The worst thing Maureen Onyelobi did in her life won't be that last thing she does with her life.
She starts law school this fall, joining her first-year classmates at Mitchell Hamline School of Law remotely from the Minnesota Correctional Facility in Shakopee. She will be studying the justice system that imprisoned her for life without parole.
She is the first law student accepted into an accredited American law school while incarcerated. She won't be the last.
The Prison to Law Pipeline — a growing network of attorneys, activists and people who have served their time and now want to serve their community — is working to help students in Minnesota prisons become attorneys and paralegals.
"The goal of it really is to democratize legal education," said Maya Johnson, an attorney and director of the Prison to Law Pipeline at the Legal Revolution — a new law firm affiliated with All Square, a nonprofit dedicated to helping the people most affected by the legal system.
Minnesota's newest law student got most of the headlines this week. But five students incarcerated at Stillwater and Shakopee prisons have been hitting the books for months, working toward paralegal degrees from North Hennepin Community College next year.
"They're brilliant, they're wonderful humans who really just want to utilize this to better themselves and their communities," Johnson said. One professor told her that he'd just awarded the highest grade he'd ever given in his career to one of the students at Stillwater.
You may be wondering who would hire someone with a criminal record as a paralegal. The answer, Johnson learned, is that plenty of local law firms want their clients to be able to work with someone who understands exactly what they're going through.