Falsely Imprisoned for 23 Years: Now He’s Received $7 Million
The payout “doesn’t settle what I went through,” said Derrick Hamilton, who accused the police of fabricating evidence.
Photograph by Dana Lixenberg for The New Yorker
Derrick Hamilton was wrongfully convicted of murder, and spent more than two decades trying to prove his innocence.
Derrick Hamilton’s legal education began in 1983, when he was seventeen and in the jail for teen-age boys on Rikers Island. He’d been an enthusiastic student as a child—his family called him Suity, because he liked to wear a suit to school. But in high school he’d begun skipping classes and getting into trouble.
At fifteen, he was charged with robbery and sentenced to sixty days in jail. The arrests continued, for petty larceny, assault, criminal use of a firearm. Then, in March of 1983, a bread deliveryman was fatally shot near Lafayette Gardens, the public-housing project in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, where Hamilton lived, and he was charged with the murder. He insisted that he had not done it, and entered a plea of not guilty.
His father, a livery-cab driver, hired a lawyer named Candace Kurtz to represent him, and she urged him to start studying in the jail’s law library, so that he could better understand his predicament. Hamilton is now fifty, tall and heavyset, with a shaved head and a thin scar running down the right side of his scalp. “I took it seriously,” he recalled recently, “because here’s some stranger saying, ‘Hey, listen. Get out of wherever you’re at. Wake up, kid, this is real.’ ” He started spending time in the library, and eventually taught himself enough criminal law to become one of the most skilled jailhouse lawyers in the country.
But, in the fall of 1983, two months after Hamilton turned eighteen, a jury found him guilty. He was given thirty-two years to life for the murder and for an earlier, unrelated gun charge, and was sent to Elmira Correctional Facility, a maximum-security prison near the Pennsylvania border. There he earned a high-school-equivalency diploma and took a class on how to conduct legal research. In 1985, he was sent to Siberia, as inmates call Clinton Correctional Facility, which is twenty miles from the Canadian border. In the law library there, he met a group of veteran jailhouse lawyers, one of whom gave weekly tutorials on criminal procedure.
There is no job description for a jailhouse lawyer. It’s an occupation born of desperation: most prisoners cannot afford lawyers, and are eligible for a free attorney only for their first appeal. After that, they have to either learn the law themselves or find a jailhouse lawyer to help them.
