From Death Row convicts' advocate to Middle School mentor

In today's New York Times, a terrific piece by John Schwartz about an attorney who traded 20 years of struggling to keep death row prisoners "from the executioner's needle" for a new job at a middle school populated by poor, at-risk, mostly black kids.

The turmoil of middle school turns many teachers away, said the school's principal, Danielle S. Battle. Students' bodies and minds are changing, and disparities in learning abilities are playing out.

"A lot of people will say, 'I'll do anything but middle school,' " she said.

But this is precisely where Mr. Dunn chose to be, having seen too many people at the end of lives gone wrong, and wanting to keep these students from ending up like his former clients. He quotes Frederick Douglass: "It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men."

Once Convicts' Last Hope, Now a Students' Advocate (Image: David Walter Banks for The New York Times / thanks John Schwartz!)

• [Brainspore]

  Mr. Dunn sounds like the type of person we should all aspire to be. Either one of those jobs would be enough to break most people.

  • [stegodon]

    agreed. it’s easy (for me, at least) to lose perspective and become so entrenched in a profession that it’s difficult to imagine doing something else. this guy really appears to have good intentions. there’s a decent argument for greed being at the core of the evolutionary spirit, but compassion may be our most admirable characteristic.. or something along those lines.

• [TJ S]

  There’s a reason nobody wants to teach middle school. The best picture they could get of him, and he’s in mid-facepalm.

• [Machineintheghost]

  One thing I bet he can tell his “poor, at-risk” class: listen to your Miranda rights and exercise them. It doesn’t matter if you’re not as guilty as the police pretend to think you are, or if the police act nice and want to give you a chance to come clean. It doesn’t matter if you’re as guilty as sin or if you’re completely innocent, never having jaywalked in your entire life. Shut up and let your lawyer do the talking. If you have been arrested, the police are not your buddies, they’re not your therapists, and they’re not your confessors. Their job is not to cut you a break for being honest with them, and that is not what they mean to do.

• [kossmikman]

  “It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men.”

  Quote of the week.

  Also I like the kid in the back sleeping on his desk instead of doing his work.

• [O_M]

  …This says to me he finally realized that most of those heading for the needle were getting what they deserved, and has decided to shift his efforts towards keeping the next generation out of the slammer and ever getting near going to Death Row. I can dig it, because stats have shown that once you go thug, you never go back.

  • [Brainspore]

    O_M: You’re projecting your own opinion of the death penalty onto a sympathetic, hard-working man who completely disagrees with you. From the article:

    Illness forced his decision to leave the law. In 2006, he ignored a sore throat and worked through two months of grueling hearings in four cases back to back. Bacteria entered his bloodstream, causing toxic shock; the infection caused deterioration in his spine and led to congestive heart failure. He recovered, but not fully; this year, Mr. Kammer recalled, Mr. Dunn met with the staff and said: “I have the heart of a 70-year-old man. If I continue to do this work at the level I want to do it, I’m going to die.”

    That doesn’t sound like someone who changed his mind about the merits of capital punishment to me. It sounds like a man who dedicated his life to one just cause and found another when circumstances finally forced him to quit.