Brittany Byrd
“I work hard, pray hard, pay dues ayy / I transform with pressure, I’m hands-on with effort / I fell twice before, my bounce back was special.” — Kendrick Lamar
This week, President Obama granted clemency to 231 deserving individuals — the most individual acts of clemency granted in a single day by any president in this nation’s history. Last month, as part of a two-day advocacy effort, families of inmates gathered for a candlelight vigil outside the White House and delivered more than 2 million signatures in support of clemency.
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The event was organized by the criminal justice reform group Cut50 and #ClemencyNow Campaign Director Brittany Byrd. Over the last several months, I’ve had the opportunity to work with Byrd on clemency applications. Since the summer, she has ran an informal clinic for forty-five SMU Dedman law students and local attorneys, guiding us through the clemency application process. Lately, she’s been working day and night, around the clock, to complete applications before the end of Obama’s term.
Byrd was born in Bagota, an East Texas town of around 1,200 people. She attended Commerce High School in Commerce Texas, and UT-Arlington for college and graduate school. She was a CPA at PricewaterhouseCoopers for two years before attending SMU Dedman School of Law. Perhaps nothing in this history would suggest she would become so involved with civil rights.
However, a decade ago, Byrd’s mom was incarcerated for two-and-half years. This ordeal is what sparked her heightened sense of compassion and empathy for those who have been imprisoned. While in law school, Byrd visited Carswell Federal Prison in Fort Worth and met with Sharanda Jones for research on her critical race theory course paper. Both Byrd’s and Jones’s life would forever be changed by this meeting. Even after joining a law firm full-time after graduation, Byrd would stay committed to Jones’s cause.
Like Byrd’s mom, Jones’s mom had also been incarcerated. Jones actually served twelve years of her sentence alongside her quadriplegic mother for a non-violent drug offense. Because of Byrd’s advocacy efforts, President Obama granted Jones clemency from her life sentence. Jones’s mother wasn’t so fortunate; she died from a staph infection while in prison.
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Last spring, Sharanda Jones was released after serving 17 years in prison. In August, another one of Byrd’s clients, Wayland Wilson, had his sentence commuted after spending the last 23 years of his life in prison. This month, Byrd will have her third client released early, after spending the last 26 years behind bars. Without Byrd’s pro-bono efforts, these individuals may have been in prison for much longer — in Jones’s case, for the remainder of her life. Clearly, I am not the only one who believes Byrd is an inspirational attorney.
Byrd is also the founder and executive director of Girls Embracing Mothers (GEM), a non-profit organization whose primary focus is to empower girls in grades K-12 with mothers in prison to break the cycle of incarceration and lead successful lives with vision and purpose. Every month for the last three years, GEM has teamed up with the Texas Department of Corrections to bring girls into a local prison facility for an enhanced visit with their incarcerated mothers.
President Obama has granted more clemencies than the previous eleven presidents combined. Still, the United States is the world’s leader in incarceration with 2.2 million people currently in the nation’s prisons and jails — a 500% increase over the last forty years, according to the Sentencing Project. As the Sentencing Project highlights, “Changes in sentencing law and policy, not changes in crime rates, explain most of this increase.” Our country makes up 5% of the world’s population, but inexplicably incarcerates over 25% of the world’s prisoners.
It’s high time to question our current system and government sentencing policies. As the year winds to a close and Obama’s second-term comes to an end, many of us are hoping for, while Byrd and many of our fellow attorneys are actively petitioning, Obama to issue more clemencies. I believe no one has been more influential and committed to this cause than my colleague Brittany Byrd. She has given numerous families hope for the holidays.
For leaving Biglaw to pursue her passions and for all her civic engagement and clemency efforts, Brittany Byrd is my inspirational attorney of the year.
Renwei Chung is the Diversity Columnist at Above the Law. You can contact Renwei by email at [email protected], follow him on Twitter (@renweichung), or connect with him on LinkedIn.