MARKED FOR LIFE

Gritty account of a music producer’s wrongful conviction for drug trafficking and his eventual legal triumph.

Wright’s overlong yet engrossing memoir (co-written with Sternfeld) encompasses a sharp exposé of mass incarceration and the quest for legal self-discovery, and the author shows how his success as a hip-hop promoter attracted the attention of a corrupt New Jersey prosecutor and his police minions. “I was at a nexus of all these people, the nucleus of the well-off, the famous, and the local hustlers,” he writes. “It put me on the radar of a joint drug unit that Middlesex County formed with neighboring Somerset County.” After acquaintances were pressured to implicate him, Wright was arrested in 1989 and convicted two years later under an ill-conceived “kingpin law,” which the author describes as “a conspiracy law with a laughably low burden of proof….As written, the statute gave a life sentence to someone for having a conversation that no one had to prove ever happened.” Yet the discovery of the prison law library gave him an unexpected new direction for dealing with his plight: “Educating myself in the law was my form of resistance.” This began with the seemingly reckless decision to represent himself. “Acting as your own lawyer, especially in a case this serious and complex, was close to unheard of,” he writes. At the notorious Trenton State Prison, Wright joined the Inmate Legal Association, worked on his own appeals, and won respect by providing aid to other inmates and forcing change in the abysmal treatment of mentally ill prisoners. In a dramatic climax, Wright chronicles how he elicited a courtroom admission of police malfeasance, which collapsed the case against him. Though the prose is sometimes repetitive, the author discusses the intricacies of his legal journey in clear, forceful terms, and the case’s complexities and Wright’s fight for justice (the prosecutor was eventually himself convicted) maintain suspense.

A startling, disturbing narrative that shows the continuing social costs of wrongful conviction and the drug war.