What Gets Us Through: Celebrating resilience and connection with Matthew Jacober
“For me, there’s nothing more motivating than trying to right a wrong. And I don’t know that there’s a greater wrong than someone sitting in prison who does not belong there.”
That’s Matthew Jacober, partner at Lathrop GPM and newly elected president of the Midwest Innocence Project board. This month, we sat down with Matthew to talk about justice, resilience, and our upcoming Faces of Innocence 2025 event.
Matthew:
The first time I teamed up with Midwest Innocence Project (MIP), it was on the Faye Jacobs case in Little Rock, Arkansas.
Faye was wrongly convicted of murder at 17. I joined the team working both on her resentencing and on her habeas corpus petition – that’s a petition for exoneration – in federal court.
Ultimately, Faye was released. She wasn’t exonerated, because she had to make a very difficult decision at the 11th hour. She could either agree to be resentenced to time served and be released from prison that very day, or forgo the resentencing and pursue the habeas corpus, which would have kept her in prison a while longer.
She chose to go home. Who could blame her?
My experience with Faye’s case is how I became more or less hooked on innocence work. Working on these cases is hard. It takes a long time. It’s difficult both intellectually and emotionally, because you get to know folks really well. You witness their pain and the injustice that causes it.
Visiting someone who should not be in prison, then getting in your car and driving home while they stay behind is overwhelming.
But this work is also a way to renew your soul as a lawyer. It’s a way to give back to someone who can’t afford legal help. And doing it, simply because it’s the right thing to do, is incredibly gratifying.
So that’s my origin story, if you will, in being involved with MIP. It’s been a wonderful relationship both for myself and for Lathrop.
What have you learned through this work that you wish everyone, even folks who have never had to encounter the criminal justice system, understood?
What comes back to me over and over again is how important resilience is. Resilience for the wrongfully incarcerated individual to keep their head up, to keep moving forward and to not let the injustice crush them, and also resilience for their families, friends, and legal team to not give up.
It’s not an easy road or an easy process. And if you don’t have that resilience, if you don’t bring that to work with you every single day, you’re going to fail.
It always shocks me, when I meet a wrongfully convicted person, how resilient they are. I think that when you’ve been treated so unjustly, you have no choice but to make a decision: are you going to let the anger consume you, or are you going to be resilient?
Anger would be a perfectly justifiable choice. But ultimately, resilience is what gets people through to the other side.
It’s what keeps them from turning into what the system says they are.
MIP has an important fundraiser coming up where attendees will be hearing stories of exactly this kind of resilience. What are you looking forward to about Faces of Innocence 2025?
I love Faces of Innocence because it’s a celebration.
It’s a celebration of MIP, which is obviously important, because it’s a fantastic organization that is helping to bend the arc of justice a little bit in states where that’s a challenging thing to do.
But more importantly, Faces of Innocence is about celebrating the innocent people that MIP and its partners have helped.
I think it’s hard for people to really fathom what someone who’s wrongfully incarcerated goes through, especially if they’ve never been actively involved in a case. Faces of Innocence is an incredible opportunity to hear from released or exonerated people and gain a better understanding of the ways our justice system – even though it’s arguably the best in the world – is still far from perfect and still capable of making grave mistakes.
Acknowledging those mistakes and seeking to make them better is a very high calling. Because their impact isn’t just costing someone money or property or inconvenience. When the criminal justice system gets it wrong, it costs people days, years, even the entirety of their lives.
Being incarcerated is hard on a person. It’s hard on their emotional and mental state, but it’s also hard on them physically. There are illnesses and injuries and missed diagnoses. What incarceration does to a person’s life expectancy is real. It’s hard financially – it takes income away from their families and makes it impossible for the incarcerated person to build up retirement and live comfortably later in life. It’s hard on their families – the long drive to visit a loved one in prison, and the trauma of having to leave them behind and live daily life without them.
Faces of Innocence is about listening, about honoring the people and families who have lived through and survived wrongful incarceration. It’s about putting a face to a name and feeling the humanity of it all.
It’s about making the connections that inspire people to keep fighting and keep this work alive.
Shortly after Faye Jacobs was released, I saw her sing at a Faces of Innocence event. She has a beautiful singing voice. I remember sitting there with my colleagues who were on her team, and there was not a dry eye at the table. I doubt there was a dry eye in the room.
Faye went into the prison system when she was just 16. It took years and years to get her back home with her family where she has always belonged. And to watch her get up on stage, free, and perform for everyone was extraordinary.
Whenever I’m having a discouraging day in this work, I think of that moment. That’s what keeps me going.
In a year when your support is more critical to our cause than ever before, Matthew and MIP are thrilled to invite you to Faces of Innocence 2025.
We invite you to come hear the stories of the innocent, like Faye – stories of resilience, of hope, of possibility, and of the tangible difference you can make in the life of someone the criminal justice system has wronged.
To purchase your tickets or make a donation today, visit our event page.