A Story of Redemption
“There came a point when I had to ask myself: How do I live in here?” says Jeremiah “JJ” Bourgeois (’23 J.D.). “A prison is a bureaucracy. It’s governed by rules, and in learning the rules I was learning the law.”
In 1992, when he was 14 years old, Bourgeois made the worst decision of his life and committed an unspeakable crime. This is a story of redemption, though, of forgiveness and maybe even grace, so we won’t dwell on the details. A person is more than the worst thing he or she has done. He was tried as an adult and sentenced to life in prison without parole. By his estimation, he spent seven of his first 10 years in solitary confinement.
“When you end up in solitary, you’re in the belly of the bureaucracy. All of your communication is done by what are called kites,” he says. “I guess because you send them up and reel them back in.”
It was through these messages and the gaslighting he experienced at the hands of the prison administration, that Bourgeois sharpened his communication skills. He focused, concentrated – he didn’t want another message coming back saying he hadn’t been clear enough. He taught himself sentence structure by reading novels and later learned how to construct arguments by helping his fellow inmates navigate the system of laws that he’d mastered for himself.
Toward the end of his time in prison, Bourgeois was writing articles for an online newspaper called The Crime Report and became the only prisoner ever admitted to The American Society of Legal Writers.
In 2012, a landmark Supreme Court ruling (Miller v. Alabama) paved the way for Bourgeois’ eventual release in the fall of 2019, after 27 years in prison. Less than a year later, Bourgeois enrolled in law school where he formed a bond with Dean Rooksby.
“There were all kinds of reentry challenges that made law school more difficult than it otherwise would be,” he says. The pandemic made those challenges even harder. He had spread himself too thin, was missing class, and even went homeless for a spell.
When Dean Rooksby noticed his mounting absences, he called in a favor from Professor Emeritus Amy Kelley, who provided some of the help and encouragement Bourgeois needed during that time. “I call her Mom Deuce,” he says, laughing.
Bourgeois is now a gubernatorial appointee and law clerk who sits on the Sentencing Guidelines Commission. Dean Rooksby could not be prouder: “He is an embodiment for our institution of what a legal education can do in terms of changing the trajectory of someone’s life.”
Bourgeois remembers talking to a priest about his journey. He says, “I told him I thought this was a miracle, but he said miracles are simple and easy to understand — this is a mystery. That’s me — the mystery.”