When Mayer Brown partner Ward Johnson first met Ken Oliver, who was serving a life sentence at California's Soledad state prison, he felt an immediate rapport.

“I knew within minutes I was talking to an extraordinary person,” Johnson told me.

I write regularly about lawyers working pro bono to help wrongfully incarcerated people get out of prison, but far less about what happens after their release.

Oliver's meteoric post-prison career as an advocate and philanthropist is testament to the talent realized when someone is given a second chance.

It's been just over two years since Johnson, who is the managing partner of Mayer Brown's Northern California offices, helped Oliver win his freedom and a $125,000 settlement from the state for civil rights violations after he was convicted under California's "three strikes" law.

Since then, Oliver has gone on to become policy director for a public interest law firm, the head of a nonprofit focusing on re-entry programs for ex-felons, and as of last month, executive director of the new philanthropic arm of human resource technology company Checkr, which was  recently valued at $4.6 billion.

Oliver credits Johnson and Mayer Brown, along with co-counsel Michael Romano from Stanford Law School's Three Strikes Project, for making it all possible.

His lawyers “were probably the only group of people who treated me like a human being in decades,” he said. “They never abandoned me, they always supported me. The whole (Mayer Brown) office embraced me.”

Indeed, Johnson continues to provide pro bono legal services to Oliver, but now it's for corporate and tax matters related to his nonprofit work.

In 1997 at the age of 29, Oliver, who is Black, was sentenced to life in prison under California's three-strikes law for joyriding as a passenger in a stolen car – his third non-violent felony.

He spent 23 years behind bars, eight of them in solitary confinement, where he was kept for possessing the book “Blood in My Eye.”

Written in 1971 by Black Guerilla co-founder and Marxist revolutionary George Jackson, the book was deemed gang literature by prison officials, who determined Oliver was an “associate” of the gang. As a result, when California voters in 2012 modified the three-strikes law to require the third strike to have been for a serious or violent felony, Oliver was ineligible to apply for resentencing.

But as Johnson notes, the Black Guerrilla Family prison gang “really hasn't existed since the 1970s” and “Blood in My Eye” has been taught in college classes. (Sample quote: “We find ourselves today forced into a reexamination of Black revolutionary consciousness and its relative standing within a class society.”)

According to Oliver's original pro se civil rights complaint – 125 meticulously handwritten pages – filed in 2014, a guard told him that “had you just been hanging out on the yard with the homies drinking (referring to prison-made wine) and smoking weed instead of having all that political shit in your cell, this wouldn't be happening.”

Johnson told me one of the first things he asked Oliver was how he stayed "sane" during all those years in isolation.

Oliver's answer? Voracious reading – hundreds of books including great works of literature, economists like Adam Smith, even Donald Trump's “Art of the Deal.”

Above all, Oliver read law, with a focus on constitutional jurisprudence. He even memorized the Rutter guide to California civil procedure. Per Johnson, his client has a better command of it than many lawyers.

After Oliver filed his initial civil rights complaint alleging he was wrongly labeled a gang member and improperly confined in segregated housing, little happened for two years. The suit was never even served on prison officials, Oliver said.

But after outside counsel from Stanford and Mayer Brown got involved, the state moved quickly to settle the suit in 2017 for $125,000. (“About a million less than it should have been,” Oliver said, but he accepted the deal rather than gamble on drawn-out litigation.)

Johnson said it took another two years to get the gang affiliation expunged and convince Los Angeles County prosecutors not to oppose Oliver's release in 2019.

With his legal knowledge, Oliver was hired as a paralegal by Legal Services for Prisoners with Children. The Oakland, California-based public interest firm quickly promoted him to policy director, sending him to Sacramento to speak with legislators about criminal justice reform.

From there, Oliver became executive director of Creating Restorative Opportunities and Programs, or CROP, which focuses on developing re-entry programs for previously incarcerated people.

In July, he convinced California state legislators to give the nonprofit $28.5 million to develop a first-of-its-kind tech-centered workforce training facility for ex-prisoners.

Oliver notes that California has a 60% recidivism rate. “People who haven't lived through (the re-entry) experience have been creating the policies,” he said. But he posits that “those who are closest to the lived experience” are better positioned to fix it.

When Checkr, which provides background checks for more than 15,000 companies, first approached him over the summer about heading its new charitable arm, Checkr.org, Oliver declined, pointing to his work at CROP. But after a series of meetings, he agreed to sign on.

Checkr Chief Financial Officer Naeem Ishaq in a  news release last month announcing the hire said Oliver “has walked in the shoes of those we are committed to supporting” and that he “will be instrumental working to eliminate bias and help promote fair chance."

It's a remarkable journey in just two years. “I don't know if there's anyone like Ken," Johnson said.

But Oliver interjected. “I was extremely lucky,” he said. “There are thousands of human beings who didn't get the break or golden ticket I got” in being represented by Mayer Brown and Stanford.

If his story has one takeaway, he said: “I hope that it inspires other law firms to be like Mayer Brown, to do pro bono work and seek out people who shouldn't be languishing in prison.”

Originally Published by Reuters

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