By Michael Caruso
The term "Jailhouse lawyer" is used to describe an incarcerated person who helps those similarly situated with legal filings. And the term is often used with disdain—the stereotype of the incarcerated person filing frivolous lawsuits. But jailhouse lawyers have been at the heart of several key legal victories: the right to an attorney, the right to be protected from abuse by other prisoners and guards, and the right to free exercise of religion.
Kelly Harnett is a former jailhouse lawyer. And a good one. In this recent article, the author describes Harnett's journey from helping other women at the law library at Rikers and then, after she was sentenced for murder, clerking at Bedford Hills Correctional Facility's law library, to the vacation of her murder conviction and life after her release:
Harnett was 28 and facing murder charges for the killing of a stranger in a park in Queens. She was innocent, she would tell anyone who would listen; she had been a bystander, unable to stop her abusive boyfriend from choking the man.
Harnett paged through the law books. At first, nothing made any sense. But she decided that if she could simply memorize the statutes, she would understand them and could maybe even become good at law. "And everyone loves something they're good at," she told me.
She filed a motion to dismiss her indictment. She wrote and revised briefs, citations, and arguments. On one occasion, Harnett was working under a deadline when flying water bugs hatched in an adjacent storage room and flooded into her cell. A guard refused to move her: "Guess what I did? I sat right on the floor, on top of the bugs but on a tipped-open garbage bag that I double-bagged, and got to work." The motion was denied, but the story became, in her mind, one of triumph and resilience.
In the end, neither the prosecutor nor the jury bought Harnett's story. In 2015, she was sentenced to 17 years to life and transferred to Bedford Hills Correctional Facility in Westchester. There, she was tapped to be a clerk at the law library. She worked with an aging PC with no access to the internet, a kiosk connected to a single legal-research database, and a printer that had to be hand-fed and that jammed every three pages. Still, she began writing motions for herself and other incarcerated women."
Harnett never seemed to get anywhere with her own case, but some of the motions she filed for other women were successful. "People were getting good results," said Heidi Stumbo, who met Harnett in prison in 2015. Women were landing court dates and being released. "You got Kelly and things started rolling," said Stumbo. "She did it all; she knew it all." By Harnett's count, four women were released because of her work, and many others moved their cases forward.
Harnett became focused on how the criminal legal system targeted women and specifically survivors of abuse like herself. She discovered that nearly all her friends inside had been abused before they came to prison and that, for most, the abuse was in some way directly connected to their incarceration.
Harnett had all but exhausted her own options when, in 2019, a law passed in New York that would supply her with a powerful weapon. It gave judges more leeway to take abuse into account during sentencing in certain cases and even allowed for resentencing.
After the court received Harnett's filing under the new law, the judge ordered a hearing. Before the hearing, Harnett's lawyer and the Queens district attorney's office agreed that if Harnett would forgo her application, her murder conviction would be vacated, and she would plead guilty to manslaughter, a lesser charge, in exchange for time served. Harnett took the deal.
The article ends with describing Harnett's struggles to find her footing after being released. She's worked as an unpaid intern for a state judge, at NYU's Bernstein Institute, taught at Brooklyn Law, and co-authored a law review paper. But her conviction limits her opportunities, and she's struggling to make ends meet. Hopefully, this article convinces someone to give her a chance.
