A little more than a month ago, vaunted
New York Times author David Brooks
wrote an introspective piece entitled
The Moral Bucket List. In that space, a typically pensive Brooks reflected on the people who inspire him and the kind of life he wants to live. He laid bare his own personal rules of fulfillment, noting especially:
ABOUT once a month I run across a person who radiates an inner light. These people can be in any walk of life. They seem deeply good. They listen well. They make you feel funny and valued. You often catch them looking after other people and as they do so their laugh is musical and their manner is infused with gratitude. They are not thinking about what wonderful work they are doing. They are not thinking about themselves at all.
There's a duality in Brooks's words as he sets himself on the path to humility. Meeting such people is not only inspiring, but also enlightening. It's a reminder of not only the goodness in that rare person, but also of how far short we fall in meeting those lofty standards set by the few. Those people challenge our very core, making us ask questions of ourselves, our goals, and our motivations. They do it not with their words. It's perhaps their best quality that their very being can make us question whether we're doing enough with the tools we've been given.
In my own life, I've had occasion to meet and learn from a few of these people. I've written in this space about the young black men who mentored me when I was young, steering me far clear of the latent and overt racism that characterized my hometown. I've written about various teachers who've inspired my mind, and particularly David R. Dow, who, through his books, his classes, and his career, has cultivated both my intellect and my passion for those offenders who find themselves condemned to Texas's death row.
There are those people, and then there's Jani Maseli Wood, a lawyer whose work has inspired not only me, but an entire generation of young lawyers and students who've been lucky enough to work under her charge.
This weekend, Jani Wood was honored by her alma mater, the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts. She was granted an honorary Doctor of Laws degree in recognition of not only her service to that university, but her service to the greater good. In recognizing her contributions, the university said the following:
Wood is a graduate of the former North Adams State College, now MCLA, and is an assistant public defender for the Harris County Public Defender’s Office (PDO). Prior to joining the PDO, Wood was an attorney in private practice for 13 years, specializing in state and federal appeals and post-conviction matters.
In 2007, Wood was contacted by Sister Helen Prejean, author of Dead Man Walking, asking her to represent an inmate on Texas Death Row, pro bono. Embarking on an almost six-year journey, Wood, along with the civil law firm of Morgan Lewis and Bockius, L.L.P., convinced the courts to grant the defendant a new trial. For that work, Wood was awarded the 2013 Harris County Criminal Lawyer of the Year award and the Texas Criminal Defense Pro Bono Lawyer of the Year award.
As a top lawyer in the appellate division of the Harris County Public Defender's Office, Wood works on the complex legal issues facing clients who've been condemned. As a professor at the University of Houston Law Center, she schools students on the finer points of form and argumentation. In her career, she's garnered praise for her ability to care, and like most good defense attorneys, she marshals her skills in advocacy for those people society has mostly given up on.
My experience with Jani Wood came during the middle of my last semester of law school. I'd been working an internship with the Harris County Public Defender's Office, and I was placed under her charge. Her job was to mentor me, and to somehow see if, given my meager qualifications as a not-yet-graduated law student, I could contribute something to the legal defense of some human being.
In discussions over our cases, I learned new and different ways of thinking about the law and how it's applied in Texas. Jani deployed a sort of hopefulness I'd lost, recognizing that despite the near-inevitability of defeat that comes from working in criminal appeals, the work is still worthy of a good lawyer's effort, creativity, and attention. Given the heaviness of our work, the conversations often drifted to our passions - sports, good writing, and Bruce Springsteen, an artist whose working man missives have long inspired Jani's work and life.
As Jani's worked to expose some of the cracks inherent in the Texas criminal justice machine, she's argued each and every time in opposition to the oppressive fees charged by courts to the usually poor people facing a criminal indictment. The state of Texas is like many states that claw their hooks deep into the pockets of the accused through court fees like the "DNA fee" that the 1st Court of Appeals in Houston recently deemed unconstitutional. In Texas at least, these fees aren't exclusively used to pay for the costs of trying a case. Rather, they're often split with other agencies, making criminal defendants pay an improper tax. These defendants are rarely in the position to challenge these costs, and when they pile up, the costs make it almost impossible for already-indigent people to re-start their lives after they've served their sentences.
It's both inspiring and curious to me that Jani's earned acclaim as the woman fighting this particular war. In a recent op-ed, the Texas Observer proclaimed:
In Houston, one attorney is making real change by quibbling over loose change.
Jani Maselli Wood, an assistant public defender in Harris County, is waging a one-woman war against the way Texas uses the hundreds of different fees it collects from people involved in the criminal justice system.
These words, of course, are not reductionist in any sense. Jani is waging a war against these costs, as she's included a section in nearly every appeal she's filed in years on behalf of her clients. And her recent victories on this point will bring immediate returns to the exploited people she serves. Her efforts have gained so much attention that she was recently asked to testify in front of the Texas legislature, a body that has the power to make right the wrongs she's identified.
The strangeness, I guess, comes from the fact that it's this issue that's won Jani the attention that a long career of defending the defenseless should have already won her. Just more than a year ago, she was honored as the Harris County Criminal Lawyer of the Year and as the Texas Criminal Defense Pro Bono Lawyer of the Year for her work on various death row cases. She's juggled a dozen appeals at a time, working long hours into nights and weekends on behalf of defendants whose legal issues are convoluted enough to justify a team of attorneys working their case. Jani's done this while managing her obligations as a professor, as a professional mentor, and at one point, as a candidate for the high criminal court in Texas. She ran in that race on a platform that proved far too reasonable for an electorate that tends to only place people on that court if they're willing to rubber-stamp executions with impunity.
In some ways, though, Jani's new-found notoriety is appropriate and a perfect microcosm for the career she's led. It's in the minutiae that appellate lawyers live, challenging established rules and norms over and over until they get the answer they want. She's a lawyer, a mother, and a wife who has never given up on people and on causes, even when there's been good reason to do so. Losses are many for those who work in public defense, and when she was soundly defeated in her primary race for a place on the state's top court, no one would have blamed her if she'd folded up her tent and called it a day after a fulfilling career.
As I reached out in consolation on the night of that loss, Jani quoted to me from our favorite artist the words that I think characterize her career:
Wherever there's somebody fightin' for a place to stand
Or decent job or a helpin' hand
Wherever somebody's strugglin' to be free
Look in their eyes Mom you'll see me.
It's been that sort of resolve and dedication that's marked the career of Jani Wood, in which she's challenged the ability of Texas law enforcement officers to conduct questionable searches, in which she's asked the hard questions about the ways in which we put to death our fellow citizens, and in which she's smacked away the hands that purport to reach deep into the pockets of people who have so little left to give. It's in the issues and the causes that most others shrug off that Jani's found her niche, giving a powerful pen and a powerful voice to those who need it the most.
For me, Jani's been a constant source of encouragement on a difficult road to the right opportunity. She's been re-assuring in the way a boxer's trainer picks up the fighter that's been knocked down. She's been a source of light that's crowded into my mind and heart when I've grown disillusioned by the darkness that can box in those who work in civil rights or criminal justice.
When David Brooks meets those people he meets - the ever-inspiring few - he notes the things they've checked off on the moral bucket list. I've never run down a list to see what it is that makes a lawyer like Jani tick. I'm often too busy reading over her arguments and asking myself, "How did I miss that?" But I do know that in the prime of her sparkling career, as old universities draw her back to honor her contributions, and as colleagues reflect on the hard work she's put in, that all honors are well-deserved. The best people bridge gaps in age and gender and race and all characteristics in-between. They open the doors of their office to invite you into their big world, where you have open eyes to things that make them them. For Jani, it's passion for people that drives the boat, and it's in this passion that she's shaped young lawyers like me, and helped win victories big and small for the clients that most of us toss away.