Derrick Hamilton was wrongfully convicted of murder, and spent more than two decades trying to prove his innocence. Photograph by Dana Lixenberg for The New Yorker

Derrick Hamilton’s legal education began in 1983, when he was seventeen and in the jail for teen-age boys on Rikers Island. He’d been an enthusiastic student as a child—his family called him Suity, because he liked to wear a suit to school. But in high school he’d begun skipping classes and getting into trouble. At fifteen, he was charged with robbery and sentenced to sixty days in jail. The arrests continued, for petty larceny, assault, criminal use of a firearm. Then, in March of 1983, a bread deliveryman was fatally shot near Lafayette Gardens, the public-housing project in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, where Hamilton lived, and he was charged with the murder. He insisted that he had not done it, and entered a plea of not guilty.

His father, a livery-cab driver, hired a lawyer named Candace Kurtz to represent him, and she urged him to start studying in the jail’s law library, so that he could better understand his predicament. Hamilton is now fifty, tall and heavyset, with a shaved head and a thin scar running down the right side of his scalp. “I took it seriously,” he recalled recently, “because here’s some stranger saying, ‘Hey, listen. Get out of wherever you’re at. Wake up, kid, this is real.’ ” He started spending time in the library, and eventually taught himself enough criminal law to become one of the most skilled jailhouse lawyers in the country.

But, in the fall of 1983, two months after Hamilton turned eighteen, a jury found him guilty. He was given thirty-two years to life for the murder and for an earlier, unrelated gun charge, and was sent to Elmira Correctional Facility, a maximum-security prison near the Pennsylvania border. There he earned a high-school-equivalency diploma and took a class on how to conduct legal research. In 1985, he was sent to Siberia, as inmates call Clinton Correctional Facility, which is twenty miles from the Canadian border. In the law library there, he met a group of veteran jailhouse lawyers, one of whom gave weekly tutorials on criminal procedure.

There is no job description for a jailhouse lawyer. It’s an occupation born of desperation: most prisoners cannot afford lawyers, and are eligible for a free attorney only for their first appeal. After that, they have to either learn the law themselves or find a jailhouse lawyer to help them. In state prisons, jailhouse lawyers typically lack law degrees—some never finish high school—but New York does guarantee access to a law library, which is run by inmate clerks.

The older prisoners in the Clinton law library gave Hamilton a job as a “counterman.” At the time, Clinton housed about twenty-five hundred prisoners, and there was almost always a line at the library counter. Often, inmates asked for materials that might help them fight their convictions. “I would show the guy how to go to the point that relates to his case, so he didn’t have to read the whole thing,” Hamilton told me. “This way, he could get his answer and keep it moving.” Prisoners also needed general legal advice, about divorce, power of attorney, paternity, child support. “You would learn so much at the counter,” Hamilton said.

Like many of the men he helped, Hamilton was a father; by the time he was eighteen, he had three children by three women. He married the mother of his son, Davone, in 1987. By then, his father had hired another lawyer, George Sheinberg, to handle his appeal, and Sheinberg managed to get the murder conviction reversed. Hamilton went on trial again for the same crime, but soon after it began he pleaded guilty to manslaughter, and was released in 1989, after serving six years. He still maintained his innocence—he had entered an Alford plea, in which a defendant does not have to admit any guilt—but he considered his punishment justified, given his earlier gun charge. “The six years was rightfully done,” he said.

After his release, he returned to Brooklyn, to his wife and Davone, who was then five. He barely recognized his old neighborhood. The crack epidemic had taken hold: empty glass vials littered the sidewalks; friends’ mothers were prostituting themselves to pay for their addiction; childhood friends had become dealers. He had six siblings, and one of his brothers had joined the trade. The most disturbing change was that his father was gone. A year earlier, he had been murdered near Lafayette Gardens.

To escape the chaos, Hamilton spent time in New Haven with an older half brother, who ran a talent agency there. But, six months after his release, Hamilton crossed the state line without his parole officer’s permission, and was sent back to prison for a year. When he got out again, he was twenty-four, and he had the scar on his head—the result of a fight in the prison yard. The best way to stay out of trouble, he decided, was to leave town. He and his half brother came up with the idea of opening a hair salon in New Haven, with the help of a beautician they knew.

Two weeks before the opening, in March of 1991, police officers arrived at the salon, handcuffed Hamilton, and drove him to a local station house. There an N.Y.P.D. detective interrogated him about a murder that had occurred in Bedford-Stuyvesant on January 4th. Hamilton knew the victim, Nathaniel Cash, who was twenty-six and had recently left prison. He had been shot nine times, and someone at the scene named Hamilton as the killer. The detective, Louis Scarcella, then thirty-nine, reminded Hamilton of the actor Joe Pesci, as he swaggered about the room, brandishing a cigar. But what Hamilton remembered most clearly, he says, is that Scarcella told him that “he didn’t care whether I did it or not, because I didn’t serve enough time for my previous case, and I would be going back to jail.”

The murder trial took place in Brooklyn State Supreme Court, in July of 1992. It should have been easy to establish Hamilton’s innocence. He said that at the time of the shooting he had been in New Haven, meeting with two women who worked at his half brother’s talent agency—he was trying to help arrange auditions for their acts at the Apollo Theatre. The District Attorney’s office had only one supposed eyewitness: Cash’s girlfriend, Jewel Smith, a twenty-two-year-old mother of two, who had a number of arrests for shoplifting and was on parole. She had given conflicting versions of what happened, and then, a few days after Hamilton’s arrest, she had gone to the office of George Sheinberg, who was again representing him, and signed a statement saying that Hamilton “was not there when Mr. Cash was shot.”

When the trial began, however, Smith testified that she had seen Hamilton kill Cash. Detective Scarcella claimed that Smith was afraid of Hamilton, and the prosecutor argued that that was why she had earlier changed her story. The women from the talent agency had not been contacted in time to appear in court, and two other alibi witnesses who were scheduled to testify for Hamilton didn’t show up. Sheinberg asked for more time to bring the witnesses in, but the judge, Edward M. Rappaport, denied his request. The jury voted to convict.