Note: This was my admissions' essay into law school. I just enrolled in my first year as a night student at Quinnipiac University School of Law, and if all goes well, I should finish in four years.

W hen Gregory Wright, Jr. was 14, he shot and killed his father with the gun his father gave him. On a July evening in 2001 in Hartford's southend, Gregory watched his father punch his mother in the head. Gregory went upstairs, got the gun, and returned to pull the trigger.

Gregory is midway through a five-year manslaughter sentence that started in 2003, and I am applying to law school partly because our lives intersected at Echoes from the Streets, the youth newspaper I established to give Hartford youth the chance to document their world.

Some of Gregory's friends wrote for Echoes, and they interviewed Gregory's mom. I ushered a crew of Echoes' reporters to Gregory's pre-trial hearings. To illustrate Gregory's story, a student - in 30 minutes - took a photo of a .09mm pointing at the camera.

Several Hartford public school administrators censored that Echoes, refusing to allow distribution on school grounds. Based on the Supreme Court's 1971 Tinker ruling regarding "underground" newspapers, I wanted to sue to protect students' First Amendment rights. My boss objected.

I founded and ran Echoes, but as an at-will employee for the not-for-profit youth business incubator which housed Echoes, I had no rights. That conflict forced me out of Echoes two years later. Yet Gregory's story was the first of many situations at Echoes where I wanted to appeal to a court of law instead of the court of public opinion.

Gregory's case showed me the contradictory standards the law holds juveniles to. While Gregory awaited sentencing, he returned to school and wore an ankle monitoring bracelet. I hired him to write for Echoes, where he published poetry. At his age, I first felt the ink in my veins; believing that a free press could curb governmental excess, that a healthy sense of skepticism and an sharp instinct for news could protect and expand the Bill of Rights.

After college, as a reporter, I experienced some success in the Litchfield Hills, where it seemed everyone read local political stories and acted on them. Moving to Hartford, I discovered a different dynamic. Only 30-40 percent of Hartford's population could read my stories, and even fewer voted. Then and now, the corporations that own our local media outlets, that have the resources to alter this situation, place profit over public interest.

My desire to alter this dynamic drove me to start Echoes in December 2000. With the aid of generous partners who believed in my vision, I focused Echoes' curriculum on four goals: literacy, civics, empowerment and entrepreneurialism.

Before Echoes, I thought a law degree would improve my reporting by imparting an understanding of the Constitution, the foundations of Western jurisprudence and the judicial precedents that impact our lives. Covering courts, I saw that journalist and barrister employed similar linguistic tools. One lawyer I know became a reporter to improve her interrogatory skills.

Yet an attorney can access levers of social change unavailable to a journalist. My independent nature makes it unlikely that I will seek a reporting job again. Newspapers avoid hiring reporters with three civil disobedience arrests in protest of war. And not even Herman Melville could survive as a freelance writer.

Studying my next 40 years, I figure I can best self-govern through personal economic freedom. A law degree would provide flexible, professional challenges, like teaching at the college level and building a private practice to represent youth and their interests (perhaps being the public defender to accept Gregory's case).

It's not fair that the education I received remains unavailable to Gregory and many others like him in Hartford. I'd like my practice to be a platform to address that system-wide discrepancy. We can learn from Plessy, Brown and Sheff to find another avenue to the American dream of educational equality and a functioning, participatory democracy.

And if that doesn't work, I'll run for office.

8/23/06

Email this to a friend.

I wanted to go to Vermont Law School, because it has a great environmental program, yet I didn't want $100,000 in debt. But when I visited I got this great picture of their law school, and it will serve to illustrate my point. I used this essay for Vermont, too.

Index Pages

Topics

Archives

Law School Starts Now