Isaac Wright Jr. was 26 years old and serving a life sentence when he decided that the law would be his only way out. He had no lawyer to rescue him, no money, no influence. He had a cell, law books, and the certainty that he had been wrongfully convicted in New Jersey in 1991 under the so-called drug kingpin law.
What he did from the inside was methodical and extraordinary: he studied law on his own, began preparing appeals for other inmates, and, in the process, discovered specific flaws in the instructions juries received in “kingpin” cases. Those flaws ended up being the lever that overturned his own conviction. The investigation also exposed prosecutor Nicholas Bissell, who had concealed plea deals and presented false testimony. Bissell fled from federal authorities and died a fugitive in 1996. The judge in the case, Michael Imbriani, was removed from office and imprisoned years later for corruption.
Wright was released in 1997. He graduated from Thomas Edison State University in 2002 and earned his law degree from the University of St. Thomas in 2007. The New Jersey Bar made him wait nine more years before granting him his license, which finally came in 2017. His story inspired the ABC series For Life, produced by 50 Cent. Today he practices law in the same system that once tried to erase him.