Last week, I had the honor of interviewing Brittany K. Barnett at the Texas General Counsel Forum Dallas-Fort Worth Chapter breakfast about her impressive legal career. To quote the event chair, Munsch Hardt’s Jamil Alibhai, it’s like Barnett “has lived three lives in the time most of us have lived one.” Barnett’s start was in accounting. From there, she went to work as a corporate finance attorney and in-house M&A counsel. By night, she dedicated herself to pro bono efforts, working on President Barack Obama’s historic Clemency Project 2014. Barnett ultimately left her job and founded The Buried Alive Project, a powerful initiative to represent individuals sentenced to life without parole for nonviolent drug offenses. Her work has led to clemency for nearly two dozen clients across three presidential administrations. She’s also the author of a best-selling memoir, A Knock at Midnight: A Story of Hope, Justice, and Freedom, and she is working on a second book. I was so inspired by her story that I wanted to share our interview with a wider audience in this week’s P.S. Column.
The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.
The Lawbook: Let’s introduce the folks to your law firm, the Law Office of Brittany K. Barnett, and your philanthropic initiative, The Buried Alive Project. Tell us what kinds of cases you are taking, both in your law firm and in your nonprofit organization.
Brittany K. Barnett: The law firm is geared more toward corporate entertainment law with select federal criminal cases. The Buried Alive Project has had more national attention. Through that organization, I partner with law firms and train lawyers to take on cases pro bono for individuals serving life sentences without parole for federal nonviolent drug offenses.
The Lawbook: I want to go back in time and take a walk through your career to today. When did you first know you wanted to be a lawyer, and did you know what kind of law you wanted to practice?
Barnett: I grew up in rural East Texas. There were like 24 students in my class. There weren’t many lawyers at all. But I grew up wanting to be a lawyer like Clair Huxtable on The Cosby Show, and I didn’t know what type of lawyer she was. I learned later, when I was going to law school, that her character was actually written as a corporate lawyer.
The Lawbook: But your first career was in accounting, after obtaining a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in accounting from the University of Texas at Arlington. You were an auditor at PricewaterhouseCoopers. You left PWC to attend SMU Dedman School of Law. Did you go to law school intent on being a criminal lawyer?
Barnett: No. It never even crossed my mind to do criminal defense. I went to law school to be a corporate lawyer. After PWC, it just felt like a natural gravitation to go into corporate law.
The Lawbook: You were a corporate finance lawyer at Winstead and then you went in-house, doing mergers and acquisitions at Orix USA. What happened? When did you start to feel the tug toward criminal law?
Barnett: I was always interested in it. I tell my mom she’s responsible for my true crime obsession. I was listening to the Crime Junkie podcast on my way here this morning. I was always interested. I took criminal law classes and I had interned with Judge Nancy Atlas, who was a federal judge in the Southern District of Texas, and I was fascinated with the cases in her courtroom. During law school, I came across a case of a woman named Sharanda Jones, who is from Terrell, Texas, and she was serving a life sentence for drugs. I had only known one person serving life for drugs. He was a childhood friend of mine. I remember when he was sentenced and, you know, you hear a story and we thought it was good old boy, rural East Texas justice. I thought his case was an anomaly. And when I came across Sharanda’s case, I learned that there were a lot of people serving life for drugs and it was unbelievable to me.
I think what stuck out to me about Sharanda’s case is that she was also from the South, but she was also a mother. And my mom was incarcerated. During my first semester of law school, my mother was in prison. She served two and a half years. And I just remember how devastating it was. It’s devastating to have any loved one incarcerated, but when it’s your mom, it’s a different type. I really resonated with Sharanda. She had a daughter and I just couldn’t believe she had gotten a life sentence. So as a law student, I was just very curious. I questioned, ‘Did someone die?’ ‘Was she part of an international drug trafficking cartel?’ I started researching the nitty gritty of the case. And there was none of that. It was under these very broad federal drug conspiracy laws that she was entangled in. She was culpable because she knew a drug dealer in Houston. She knew a drug dealer in Dallas. And she connected them. On a handful of occasions, she did traffic drugs from Dallas and Houston on behalf of these drug suppliers. They took plea deals. Sharanda went to trial. She had never been in trouble.
When I came across her case, I was researching for a paper in law school. I was writing about the disparities in sentencing for powder cocaine and crack cocaine. The consequence of it is that a hugely disproportionate number of Black and brown people are sentenced to federal prison for a drug offense. I was writing a paper about that and I wanted to include a human element. I did a Google search in SMU’s Underwood Law Library and an interview with Sharanda from prison came up. I was just so drawn to her story, and I wanted to help, so I sent her a card and told her I was a law student. I still have the letter she wrote me back in 2009. She was so kind and she wished me well in my studies, but we joke now because there was an undertone of like, “How are you going to help me?” We went on a very long journey; it took six years to obtain her freedom.
The Lawbook: You were at Winstead and Orix while working on Sharanda’s case. How did you juggle these pro bono cases while working your day jobs?
Barnett: I filed the petition while I was at Winstead and I literally would work at the firm 10 to 12 hours a day. And I was so passionate about Sharanda’s case. I say I was doing clemency work before clemency work was cool. It’s so popular now, but there was no blueprint for it then. It is a very vague process. It’s not transparent at all. I spent a lot of my time trying to figure it out.
The Lawbook: You had taken some criminal classes, but criminal law was by no means your specialty at that point. I sometimes hear from lawyers a hesitation to take on pro bono cases that are not in their specialty, but they still have a desire to help the community they’re in. What advice do you give to lawyers who want to take on pro bono cases in areas they’re not practicing?
Barnett: I get that question a lot. I just jumped in. As I reflect on it, it was very overwhelming and intimidating. I remember, as a law student, with Sharanda’s case, I was writing motions and randomly calling defense lawyers, asking them to file them. Part of the thought process that I think other lawyers should have is that we are lawyers; we know how to research, we know how to advocate and we know how to figure things out. I feel that the passion for whatever the issue, even if it’s outside your practice area, will make a way for preparedness.
The Lawbook: When you were with Orix, you were pushing mergers and acquisitions by day and working on these pro bono cases by night. When did you decide to leave Orix and what were the factors that you weighed in making that decision?
Barnett: I first started filing these clemencies in 2012 and 2013. About a year later, President Obama announced his historic clemency initiative where he was going to prioritize clemency for individuals with cases like Sharanda’s and like the other cases I was working on while at Winstead and Orix. They had been so supportive. I would go to conferences in Washington D.C. and so people knew that I was doing clemency work, and I was asked to be on the screening committee for the president’s Clemency Project 2014.
Through that work, I was training hundreds of lawyers across the country. I really wanted to get as many people free as possible while President Obama was in office under this initiative, but I didn’t want to leave corporate law either. It was a very hard decision. I enjoyed the work that I did at Orix. I enjoyed my colleagues. Working for a global company, there’s a sense of having your thumb on the global power that was exciting. I remember talking to my dad about it. He was my voice of reason. I didn’t have anything lined up and he said to me, “Brittany, stop worrying about the challenges and imagine the possibilities instead.” That was when I knew that I was going to be resigning soon. I tell people, I was not a fool. I waited until I got my bonus. I got my bonus in, I think April, and I resigned in May of 2016.
The Lawbook: President Trump did not continue President Obama’s clemency initiative, right?
Barnett: He did not, but very surprisingly, he did a lot for criminal justice reform. And I say surprisingly because I remember when President Obama left and President Trump was coming into office, I was on my couch for about a week, because I was like, “What the hell did I do? I left my job.” One of my mentors and a former boss at Orix, Ron Barger, emailed me out of the blue and it was like he was reading my mind about the emotions I was feeling.
Getting that email from him was very motivating for me to stay the course. I had helped free seven people under President Obama’s initiative and every time I would speak to them, they would feel a survivor’s remorse, if you will, because they knew who they had left behind – many people who had earned a second chance, just as they had. One of the people that Sharanda was close friends with in prison was Alice Marie Johnson, who was serving a life sentence. (Johnson’s case was made famous, in part, because reality TV star and businesswoman Kim Kardashian championed her case to President Trump who commuted her sentence. This year, President Trump appointed Johnson his ‘pardon czar.’) Sharanda, Corey Jacobs and I just linked arms and co-founded The Buried Alive Project. Through this and Alice’s case, quite frankly, President Trump became very vocal about criminal justice reform and passed the First Step Act, which was a very monumental piece of legislation.
The Lawbook: How often do you work with lawyers from other firms and general counsel with the Buried Alive Project?
Barnett: Often. I had imagined launching this nonprofit and having my own firm and raising money to hire lawyers to come help free people. But no one is funding lawyers who do pro bono work. It’s just a sad reality that even with hundreds of millions of dollars flowing through criminal justice reform, it is very hard to fundraise for direct service work. That is somewhere I think my skills as a corporate lawyer kicked in, like, how do I scale this in a way to still help people even though it’s very hard to fundraise. I started partnering with big firms and I would go train their lawyers. Maybe they read the book or they heard me on a podcast and pro bono partners would reach out about ways to help. Since 2020, we’ve trained more than 150 lawyers at about 12 firms. Sidley Austin, for example, in partnership with Morgan Chase’s corporate legal department took on cases. It’s just been a very rewarding experience. I feel that no matter what type of law that you practice, we all should be engineers for justice.
The Lawbook: What are you looking for in a partnership?
Barnett: Passion. We know that corporate lawyers are big firm lawyers, so they are very busy. I was one of them. I totally understand that. And I think it is an overwhelming process to learn a whole new field. But if we’re taking on a case of someone’s life, then we should treat it in the same way we do as our paid clients. So, I’m definitely looking for pro bono partners with the passion for the work, who understand the human element. It is truly life-saving work. There’s not many professions where you can literally save someone’s life. Maybe a doctor, maybe a police officer. This is truly a privilege and an honor to be able to do this work. I just really impart that into the lawyers that we work with.
The Lawbook: You’re not looking for lawyers to know it all?
Barnett: No, no, not at all. I didn’t know it all. I still don’t. I just feel with the passion and just the skills that we have as lawyers, we can cross lanes. I mean, we may be crossing them into oncoming traffic, but we can dodge. We’ve had success even with those lawyers, and I see that the younger lawyers now are getting involved. It’s just an experience you’ll never forget to be able to tell someone that they will not die in prison.
The Lawbook: We mentioned Kim Kardashian earlier. You actually helped prepare Ms. Kardashian for her meeting with President Trump in Alice Johnson’s case. What was that like, working with a celebrity?
Barnett: I didn’t know what to expect at first. Alice did an interview with a platform called mic.com. The prison allowed her to use Skype to do this interview, and the video went viral on social media. Kim just so happened to see this video of Alice and she was moved to action. She engaged her lawyer, Shawn Holley in Los Angeles, to see how she could help with the case. They reached out to Alice. Alice reached out to me and Jennifer Turner, who’s with ACLU, who’s also been helping advocate for Alice for years. We started having calls with Kim and Shawn. I was pleasantly surprised at how genuine Kim was about it, how we would give her talking points and she would recite them and know exactly what she was talking about. She had a curiosity that we have as law students. So, when we prepped her to go into the Oval Office for Alice, she was definitely ready. We went on to work on other cases together. We went back to the White House together. She just was always very passionate about it, and she still is.
The Lawbook: Mandatory life sentences for nonviolent drug offenses still exist today. What is the next step for this reform?
Barnett: In 2005, the Supreme Court case United States v. Booker made federal sentencing guidelines advisory. However, there are people still in prison from before 2005 and those laws weren’t retroactive. We got President Trump and the First Step Act, which as I mentioned, was a monumental piece of legislation, but some of the frustrations are still there. There were four sentencing reforms in the First Step Act and only one of them was retroactive. One of the reforms that wasn’t retroactive was the three strikes law. So, it used to be that after two prior felonies, the third federal one resulted in a mandatory life sentence without parole, no matter what those two priors were.
There was one client I had who had two priors: One when he was age 17 or 18 and one when he was 19. The quantity from both cases weighed less than two pennies. But in the third case, the prosecutor in his sole discretion, chose to enhance the sentence under the three strikes law, which carried a mandatory life sentence. The federal judge had no choice. The federal judge actually spoke out from the bench about this case. He resigned from a federal lifetime appointment in protest of these types of sentences. He actually went to the White House with Kim and me. Even though those laws have changed – now it’s a mandatory 25 years through the First Step Act and your two priors have to be serious, you had to have at least gone to prison for a year, and they had to have occurred within the past 15 years – that provision is not retroactive. So, we still have people serving life sentences today under yesterday’s drug laws.
Even now, some of the cases that we do with the Buried Alive Project through compassionate release, judges are not granting them. They don’t care that the law has changed. As we try to work through Congress to make these laws retroactive, or as we try to work through the courts, we also have to keep trying through clemency as well.
The Lawbook: There must be an incredible emotional toll that comes with taking on these cases. Can you talk about that toll first of all, and then why you keep taking them?
Barnett: There is an incredible emotional toll that I didn’t think about at first. About three years ago, I hit rock bottom exhaustion. I couldn’t get out of bed some mornings, so I was like, I am not taking another case. I don’t want to do it. I don’t even want to be a lawyer anymore. It was that bad. I realized that the pace I was going, the amount of work I was doing, is just not sustainable. I had to take time away from that. I didn’t take any cases for a few years, but I still had all these cases we were currently working on.
So I took time last year. For three months, I traveled abroad. And that was another one of the moments in which I was like, “What did I do in 2016 when I left my job?” I took that time to really work on myself. Therapy helps a lot, too. I came back very rejuvenated and ready to go. I don’t have to not do this work. I just need to show up to this work in a healthy way with boundaries. So we kept the Buried Alive Project going.
With my firm, like I said, I take a select number of cases. I consult more than anything on the federal side on white collar cases. I’ve been invited to be on crisis communications teams for white collar cases. And then I have a couple of clients in the entertainment space, which takes up half of that practice. Some of them are in hip hop, and sadly, sometimes that overlaps with the federal system. I have a few clients where I have a lot of matters happening with them. The Buried Alive Project is still flourishing and we’re trying to really advocate for the president and his current administration to do more clemencies like he did before. I think he will. He actually appointed Alice Johnson as his pardon czar, which is so amazing to see. I was there last week at the White House visiting her. To see her go from prison to Pennsylvania Avenue is incredible. I know she’s going to do great things and try to get as many people home as possible.
The Lawbook: Let’s talk about your book. It’s a memoir. How different was it writing a memoir as opposed to writing briefs and motions?
Barnett: It’s much different. In my book, I’m sharing very personal parts of my journey growing up in rural East Texas. My mom was a nurse and witnessing her rapid decline from drug addiction and her going to prison – It’s something when your hero is on ground zero, and it does a lot to a child to see disaster unfolding tiny arm’s reach away and feeling you can fix it and you can help, and that’s not your responsibility. That’s not your burden to carry. But we do. I wasn’t going to write about that part. I was going to start the book with Sharanda. The editors really pushed me to share more of my story. So now, like a quarter of the book is that journey of my life, from childhood into college, and I’m glad that I did. So it was very difficult to write that. And I have always been a pretty good writer, but I never liked to write. That’s probably why I became a corporate lawyer. We do write, by the way. But I remember I would sit at my desk and three or four hours would go by and I had written a paragraph. I was telling [lawyer and CNN host and contributor] Van Jones that I was having a hard time writing the book and he suggested I speak the book. That just changed everything for me.
One of my dear friends in Dallas would interview me about the book and she’d ask me questions. I’d say, “I’m going to visit Sharanda.” She’d say, “What was the weather like? What were you wearing?” We recorded it over a couple of months – probably 40 or 50 hours of audio – and I sent it off to have it transcribed. It was still so much work after that, but I just felt much better. It sped up the process. I wasn’t typing three sentences a day. It also allowed someone that’s very close to me, that knows my journey, to pull the story out in ways that I probably never would have been willing to. It was a fun journey and a challenging journey.
The Lawbook: How long from beginning to end did it take you?
Barnett: Two years.
The Lawbook: And how many editing revisions?
Barnett: Three.
The Lawbook: What can we expect next from you?
Barnett: I’m going to continue to build up lawyers to help train them to do this work, because I want to go do other things, too. I am writing my second book. It’s called And Then She Freed Herself. We’ll see how that goes.