's an old saying that luck happens when preparation meets opportunity.

There's no better example of that than a 2016 discovery at the University of California, Irvine, by doctoral student Mya Le Thai. After playing around in the lab, she made a discovery that could lead to a rechargeable battery that could last up to 400 years. That means longer-lasting laptops and smartphones and fewer lithium ion batteries piling up in landfills.

Keep ReadingShow less

A beautiful cruise ship crossing the seas.

Going on a cruise can be an incredible getaway from the stresses of life on the mainland. However, that doesn’t mean there isn’t an element of danger when living on a ship 200-plus feet high, traveling up to 35 miles per hour and subject to the whims of the sea.

An average of about 19 people go overboard every year, and only around 28% survive. Cruise ship lawyer Spencer Aronfeld explained the phenomenon in a viral TikTok video, in which he also revealed the secret code the crew uses when tragedy happens.

Keep ReadingShow less
Joy

Kudos to the heroes who had 90 seconds to save lives in the Key Bridge collapse

The loss of 6 lives is tragic, but the dispatch recording shows it could have been so much worse.

Representative image by Gustavo Fring/Pexels

The workers who responded to the Dali's mayday call saved lives with their quick response.

As more details of the Francis Scott Key Bridge collapse in Baltimore emerge, it's becoming more apparent how much worse this catastrophe could have been.

Just minutes before 1:30am on March 26, shortly after leaving port in Baltimore Harbor, a cargo ship named Dali lost power and control of its steering, sending it careening into a structural pillar on Key Bridge. The crew of the Dali issued a mayday call at 1:26am to alert authorities of the power failure, giving responders crucial moments to prepare for a potential collision. Just 90 seconds later, the ship hit a pylon, triggering a total collapse of the 1.6-mile bridge into the Patapsco River.

Dispatch audio of those moments shows the calm professionalism and quick actions that limited the loss of life in an unexpected situation where every second counted.

Keep ReadingShow less
Joy

Yale's pep band had to miss the NCAA tournament. University of Idaho said, 'We got you.'

In an act of true sportsmanship, the Vandal band learned Yale's fight song, wore their gear and cheered them on.

Courtesy of University of Idaho

The Idaho Vandals answered the call when Yale needed a pep band.

Yale University and the University of Idaho could not be more different. Ivy League vs. state school. East Coast vs. Pacific Northwest. City vs. farm town. But in the first two rounds of the NCAA basketball tournament, extenuating circumstances brought them together as one, with the Bulldogs and the Vandals becoming the "Vandogs" for a weekend.

When Yale made it to the March Madness tournament, members of the school's pep band had already committed to other travel plans during spring break. They couldn't gather enough members to make the trek across the country to Spokane, Washington, so the Yale Bulldogs were left without their fight song unless other arrangements could be made.

When University of Idaho athletic band director Spencer Martin got wind of the need less than a week before Yale's game against Auburn, he sent out a message to his band members asking if anyone would be interested in stepping in. The response was a wave of immediate yeses, so Martin got to work arranging instruments and the students dedicated themselves to learning Yale's fight song and other traditional Yale pep songs.

Keep ReadingShow less