Stacey Barchenger

The Tennessean

NASHVILLE — David Harris is a lawyer who would rather work with paper than people.

That’s because Harris sees his own victims in faces on the witness stand.

Harris served seven years in Tennessee for a string of armed robberies he committed in 1997.

He got out in 2004, afraid to fail again.

But a series of people went to bat for him, as did his honesty about his own history.

In 2013, while he was on parole, he was licensed to practice law in the Volunteer State.

In January, he argued his first trial in front of a jury.

He doesn’t want to do that again.

***

The men who robbed front desk clerk Tricia Johnson at an airport hotel in 1997 were nice.

“I had no clue what was about to happen me,” Johnson told The Tennessean, now 19 years later.

The men apologized as one of them drew a gun, forced her to the floor of the manager’s office and tied her hands behind her back with plastic.

“They both kept saying we’re really sorry we have to do that,” she said.

Police reports say the duo took cash and two-way radios from the hotel. They took Johnson’s purse, wallet, keys and driver’s license.

They took her security.

She worried they would come after her. They knew where she lived. Family members had to accompany her on the 2 to 11 p.m. shift at the hotel.

The robbers — Harris and an accomplice — committed similar crimes at nine businesses in Williamson and Davidson counties in a period of two months.

Harris eventually confessed to police. He told the police he needed money to keep his girlfriend from stripping, according to his confession — a 52-page document still kept in his archived court file. He realized later that his crimes were fueled by a drug addiction, he said, the need to get pills and pay off debt.

He was sentenced to a minimum of six years in prison, but possibly up to 20 years, for the Williamson County charges. His sentence in the Davidson County crimes was appealed by the state and converted from 24 years probation to hard time. Facing a more than 40-year sentence because of that, Harris glued himself to the prison's legal library.

He helped research law that convinced an appeals court to overturn the state's longer sentence.

Now, Harris helps others do the same.

***

Harris left prison in 2004 and got a job busing tables at a downtown Nashville restaurant while he earned a degree at Middle Tennessee State University.

He was limited by fear.

“I don’t like to feel like I’m a failure,” he said. “I’d been smacked down enough by that point.”

He planned to be a paralegal — after all, he had his own experience — until he asked John Vile, then the head of MTSU’s political science department, how to turn his credits from classes in prison into a degree. Vile is now dean of the honors college.

He changed Harris’ life in five minutes.

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“It’s as innocuous as hell to him, I’m sure,” Harris said of their brief meeting. (Vile said he doesn’t remember the meeting.)

Harris said he told Vile about his prison term. He said Vile asked why Harris did not want to be a lawyer. Why he would not go get that advanced degree.

“Why in the world give up without being told no?” Harris recalled the professor’s advice.

***

Harris graduated from MTSU in 2006 and enrolled at Nashville School of Law. He began working for a group of local attorneys, doing research and writing court papers. He graduated from law school in 2010 while working full time.

Law school was terribly hard, he said, but looming ahead was another challenge.

The Tennessee Board of Law Examiners, a group that decides who can practice law in Tennessee, told Harris he could not take the bar exam to get his law license because of his criminal history, Harris said.

Harris had been told “no.” But he wasn't giving up.

After a year's worth of paperwork and a hearing, Harris won the board’s permission to take the test. It took him three times to pass, he said.

Then came a character examination — a confidential meeting with the board that is almost like a mini-trial itself — to prove he was fit for the job. There is no specific prohibition in Tennessee that felons cannot get law degrees, though rules set by the state Supreme Court say crimes of "moral turpitude" are reason for disbarment or denial.

Harris rallied his support with that nagging “no” in his mind.

One of his chief supporters was a woman who goes to bat for victims: Verna Wyatt, executive director of Tennessee Voices for Victims, an advocacy group that supports victims. Harris returned to prisons in later years to speak to inmates about being accountable for their crimes.

“His adversity doesn’t define him. It refined him,” Wyatt said. “It made him better. All the things he experienced, all the things he did to other people, he was accountable for it.

“These people who are in prison think, I can’t do anything. I’m stuck. I have felonies on my record. I’m never going to get a job or make the minimum wage. He’s the proof that working hard can give a second chance.”

Among the letters Harris carried to the character test was one from Nashville Criminal Court Judge Mark Fishburn.

Fishburn said he was persuaded to write the letter because of Harris’ honesty about his crimes, and his own belief that the legal system is meant for rehabilitation.

“I thought he deserved a chance,” Fishburn said.

The board approved Harris, and he was licensed in 2013.

“I remember being in tears,” Harris said. “That was it.”

***

Harris is still growing his law practice, where he hopes to focus on appeals work — the very same work he did in prison to reduce his own sentence.

He alternates his time between a remodeled home-turned-office on Music Row and a desk at his Brentwood home.

He shares the home with his mother, his wife of six years and two rambunctious sons — ages 2 and 4 — who have a passion for tricycles, dinosaurs and pretending to be Minions.

David and Melissa Harris married in 2010, as Harris was going through the lawyer licensing process. They met via an ad Melissa Harris posted online, and months later Harris told her his history. She was not scared off because she believes people can change, she said.

Harris changed her, too.

“I’m full of excuses, always, for everything,” Melissa Harris said, adding that at her husband's prompting she grew her design business. “He strips you of that.

“Everything you say, he’s like, 'OK, you can fix this.'"

During the first week of January, Harris represented his first client in front of a jury. It was a robbery case involving a man — Harris' client — and three others who kidnapped two strangers and held them for about an hour of torture, as one victim described it. The jurors came back with guilty verdicts.

As Harris walked up to cross-examine the victims, his stomach was in knots. He thought he'd be sick. He did his job, asking questions to make the case that the victims could not specifically identify his client in the attack.

“I will never be OK with cross-examining victims,” he said. “That’s not going to be for me.”

Instead, Harris prefers appeals work that allows him to make sure both victims and the accused were treated fairly under the law.

On Friday, Harris got some news. His next jury trial starts Monday.

***

Johnson, the woman working at the airport hotel who was one of Harris’ victims, still works in the hospitality industry, though no longer at the front of the house.

Now 42, her voice sputters with sobs as she thinks about the uncertainty and fear she felt in the days after Harris passed through her life.

She said she’s occasionally thought about what to say to the men who shattered her sense of safety, but never came up with an answer.

She had no idea what happened to Harris until a phone call from a Tennessean reporter last week.

“Wow, really?” she said.

She found 13 simple words to say, and asked they be passed on to Harris.

“Tell him no ill will, and I’m glad things worked out for him.”