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'This is us': Jena 6 defendant Theo Shaw delivers law school commencement address
Updated on Jun 06, 2018 at 10:45 AM CDT
'Jena 6' defendant Theo Shaw is photographed prior to graduating from the School of Law at the University of Washington in Seattle, Wa. Saturday, June 2, 2018.
Updated on Jun 06, 2018 at 10:45 AM CDT
'Jena 6' defendant Theo Shaw is photographed prior to graduating from the School of Law at the University of Washington in Seattle, Wa. Saturday, June 2, 2018.
- People can change; people can be rehabilitated; but if there's anybody whose good character seems locked in and immutable, if there's anyone whose character should make us doubt a past allegation against him, it's Shaw.
One simply can't conceive of him setting upon a high school classmate with an intent to kill.
But in December 2006, in a case that drew worldwide attention and led to thousands of protesters marching in Jena, Theodore Roosevelt Shaw, then 17, was one of six black teenagers from Jena High School accused of attempted murder in an attack on a white student at the school.
The victim was treated in an emergency room; so somebody obviously attacked him. But Shaw says he didn't, and it takes more cynicism than I possess to believe he's lying.
Despite his claims of innocence, to make the case go away, he eventually pleaded no contest to simple battery, a misdemeanor. If a jury had found him guilty of the original attempted murder charge, Shaw could have been imprisoned well into his 60s.
But there he was Sunday night, at age 29, standing out in a room of legal scholars. The Class of 2018 at the UW School of Law chose him to speak for them and to them.
Even the law professor who called him forward to receive his degree was effusive with praise. He introduced Shaw as "my beyond student" and said, "I learned so much from him. I hope he learned something from me."
Shaw's story is a cautionary tale, but not the typical cautionary tale one tells to scare a misbehaving child into straightening up. It's a cautionary tale that law enforcement officers in this incarceration-happy state of ours need to digest. How many other Theo Shaws has our criminal justice system chewed up and destroyed? How much talent is drying up in the sun on Angola plantation?
Emily Maw, the executive director of Innocence Project New Orleans, was in Seattle Sunday night to see Shaw lead his law school classmates into the auditorium.
"Of course he's exceptional," she said Monday, but focusing on his exceptionality "misses the point." After his time in jail, she said, he had a network of people who cared for him and advocated for him, who provided mentoring and guidance. "It shows what kids that we would otherwise throw away can do," Maw said.
Maybe others wouldn't be law-school standouts, she said, but they could still achieve. "That's the moral of the story."
Maw was in Seattle with her husband, Rob McDuff, the attorney who negotiated Shaw's plea deal and helped him get his life back on track.
"It was quite a sight," McDuff said, "to see this young man who Louisiana incarcerated on unreasonably high bail, who was on the railroad to the penitentiary, leading his class, leading the procession, giving the speech to the law school graduation. I don't know that that's ever happened!"
***
Shaw interrupted his bar studies Friday (June 1) to talk to me about law school and the speech he was scheduled to give two days later. I reminded him that in 2014 he told me that he had no direction when he was a high school senior, that he had no plans after high school and that he believes he was ranked dead last in his class .
"Were you a different person then?" I asked him. "Was there a transformation so profound that Theo Shaw became a different person than he was in high school, or were you just this diamond in the rough kind of thing where all the traits you have now were actually there but you just weren't clicking yet? How do you see it?"
He said he was always likable and that it wasn't his personality that changed, but his focus.
"I think it was Frederick Douglass who said, 'Some people know the value of education by having it. I know its value by not having it,'" Shaw said.
While in jail, he borrowed a law book from another inmate and began writing motions to get the judge to lower his bail. He said in an interview before law school that he felt a rush of power when he realized that even as a poor, uneducated, incarcerated teenager, he could write something that compelled a judge to respond -- if only to say no.
In Friday's interview, he told me that having his jailhouse motions denied taught him, "Oh, I have to just talk the way you want me to talk and maybe they'll come give me some attention."
McDuff met Shaw when he was out of jail but still had charges hanging over his head. "First thing he said to me when I met with him was 'I want to get back into school.' Didn't talk about his case. Said, 'I want to get back in school.' I went to talk to the guidance counselor, principal. They all loved Theo. We worked it out, got him back in school. It's amazing how he turned that terrible experience into a true quest."
"There was a transformation in terms of his ambition," McDuff said, "but I think the underlying qualities that caused him to pursue that ambition" haven't changed.
"During his case, he was calm, collected, he took everything in stride, he kept a positive view, he had perspective, he looked at the big picture. It was really amazing." The day Shaw ended his case by pleading to a misdemeanor, the victim in the Jena High attack was sitting in the front row of the courtroom, McDuff remembers. "Theo went over and shook his hand and wished him the best for the future. His goodness was always there."
***
On Friday afternoon, Shaw was still figuring out what he was going to say for Sunday night's speech. "I don't know," he said when I asked what he had planned. "I do mock trials in law school, and I usually have bullet points of what to talk about. I think when I stand up I'll sort of let my convictions or heart just move me where I feel like I should be going."
When he stood at the lectern Sunday, he didn't bring bullet points. He extemporized. He spoke of the internship Maw made possible at IPNO and how that job allowed him to meet inmates at Angola who are all free now thanks to that organization's advocacy
"I talk about those men's experience because after tonight, after the celebration, even after we pass the bar, I believe as future lawyers, we have a responsibility," he said. "We may not be guilty or have had anything to do with the injustices that other people experienced in the criminal justice system. But we have a responsibility: a responsibility to the poor, to the condemned, to those who may not be popular in the eyes of the majority."
Despite his own remarkable story as one of the Jena 6, he didn't mention any part of it in his speech. He didn't even mention that years after he failed to persuade a judge in his home parish to lower his bail, he persuaded the highest-ranking judge in the state to hire him for a clerkship.
"This is an inspiring young man who's overcome significant obstacles," Louisiana Chief Justice Bernette Johnson said on the phone Tuesday. "Instead of being discouraged, what he's done is work harder."
Johnson praised Shaw's "great focus" and his "great analytical skills" and called him "the full package. I'm looking at potential, people who want to make a difference. I want a legacy of law clerks who want to make a difference."
In March 2017, almost two years after my column announcing Shaw's acceptance to law school, it had a second life of Internet virality. People were sharing it on Twitter and Facebook like it had just happened when, by that time, it was old news. People shared it with Shaw, too. As if he didn't know.
Why does he think his story has resonated so powerfully with so many people?
"It's not often you turn on the TV and see the media talking favorably about a young black man. Most of the time you turn on the TV, it's about crime and all this bad stuff," he said. "I think for our community that any time there is sort of something to change that narrative about us, people like to put that out there."
Black people crave reminders "that who they say we are we're not. Actually, this is who we are. And at that point, it's not even just about me. It's about us. This is us. Yes, he went to law school and did great things, but this is about us as a people. This is who we are."
Shaw's father, who worked at an apparel manufacturing plant in Jena, passed away during his son's second year in law school. Not that there can ever be a substitute for one's own father, but it was clear from a conversation with Wayne Brumfield, a former vice president at the University of Louisiana Monroe, that he's a quasi-father in Shaw's life. It was Brumfield who began mentoring Shaw when he transferred from Louisiana Delta Community College.
He knew the story of what happened in Jena, but finds the idea of Shaw's involvement as preposterous as I do.
"It's hard to imagine Theo being a violent person," he said and described the charges against him as "trumped up."
Like the law professor who called Shaw to the stage to receive his degree, Brumfield said, "I learned a lot from him, believe it or not: When things don't seem to go the way they should, just keep pushing forward."
But on Sunday night in Seattle, it was Brumfield who let Shaw know that he could stop pushing - if only for a minute. Two of Shaw's cousins traveled from Jena to see him graduate. His brother drove over from another part of Washington.
Shaw told them after the commencement that he needed to return home to resume studying for the bar. Brumfield was still laughing Monday at the absurdity of that.
"Take a little break, man," he said he told him. "You got your brother and your cousins. Take a little break. You good."
Jarvis DeBerry is deputy opinions editor for NOLA.COM | The Times-Picayune. He can be reached at [email protected] or at twitter.com/jarvisdeberry .
. I hope he goes on to do phenomenal things.
