The bank robber turned law prof
Eleven years behind bars gave Shon Hopwood an understanding of the impact of U.S. sentencing
During a break in a basketball game to raise money for charity, Shon Hopwood told some of his Georgetown law students it felt different than the last time he was on a court: playing basketball in federal prison, he had to carry a shank in case his team started to lose.
His students laughed. He ran back onto the lawschool court — and sank the winning shot.
Hopwood’s new job as a tenure-track faculty member at the Georgetown University Law Center in Washington is only the latest improbable twist in a remarkable life. In the last 20 years, he has robbed banks in Nebraska, spent 11 years in federal prison, written a legal petition for a fellow inmate so incisive that the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear the case, earned undergraduate and law degrees and extremely competitive clerkships, written a book, married his hometown crush and started a family.
But this could be his most compelling role yet. His time in prison gave him a searing understanding of the impact of sentencing and the dramatic growth in incarceration in the U.S.
“It’s one of the big social-justice issues of our time,” he said. The U.S. has 5 per cent of the world’s population but 25 per cent of its prisoners. “Between prison, jail, home confinement, probation, parole combined it’s about 10 million people.” And almost three-quarters of released prisoners are back in cus- tody five years later. He hopes to change some of that.
Shon Hopwood’s life began with a happy childhood in Nebraska. His dad managed a cattle feed yard and his parents helped found a church. He was well-liked, uninterested in school and best known for basketball skills. An athletic scholarship to college ended when he got kicked out for not going to class. After two years in the U.S. Navy, he drifted back to Nebraska. One night his best friend suggested that they rob a bank. In August 1997, Hopwood and his friend walked into a bank and left with $50,000. Hopwood went on to rob four more banks.
At his sentencing, Hopwood, then 23, said he was going to turn his life around. In prison, Hopwood worked in the law library. In the summer of 2000, a Supreme Court decision caught inmates’ attention. Essentially, Hopwood explained, “things that can increase your sentence need to be proven to a jury, or you need to plead guilty to them.”
He had been sentenced based on guidelines for armed robbery, even though he had pleaded guilty to unarmed robbery. A technicality, maybe, but he began dreaming of getting out early. After two months of research, he mailed off his appeal, but it was denied. Still, something clicked. Trying to figure out a solution to the legal puzzle was the first academic thing Hopwood had ever enjoyed. Soon he was sending memos to other inmates’ lawyers, suggesting strategies. Then he was writing briefs.
He wrote a brief for a friend whose appeal had been denied. Hopwood spent months learning about the Supreme Court and habeas petitions, and one night he realized how he could frame an argument using the Sixth Amendment rather than the Fifth. After many drafts, he distilled the legal issues into simple, compelling logic, typed out a petition for certiorari and mailed it off. The Supreme Court accepted the petition.
The odds of that happening are maybe one in 10,000, said Seth Waxman, the former solicitor general of the U.S. who agreed to argue the case for free. The petition was “incredibly good,” he said. “It really identified, in sort of a crystalline form, the questions presented.”
Waxman immediately wanted to talk to the bank robber who could write such a thing, and thus began a friendship that would help change the trajectory of Hopwood’s life. When Hopwood walked out of prison in October 2008, he was 33 and had another moment of grace. A legal printing business in Omaha agreed to hire him to help with their Supreme Court briefs. A story in the New York Times unleashed a book deal. Still it was difficult to get into law school. But the University of Washington granted him a full scholarship.
In April 2015, after he passed the bar exam, he was sworn in as a lawyer. He joined Georgetown on a teaching fellowship, and on July 1, starts his new position there as an associate professor of law.
“He understands the problems of incarceration in a way that somebody who just studies them as an academic is not able to get,” said William Treanor, the law school’s dean.
Hopwood is still, at 41, haunted by guilt and regret for his crimes. But he has accepted that he can only change the future.