Jarrett M. Adams

Jarrett M. Adams is an American criminal defense attorney, civil rights advocate, author, and exoneree. Wrongfully convicted of sexual assault at age 17 and sentenced to 28 years in a Wisconsin maximum-security prison, Adams served nearly ten years before the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit unanimously overturned his conviction in 2006 on grounds of ineffective assistance of counsel, with assistance from the Wisconsin Innocence Project. Following his exoneration, Adams earned a law degree and became the first exoneree ever hired as a staff attorney by the Innocence Project. He founded the Law Offices of Jarrett Adams, PLLC in 2017 and co-founded the nonprofit Life After Justice.

Early life Jarrett M. Adams was born and raised on the South Side of Chicago, Illinois.

Wrongful conviction

Arrest and trial On September 6, 1998, seventeen-year-old Adams traveled with two friends from Chicago to Whitewater, Wisconsin. Following a social encounter at the University of Wisconsin–Whitewater, Adams and his co-defendants were accused of sexual assault. An all-white jury convicted Adams despite his account that the encounter was consensual. He earned his Juris Doctor from Loyola University Chicago School of Law in May 2015. He was part of the legal team that obtained a new trial for Richard Beranek, who was released in 2018 from the same prison in which Adams had been wrongly incarcerated.

WTTW's Chicago Tonight: Black Voices featured Adams in October 2021, with correspondent Erica Gunderson reporting that Adams had spent ten years in prison for a crime he always maintained he did not commit, studying the legal system to overturn his own case before becoming a lawyer working to help others like himself.

Media coverage and recognition Adams was featured on NBC Nightly News with Lester Holt in August 2017 in a segment covering his exoneration and his work representing others who had been wrongfully convicted. MSNBC, ABC News, and CBS News.

The State Bar of Wisconsin's publication InsideTrack featured Adams as a keynote speaker at its 2021 Annual Meeting and Conference, where he addressed racial injustice and criminal justice reform.

Adams is listed in the National Registry of Exonerations, maintained jointly by the University of California, Irvine, the University of Michigan Law School, and Michigan State University College of Law.