Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
From street gang to U. of Miami Law School
When UCF graduate Angel Sanchez starts law school in Miami this week, it will be a strange sort of homecoming. After all, the last time he lived there, he was a 16-year-old gang member being sentenced to 30 years for attempted murder.
“I have two different worlds,” he says. “Sometimes when people ask me where I’m from, I slip and say Orlando — even though I was born and raised in Miami. But I feel like the person I am now was born in Orlando . ... I have to remind myself, ‘Yo, you came from
So much about his story seems unlikely: earning his GED behind bars and studying old law books in the prison library, getting his sentence cut to 12 years, re-entering society at 28 only to become homeless. Sanchez stayed at the Salvation Army in Orlando, taking four buses a day to work and take classes at Valencia College, where he graduated with honors.
When he transferred to the University of Central Florida in 2014, he helped collect more than 300 books for the Orange County Jail’s inmate library while becoming one of the top moot-court competitors in the U.S.
He graduated with top honors in May.
“He had to work harder than anyone else to get to where he is,” says Alisa Smith, the legal studies department chair at UCF. “He has defied the odds every step of the way.” Others agree. “He just has a vibe and an aura that is truly remarkable,” says Beth Zielinski, his adviser at the prestigious Jack Kent Cooke Foundation, which awarded him undergraduate scholarships and, this year, a $50,000-a-year graduate scholarship, renewable for up to four years, to attend the University of Miami School of Law. “All our scholars are amazing, but when Angel comes in, he just grabs the room and holds it. … And he keeps plowing forward.”
Sanchez can seem relentlessly optimistic. But he has his moments of self doubt, including about his return to the place where he lived such a different life.
“The more my name has been circulated, the more old friends will try to contact me,” he says. “Once when I was clerking, I saw an old friend of mine — a guy I hadn’t seen in 15 years. We had both been in the jail, we were both Hispanic, we were both little so we had to look out for each other … I just have to rewire myself to be prepared.”
The old friend didn’t recognize Sanchez, who looks a decade younger than his 35 years. And Sanchez didn’t say anything.
Born in Miami’s Little Havana to an absentee, crack-addicted mother, Sanchez was raised by his father — a Cuban immigrant who spoke broken English, drove a tow truck and lectured his son on the value of education.
But by middle school, he carried a .38 special and — always small for his age — he worked especially hard to prove himself worthy to the gang members who served as his surrogate family. By 16, he had been arrested four times for a laundry list of felonies — all involving his association with drug dealers and violence against rival gang members. He wanted to be sentenced as an adult because the food was supposed to be better in prison.
Oddly, some of the same qualities that got him in trouble have made him successful. “The person I am internally never changed,” he says. “The drive to be accepted, to be loved, to be celebrated because I fought for the little guy — they’re the same. In gangs, you get the most respect if, when it’s five against two, you don’t run. You get beat up, but you keep fighting.”
Three years ago, when he went before a Miami judge seeking to get his probation reduced, she listened to his story, then called the attorneys for a sidebar.
A moment later she announced: “Mr. Sanchez, because of the changes you’ve made and the turnaround you’ve shown, I’m not reducing your probation. I’m terminating it outright.”
The courtroom erupted in applause. Later she asked him to be her summer law clerk. The next summer, it was her colleague in Miami’s 11th Judicial circuit, Judge Miguel de la O, who offered him a job.
“I rarely hire clerks who are not already in law school because they don’t know how to do legal writing, and they don’t know how to do legal research,” the judge says. “But Angel, because of working on his own case and working in the law library at the prison, was an excellent clerk. And he’s just a wonderful person.”
Sanchez not only clerked for the judge for two summers, he ended up living with him and his family. De la O offered him a place to stay so he wouldn’t have to sofa-surf or sleep in his car. By graduation time, Sanchez had made connections not only with judges, but also with state and federal attorneys — who invited him to give motivational talks to at-risk kids — and with civil rights leaders in the ACLU and Southern Poverty Law Center.
Though he’d set his sights on attending Yale and managed to make its wait list, he didn’t get in. He looks at the outcome as a chance to help kids in the same Miami neighborhood where he once went astray — including his own niece and nephews.
Yet even with all of his connections and accolades, there’s no guarantee he’ll overcome one fact: Convicted felons are not typically allowed to practice law in Florida.
Once he graduates law school, he’ll have to apply for clemency with the governor, a move that, if granted, would restore his voting rights. But the process can take up to seven years and much of it depends on the whims of whoever sits in the governor’s mansion at the time.
“We are a society that is supposed to believe in rehabilitation,” Smith says. “Do any of us want to be judged by the worst thing we’ve ever done, especially as a teenager?” Sanchez, as always, has a Plan B. “I will become an advocate for civil rights, a community leader, a reform leader or the founder of an organization that has just as much impact as if the [Florida] Bar had let me practice,” he says. “Even in the worst-case scenario, there is still a lot of important work to do. That’s what gets me through.”