The ultimate nightmare!
From ending up behind bars in a maximum security prison in 1989 after being wrongfully convicted, for seven and a half years and being eligible for parole only after 30 long years in prison to proving his own Innocence and freeing himself after arming himself with the law, Isaac Wright Jr., whose true life story inspired ABC’s ‘For Life’ is no doubt a spirited champ. Now he is running for Mayor.
Hopeful, even though it seemed freedom was a far-fetched dream, Isaac who after serving as his own lawyer when all hopes to get one proved abortive with most telling him he would bag at least 20 years in prison, was in 1991, two years after his arrest, wrongfully accused of being the brain behind a drug conglomerate in the New York and New Jersey area, hence was convicted under New Jersey’s drug kingpin law and sentenced to life imprisonment . But he decided giving up was no option.
While incarcerated in prison, he armed himself with knowledge of the legal ropes, worked as a paralegal and helped to overturn the wrongful convictions of twenty of his fellow inmates, before finally proving his own innocence following his ability to extract a confession of police misconduct from a veteran police officer, James Dugan while conducting a cross-examination, securing his release:
“I understood law enforcement in such a way that I was able to get a law enforcement officer, a veteran, to actually come clean and admit fault, even though he was facing prison time,” Wright told People.
“The years of dealing with those issues allowed me to take that experience and individually turn an officer around. I think I could do the same thing with the NYPD.”
Upon release from prison, he pursued law and graduated in 2002 with his undergraduate degree. In 2007, Wright graduated from Saint Thomas University School of Law. In 2008, he passed the New Jersey bar examination.
He is currently a Counselor with one of the biggest Black-owned law firms in Newark, New Jersey, law firm Hunt, Hamlin & Ridley.
Before his arrest, Isaac Wright Jr. worked as a music producer for the Cover Girls, an 1980s group which he help create featuring his then-wife Sunshine Wright as a vocalist. Before his arrest he was happily married with a 5-year-old daughter.
“Everything was going really, really, really good,” Wright later recounted to Esquire Magazine. “And sometime after it started going well for us, we decided to move to New Jersey.” There, everything would take a sharp turn for the worst.
On Tuesday, December 1, Wright announced his candidacy to run for mayor as a Democrat in New York City.
“In my experience in life, nothing good happens, most of the time, without a fight,” he said. “You can scream, you can holler, you can protest — which are all good things, because we have to be heard — but no real, significant changes occur without rolling up your sleeves and getting into a fight.”
