A Solitary Jailhouse Lawyer Argues His Way Out of Prison

By SEAN GARDINER
WSJ

Each morning for 5,546 days, Jabbar Collins knew exactly what he'd wear when he awoke: a dark-green shirt with matching dark-green pants.

The prison greenies of a convicted murderer, he says, were "overly starched in the beginning, but as time wore on, and after repeated washes, they were worn and dull, like so many other things on the inside."

His Case for Freedom

Today, Jabbar Collins works as a paralegal at the Law Offices of Joel B. Rudin in Manhattan. But for 15 years, he sat in prison, convicted of the 1994 murder of Rabbi Abraham Pollack. Mr. Collins, who maintained his innocence, spent much of those 15 years in a computerless prison law library.

For most of those 15 years, Mr. Collins, who maintained his innocence, knew the only way his wardrobe would change was if he did something that's indescribably rare. He'd have to lawyer himself out of jail.

There was no crusading journalist, no nonprofit group taking up his cause, just Inmate 95A2646, a high-school dropout from Brooklyn, alone in a computerless prison law library.

"'Needle in a haystack' doesn't communicate it exactly. Is it more like lightning striking your house?" says Adele Bernard, who runs the Post-Conviction Project at Pace Law School in New York, which investigates claims of wrongful conviction. "It's so unbelievably hard…that it's almost impossible to come up with something that captures that."

(More here.)