Wrongly convicted, he became 'The Jailhouse Lawyer' — and helped free himself

TERRY GROSS, HOST:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. My guest Calvin Duncan became a jailhouse lawyer - an official one - while serving 28 1/2 years in prison for a murder-robbery he didn't commit. Rather than letting his life sentence crush his soul, he spent his time in the prison law library and learned enough to help free other wrongfully convicted men and eventually won his own freedom. Duncan grew up poor in New Orleans. In 1982, when he was 19, he was getting vocational training in a job corps program in Mount Hood, Oregon, when the police arrested him, in spite of his insistence that he knew nothing about the crime. This was six months after the crime was committed in New Orleans.

His lawyer did virtually no research, presented a minimal defense. The eyewitness testimony was unreliable. But Duncan was sentenced to life. He served most of his time in the Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola. That's where he became an official jailhouse lawyer as part of Angola's Inmate Counsel Substitute Program. Angola had the largest legal library of any U.S. prison.

Duncan worked on hundreds of cases and helped free many people incarcerated there. After years of trying to get his own case reopened and often coming close, only to encounter yet another obstacle, he finally succeeded with the help of the Innocence Project of New Orleans. The DA agreed to his release based on time served in exchange for a plea deal. Later, Duncan was exonerated.

After he was released in 2011, he went to college and got his BA from Tulane. This past spring, at the age of 60, he received his law degree from the Lewis & Clark University in Oregon. He now lives in New Orleans, where he's the founder and director of the Light of Justice program, which works to improve access to the courts for people who are incarcerated. His new book, co-authored with Sophie Cull, is called "The Jailhouse Lawyer."

Calvin Duncan, welcome to FRESH AIR. Congratulations on being a free man, and congratulations on your law degree and this book. I have to tell you, I didn't know there was such a thing as an official inmate counsel substitute that was part of an official prison program, which is how you functioned as a jailhouse lawyer. Only six states created this kind of program. And this was created after a 1977 Supreme Court ruling that said states have an obligation to ensure that incarcerated individuals receive meaningful access to the courts and that they need pens and papers, notary services, stamps and libraries. So why was it or is it necessary to have jailhouse lawyers?

CALVIN DUNCAN: Yes. So, like, in places like Louisiana, once a conviction is upheld on direct appeal, we're not entitled to a lawyer. So without a lawyer assistance to proceed to the next court or to have people cases reviewed, the institution train and provide jobs for people like me, a jailhouse lawyer inmate. We refer to ourselves as inmate counsel substitute, where we actually provide legal assistance to those individuals that cannot afford an attorney.

GROSS: So when you say that people who've lost an appeal aren't entitled to a lawyer, you mean like a pro bono lawyer.

DUNCAN: Exactly.

GROSS: Like a public defender.

DUNCAN: Yes.

GROSS: But if they can pay for it, they can have a lawyer.

DUNCAN: Exactly. Yeah. So for most of the people in prison, we cannot afford lawyers.

GROSS: Right.

DUNCAN: So what the institution does is provide - is a job, and that's the inmate counsel substitute.

GROSS: And is that true just in Louisiana that you're not entitled to a lawyer, or is that everywhere?

DUNCAN: I think it's just about everywhere.

GROSS: OK.

DUNCAN: Yeah. Most places, yeah.

GROSS: So explain what you were able to do in your role as a jailhouse lawyer.

DUNCAN: Our function was to provide legal assistance to people that could not afford to hire a lawyer, in which case we function just like lawyers. We spent most of our time reading the records if we could get our hands on the records. We spent a lot of time researching issues. And then in the process of reviewing a person's case, if we realize or we see errors that happened in the case that prevented that individuals from being afforded a fair trial or facts in the case that really raise red flags as to the person possibly innocent - if a person is innocent, we actually contact Innocence Project New Orleans to look at the individual case. But if we don't have any facts of innocence and we determine that the person wasn't afforded a fair trial, we actually draft the petition, which is generally - in most states is a petition for post-conviction relief. Once we prepare it, we get with our clients, and if they approve of it, the client signs it and sends it to the court. In a nutshell, we function just like lawyers. One of the things that we can't do as lawyers is leave the prison to provide investigations.

GROSS: So one of the inmates, who later became a friend - his name is Big Dugger (ph) - told you, if you want to get out of prison, put down the Bible and pick up a law book. And you had this idea that the only way you'd ever get out - because you knew you were not guilty - the only way you'd ever get out was if you could, like, defend yourself and get your case reopened and reexamined. And so you started studying law. You became, you know, a jailhouse lawyer. But before you even got to Angola, you were in the Orleans Parish prison in New Orleans, which you say was worse than Angola. And you wanted to study law when you were there, but you had no access to law books. So one of your first lawsuits was suing to get a law book. So who did you sue, the prison?

DUNCAN: So I prepared a motion because at that time, the Orleans Parish prison did not provide law material to people that needed it. We didn't have a law library. So what I would generally do is write the people on the outside to provide me with Xerox copies of cases. But then that wasn't enough. So every time when I used to go to court, on a desk in the courthouse, they always had Criminal Code of Procedures (ph). So I figured that that was the book that I needed. So one of my first motions that I filed was a motion for a law book. I prepared the motion and then filed it with the Louisiana Supreme Court. But the judges said, look, you filed it in the wrong court. You should have filed it in the trial court. So then at that time, they had remanded it from the Louisiana Supreme Court to the Court of Appeals and from the Court of Appeals to my trial court. And one day when I went to court, the judge actually gave me the Criminal Code of Procedure that I had asked for.

GROSS: Was it difficult to get access to the things you needed in order to help people and in order to help yourself defend innocence? Was it difficult to get access to records of the trial, to police records, to witness testimony, you know, all the things that you need to investigate in order to reopen a case and then set up a defense?

DUNCAN: Yeah. So one of the biggest hurdle, obstacles that we face in providing legal assistance to people on the inside is getting access to their records. In Louisiana, we have a law that says that people like me is not considered to be a person for the purpose of accessing our records. Louisiana, persons have a constitutional right to public records. However, they passed a law, like, in 1994, that says, look, people like Calvin, that conviction has already been upheld, they are not considered to be a person for the purpose of getting public records.

But even prior to that law, police reports wasn't public records. District attorney files wasn't public records. It wasn't until 1990 that the Louisiana Supreme Court said that district attorney files are considered public records. And when we tried to get access to those records, they charge you a fee. At Angola - back when I first got to Angola, we was only earning 4 cent an hour. And right now, it's only 2 cent an hour, and you don't even start earning those two pennies until you'd have been there for three years. But yet you have a one-year deadline. So once the court ruled that district attorney files was public records and police reports are public records - investigative file is public records, the difficulty was how are we going to pay for it?

In my case, as detailed in the book, I used to donate my plasma just to save enough money to buy my records. But the difficulty in obtaining the records is that we cannot leave the prison to go to the court and say let me review the files. We don't make enough money and incentive wages to actually purchase the records of - one page of a trial transcript is 1- and $3. And sometimes the records consists of thousands of pages. The sad part about all of that is once we do get the records, the court, like in my case that I detail in the book, the court told me, well, you should have been got those records. And then I - my case was procedurally barred.

GROSS: Wait, they told you you should have already had the records?

DUNCAN: Yeah, they - yeah. My judge said you should have had those records, like, 30 years ago, not even considering that, first, I couldn't get my records. When I got in a position to save enough money to get my records, I got some of the records, but by that time, I was already procedurally barred. And I'm going to go back a little further that, like, in 1990, when the Louisiana Supreme Court said district attorney and - files and police department files and investigative files are public records, Louisiana also passed a law that gave us one year to file into court. But then after one year, we were still struggling to get access to our records.

GROSS: Wait, you only had - your deadline was one year. And after this law, you couldn't file for any kind of appeal after one year.

DUNCAN: Yeah. So, prior to that, there was no time limitation. But in 1990, they passed a law that gave people like me one year to file an application for post-conviction relief. During that period, we were still struggling trying to get our records. And by the time we did get our records, that one year had already run, and for the most part, a lot of people's cases was denied because the application was filed untimely.

GROSS: So, like, everything was working against you in your work. I mean, the law was not on your side in terms of helping people get an appeal or helping yourself. And, you know, you mentioned that legally, you weren't considered a, you know, quote, "person" in prison, legally, like, in order to get transcripts of the trial and things like that. And one of the lawyers even said to you, no, I'm not going to work with you 'cause legally, you're not considered a person. How did that feel when you were told that?

DUNCAN: Well, that was a very painful statement for the lawyer to tell me, and that lawyer was actually the director of the organization that's duty and function is to provide legal representation for indigent people like myself. And so when he wrote me and told me that, I said, you know, I was like, God, that's really sad. No wonder we're not very successful in the Court of Appeals in proving that our conviction was unconstitutional because here is a person that's a director, expressing what the law expressed - that I wasn't a person. That was very sad.

GROSS: Well, let me reintroduce you.

If you're just joining us, my guess is Calvin Duncan, co-author of the new book, "Jailhouse Lawyer." We'll be right back. This is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF ANDREW BIRD SONG, "I")

GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. Let's get back to my interview with Calvin Duncan. He co-authored the new book, "The jailhouse Lawyer." It's about how he was unjustly convicted of robbery-murder, was sentenced to life and served 28 1/2 years in prison, mostly at the Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola. In Angola, he studied law and became an official jailhouse lawyer, helping to free other unjustly convicted men, including himself.

So I want to ask you about a Supreme Court decision that overturned something that really surprised me. I didn't know that this existed - that in Louisiana, until the 1991 Supreme Court decision in Louisiana, you didn't need a unanimous jury to convict somebody in a criminal case. All you needed was for 10 people to vote for a conviction, but two people could disagree, and they'd still be convicted. And I just want to quote what Adam Liptak, who is the Supreme Court reporter for The New York Times wrote in a piece about you. He wrote a piece about you, and in that, he said, the non-unanimous law passed in 1898 after the Supreme Court ruled that states couldn't exclude Black people from juries. Louisiana held a constitutional convention. The chair of the state's Judiciary Committee said, the purpose of this was, quote, "to establish the supremacy of the white race in this state to the extent to which it could be legal and constitutionally done." So the chair of Louisiana State Judiciary Committee just said it. He said, this is to establish the supremacy of the white race.

DUNCAN: Yes. And so in prison, I didn't know that part. What I did know was that some of the people that I was trying to help that was innocent, their verdict was 11-1, 10-2. And so one and two jurals had it right, but because of Louisiana non-unanimous jury verdict, they were still convicted. So in the process of researching that issue, there's a case they called State v. Apodaca, that the court said, well, Louisiana and Oregon, that - the law is good. But the rest of the country, their law is fine, as well, which require all of the jurals to agree. So in prison, I still would raise issues, saying, look, in this guy's case, the jury verdict was non-unanimous. Therefore, it's unconstitutional. It violates the Sixth Amendment right and the 14th Amendment right. The court generally always denied. But when I got out of prison, I came across an article that says that Louisiana law that allows non-unanimous jury verdict was introduced for the sole purpose of preserving white supremacy. So I went to one of the lawyers that worked at the organization where I worked at, Ben Cohen, and I showed it to him. And I said, we got to do something about this. I didn't know that the law was only introduced to preserve and make sure that Black folks didn't count if they wind up getting on a jury. And he said, well, if you know cases where people was convicted by a nonunanimous jury verdict, we'll litigate the case. And we'll do it pro bono.

And so, Ben and I actually worked on the nonunanimous jury cases. What we would do is once the person appeal is affirmed, we would petition the United States Supreme Court and really tell the Supreme Court, look, you all approved this in 1972. But did y'all know that it was introduced for the sole purpose of preserving white supremacy? Over a long period of time, the court constantly would reject our petition. But on the 23rd petition, the United States Supreme Court said, we're going to hear this issue. And the case that they granted to hear the issue was Ramos v. Louisiana. And in 2020, the United States Supreme Court agreed with us that Louisiana law was unconstitutional because it violates the Sixth Amendment right to a jury verdict.

GROSS: See, I think it's remarkable that you're responsible for initiating that case. And after the 23rd petition, it finally got to the Supreme Court and that law was overturned. You have such persistence. You have such persistence. And you've had such persistence in the face of such odds. Like, when you were in prison, you worked for years and years to get your case reopened and have a meaningful appeal. And there kept being roadblocks. Even when things looked really good, something ended up standing in your way, even if it was at the last minute. And you kept persisting. Where did that come from, that persistence?

DUNCAN: What I firmly believe is that we all entitled to hope. And how you make sure you keep hope and make sure other people maintain hope is to provide. Like I said earlier, Louisiana, we don't have a right to a lawyer. And so you have all these people convicted by nonunanimous jury verdicts. And we know that the conviction is unconstitutional. And so, I believe that once we know that an injustice has occurred, I think it's the obligation of every person to keep on educating people, telling people, look, this law is creating harm. This law is unjust.

And despite the fact that you might have one or two people that totally disagree with you, or might have a hundred people that disagree with you, I believe that at some point that God is going to intervene and perk their hearts and minds and say, look, at least, let's consider the issue. And so my persistence comes in that, just believing that if you give people an opportunity to do the right thing, that they would do it. Sometimes it takes a long time for that to happen. But history has shown that it actually happens. And you just can't give up in spite of being told no, no, no, no, especially when you know you're right.

GROSS: So after the nonunanimous jury law was overturned by the Supreme Court, did that open up the door to filing appeals on behalf of incarcerated people who were convicted by nonunanimous juries?

DUNCAN: Yes. So in Louisiana, those people that had nonunanimous jury verdict that was still on direct appeal - meaning that they had been convicted, but their cases is still under review on appeal. Those individuals was granted a new trial. As a matter of fact, Ramos himself, he was granted a new trial. And he was retried, and a unanimous jury found him not guilty. So in Louisiana, everybody that was on - their case was still pending on appeal, their conviction was vacated, and it was afforded a fair trial. But those individuals who was not pending on direct appeal, our Louisiana Supreme Court said that they should die in prison.

A legal way of saying that is that, look, we not going to allow the nonunanimous jury verdict decision to be applied retroactive to cases that convictions had already been finalized. However, when Oregon was faced with the same question, the Oregon Supreme Court said because those convictions are unconstitutional, they ruled that Ramos v. Louisiana in Oregon is retroactive. Meaning that unlike Louisiana, people in Oregon are being granted a new trial, where the people here in Louisiana, they are told that they have to die in prison.

GROSS: Well, let me reintroduce you here. If you're just joining us, my guest is Calvin Duncan, coauthor of the new book "Jailhouse Lawyer." We'll be back after a short break. I'm Terry Gross, and this is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF DUKE ELLINGTON'S "VERY SPECIAL")

GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. Let's get back to my interview with Calvin Duncan. He co-authored the new book "The Jailhouse Lawyer." It's about how he was unjustly accused and convicted of a robbery murder, was sentenced to life and became an official jailhouse lawyer while incarcerated in the Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola. He helped free hundreds of unjustly convicted men there and eventually helped reopen his case and free himself. This past spring, he received his law degree from Lewis & Clark University. He now lives in New Orleans, where he's the founder and director of the Light of Justice program, which works to improve access to the courts for people who are incarcerated.

When it came to reopening your own case, you had a lot of trouble getting an investigator because you not only needed a lawyer; you needed an investigator. You needed somebody to get the transcripts but also to, like, find the witness who misidentified you and to question her and to find the people who were with you when the police first came to arrest you because the police testimony implied that you had confessed, and you had done nothing of the sort. But the people who witnessed you when the police came, they could testify that way. But you had so much trouble finding somebody who was willing to investigate on your behalf. Why was it so hard?

DUNCAN: So one of the difficulties in our cases is getting access to our records. So we would write letters to the courthouse saying, please give me my records. Sometimes they respond. Sometimes they wouldn't respond. Sometimes they say, well, give me $1,200, and we'll provide the records to you. So there was a young lady. Her name is Emily Bolton. She came to the prison. And we explained to her - she was a law student at the time at Tulane University. And we explained to her that we was having a difficult time getting access to our records. And she had promised that once she graduated from law school that she was going to actually come help us get our records to help us.

So at some point, the Innocence Project in New Orleans accepted my case, and they started investigating my case. They actually went and talked to the witness. They got access to documents that I couldn't get on my own. And as a result of that, they discovered evidence that had the jury heard about this evidence, I would not have been found guilty. And one of the things that was key to my case was that the two detectives that arrested me in Oregon, they was under investigation themselves. Both of them was being investigated by the FBI for trying to fabricate evidence against a representative in Oregon. And one was charged. Another thing that we discovered from the files concerning my case was that the statements that they say that I had told them, they actually told me those statements. And getting access to those records proved that the detectives in my case had lied to the jury that convicted me.

GROSS: So one of the problems in your trial was that the witness who testified against you, she described the shooter in the crime as being fat, which you are not. And she described the shooter as fat several times. So it wasn't just, like, a one-time slipup. Also, from what we know now, the way she was asked to identify the perpetrator is so unreliable. She was shown, like, a few pictures, right?

DUNCAN: Yeah.

GROSS: A few photos. And I think one of them was somebody who is Chinese and somebody who had hair that was nothing like yours. I mean, you were the only person, probably, who came remotely close to matching who the shooter really was. That's my understanding of it from the book. Am I right?

DUNCAN: Yeah, you're right. The young lady in my case, she made a mistake. She misidentified me as the person that had killed her boyfriend. But the government had evidence that showed that she was so traumatized, the witness, and her boyfriend being killed, and that she had gave so many conflicting statements. And all of this - these conflicting statements, the misidentification, they knew, but they didn't share that with the defense. And the jury wasn't allowed to hear that because they withheld it from us.

GROSS: So all this information helped you - well, I shouldn't say overturn your conviction. You got out on a plea bargain.

DUNCAN: Yeah. So what happened was that once the Innocence Project obtained the evidence that needed to prove my innocence, they prepared a petition, filed it with my judge. But my judge denied me. And he denied me on the grounds that - he was like, well, I don't think the evidence is new. His position was that I could have discovered this evidence way before now. What he didn't consider is that I had been in prison all that time. I was trying to get my records. It wasn't until the Innocence Project actually accepted my case and was able to investigate my case and locate the evidence. But he was determined to make sure that I got denied. And that's when the prosecutor stepped up and said, look, we have to do something. We have to help Calvin. Their position was that if I was willing to take an Alford plea, my judge might vacate my conviction, allow me to plead guilty and be released.

GROSS: You have to explain what that plea is.

DUNCAN: So an Alford plea is - well, it's where you maintain your innocence, but it's in your best interest to take the deal. So it would have been in my best interest to take the deal because my judge had already stated on the records that he was going to deny my application that was before him. So being in that dilemma, I could have stayed in prison, fighting my case and died in prison or accept the deal in spite of the fact that I didn't commit my crime. But I had to plead guilty in order to get out.

GROSS: But then the prosecution withdrew that offer, and they said, no, you actually have to plead guilty.

DUNCAN: Yeah. So my judge, he rejected it. He said, no. Then he sent me back to prison to spend my last Christmas in prison. And, in January the 7, I appeared before him the final time without an Alford offer, and I pled guilty to attempted armed robbery and manslaughter, and I was released the same day.

GROSS: So you had to plead guilty knowing that you were not guilty, and you had to do that under oath. What did that feel like?

DUNCAN: It was really a shameful thing, but it worked out in my favor because I got out of prison. And so for 28 1/2 years, I always told the truth. That is, I did not commit my crime. And that is the truth. I didn't commit my crime. But in order to get out of prison, I had to actually take an oath and lie and say, yeah, I committed the crime. That, to me, was a very - it was sad. For all my life in prison, I wanted the court to say, Calvin, we made a mistake. I'm sorry. You're free. But on January the 7, I had to actually take an oath and confess to something that I didn't do.

GROSS: And you ended up being exonerated.

DUNCAN: And later, yeah, in 2021, I was called back to court. And I was exonerated.

GROSS: How did that happen?

DUNCAN: Louisiana had enacted a law that allowed the prosecutors, when the petitioner agree and the court agree, that they could waive procedural bars. And because my case had never been actually adjudicated, the new evidence was never reviewed at the time that I took the deal. They reviewed it, and they determined that I was - my conviction was unconstitutional. I was innocent, and therefore, they vacated the two guilty pleas. And I was totally exonerated.

GROSS: That must've felt really good.

DUNCAN: I always say that was the second best day of my life. The first best day of my life was when I got out, January 7, 2011. The second best day of my life was August 3, 2021.

GROSS: When you were exonerated, did you get an apology? Did you get any kind of reparations?

DUNCAN: Well, I did get apologies. The judge said that, you know, she's sorry for what happened to me. But I didn't get any reparation. I did apply for it. In Louisiana, they have this wrongful conviction compensation law that allows a person that'd been wrongfully convicted, innocent, they would give you up to $400,000. And you would get 40,000 a year for a 10-year period. Well, I actually applied for that. But because our new attorney general, her position is that people like me should never get compensated, I wasn't compensated. But I did apply. I didn't get it. But what I did get when I got released was a $10 check.

GROSS: (Laughter).

DUNCAN: And I still have that $10 check.

GROSS: What is $10 supposed to mean? That's not enough to pay for parking in a city.

DUNCAN: Yeah, I think it was their way of saying, here's $10 and good luck. And if you have any problems, know that we always here. Yeah, but I got $10. If it's compensation, I got a $10 check.

GROSS: Yeah, don't spend it all in one place, right?

DUNCAN: Yes.

GROSS: Yeah, all right.

(LAUGHTER)

GROSS: If you're just joining us, my guest is Calvin Duncan, coauthor of the new book "Jailhouse Lawyer." We'll be right back. This is FRESH AIR.

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GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. Let's get back to my interview with Calvin Duncan. He coauthored the new book "The Jailhouse Lawyer." It's about how he was unjustly convicted of a robbery murder, was sentenced to life and served 28 1/2 years in prison, mostly at the Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola. In Angola, he studied law and became an official jailhouse lawyer, helping to free other unjustly convicted men, including himself. He now has his law degree from Lewis & Clark University and is helping people who are incarcerated get access to the courts.

I want to get back to being a jailhouse lawyer. I bet there were people who came to you who said that they were not guilty, and they wanted you to try to help reopen their cases, but that you suspected that they really were guilty. Am I right about that, that people came to you who you thought, like, this case is not worth spending my time on?

DUNCAN: So there are guys that committed their crimes. There are guys that didn't commit their crimes. As a jailhouse lawyer, we provided assistance to everybody that we determined that was not afforded a fair trial. And I'm not trying to lecture you. But everybody's entitled to a fair trial.

GROSS: I see your point. You weren't judging their guilt or innocence.

DUNCAN: Yeah, we wasn't.

GROSS: You were judging the fairness of their trial.

DUNCAN: Yep. And for cases where a person is, you know, innocent, we actually get assistance from the New Orleans Innocence Project. They actually assist because they need investigation. But for those cases where a person wasn't innocent, but the records demonstrate that they was not afforded a fair trial, we still actually assisted those individuals as well.

GROSS: What is your opinion of the American judicial system?

DUNCAN: We got this thing. It's so twisted, it's so crude, to tell poor people that because you don't have enough money to hire a lawyer, we're not going to give you the same justice that we'll give somebody that could afford a lawyer. To me, that is a crude way of really treating poor people, because I've seen people that have lawyers prevail. People without lawyers don't prevail.

GROSS: When you were young - and you write this at the very beginning of the book. When you were young and orphaned and poor, you would do what you needed to do to feed yourself and your younger sister. You stole, you robbed, when you felt like it was your only way of getting enough money, you know, to get food. Or you had to steal the food in order to eat. You were in juvie for a while, in juvenile detention. And you list some of the problems that you had and some of the offenses you committed, which doesn't mean that you committed what you were charged of. You did not. But I wonder, like, if you had not been wrongly convicted and spent more than 28 years in prison, what do you think your life would have been like?

DUNCAN: So before I was arrested, I was, like, two weeks from signing up to go to the military. And I generally always explain that I messed up my life at the age of 14 when I got arrested for shoplifting for clothes to go to school. I always say that had I not had to do that, I would never have had a mug shot. And therefore, I would never have been misidentified. So...

GROSS: Oh, 'cause you had - the witness who misidentified you did it from a mug shot from several...

DUNCAN: Exactly

GROSS: ...Years earlier?

DUNCAN: Yeah. Yeah, that's - exactly. So I'm not proud of shoplifting, but I had to do what I needed to do. But then, you know, I was in Job Corps. I was learning a welding trade. I was working. I was about to go to the military. I was in Oregon - Portland, Oregon, Mount Hood. And my life just was snatched away from me. So I think that had not this tragedy happened, I would have been probably, like, a three-star general of one of the military branches. Because that's - I wanted to go to the military, and I was close. Almost there until this, you know, I got a - I was, you know, unlawfully and illegally arrested.

GROSS: I'm wondering, like, when you dream or when you did dream when you were in prison, did you dream you were in prison, or did you dream that you were outside? And now, on those occasions when you do dream, where are the dreams set?

DUNCAN: What I would do in prison, when I got to my low moments, I always thought about Mount Hood, the place where I was before I was arrested. I always knew that there was a place that had brought me so much peace. Yeah, that was the thing sustained in me.

GROSS: Do you ever go back to Angola to work with incarcerated people there who you're trying to help?

DUNCAN: Yes, I always go back. Yes.

GROSS: What's it like to go back, but to be able to leave at the end of your time?

DUNCAN: Yeah. So going back rejuvenates, and it makes me - reminds me of how much I have to appreciate being free. Going back to help people that need help is the thing that I live for, really, being honest. Yeah, but I always wanted somebody to help me when I was in prison. And I know there's a lot of people in prison need help, and they want people to come help them. And for me to go back to actually fulfill that obligation is - that's what keeps me going, is to help the people that I left behind, to get justice and get access to the courts. Something that we - that the Constitution entitles us to. But because of they don't have the funds to hire lawyers and investigators, I actually have to go and provide that assistance.

GROSS: I'm almost surprised that when you go back to Angola, you don't have PTSD.

DUNCAN: I think I just be so happy that I'm being able to do it, being in a position to actually do it. I think I probably do, but it - my elation and enjoyment that I'm actually helping the people that need help, overrides any of that.

GROSS: It's been great to talk with you, and, you know, I wish you good health and good work.

DUNCAN: Well, thank you. It has been a pleasure.

GROSS: Calvin Duncan's new book is called "The Jailhouse Lawyer." It's co-written by Sophie Cull. After we take a short break, Maureen Corrigan will recommend two summer nonfiction books. This is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF CHRISTOPHER NORTON SONG, "SWING OUT SISTER")

TERRY GROSS, HOST:

This is FRESH AIR. By land and by sea, two summer nonfiction books carry readers far away from the mundane routine. Our book critic Maureen Corrigan says these two titles are standouts.

MAUREEN CORRIGAN, BYLINE: I like the country, but I wouldn't want to live there. My husband and I are of one mind about that. Years ago, when we were house hunting, we opened the kitchen door of a little city rowhouse and surveyed not a grassy backyard, but a concrete slab that formed a grim little patio. No mowing, my husband cried ecstatically. We bid on that house - still our home - the very next day. Clearly, I'm not the target audience for Helen Whybrow's memoir, "The Salt Stones." Yet, I was transported by it. Whybrow, a former editor, has lived for over 20 years with her family on Knoll Farm in Vermont. There, she tends a flock of some 90 Icelandic sheep known for their double-ply coats and disinclination to docility. Whybrow's closely observed accounts of her working life as a shepherd are filled with muck, sweat and a hard-won sense of the interconnectedness of the natural world. Here are snippets from an extended passage where Whybrow - along with her then 3-year-old daughter, Wren - released the sheep from their paddock to munch their way through a spring meadow. Even as she leads her sheep, Whybrow leads her readers into a deeper recognition of how the sublime and the sinister grow side by side.

(Reading) Our pant legs are drenched and heavy with dew. The sheep stream ahead of us, calling to each other in the yellow buttercups. We walk after them as if through a light-filled doorway in a dream. Nearby, I show Wren the diminutive plant called shepherd's purse, with its tiny, white flowers - helpful for diarrhea. Next to it, I spot one of those tiny, thin-skinned snails, inside which is an invisible worm that can find its way into the brain of a sheep and drive it mad. Lobo, the farm's guard llama who protects the flock against predators like coyotes, will later be felled by one of those worms carried in those tiny, gleaming, golden snails in the grass - deliverers of death.

Reading about Whybrow's life has made me more aware of the teeming environment above and below that backyard concrete slab that I normally don't notice.

"A Marriage At Sea," by Sophie Elmhirst is a true story that's part extreme adventure tale, part meditation on the mystery of a loving partnership. Maurice and Maralyn Bailey were a lower-middle-class English couple bored with their lives in the early 1970s. Maralyn, the go-getter of the two, decided they should sell their suburban bungalow, buy a boat and sail round the world. In June 1972, the couple set off on a 31-foot wooden sloop called The Auralyn. A year later, in the middle of the Pacific, a whale breached out of the briny deep and knocked a hole in The Auralyn. It sank within minutes. Maralyn - who couldn't swim - and Maurice spent four months adrift on a rubber raft.

They survived, barely, by catching and eating raw fish and birds, sucking water out of turtles' eyeballs - and in depressive Maurices' case, fighting the temptation to tip himself overboard, Elmhirst, who writes for The Guardian and The New Yorker knows how to tell a perfect storm of a story, relying in part on Maralyn's diary. Here, for instance, is the day when the pair woke to find themselves sunk in a hollow in the middle of the raft. The bottom of the rubber raft had been pierced by the spines of tiny fish and needed patching. Afterwards, to stay afloat, the couple had to pump two or three times an hour. Elmhirst then uses poetic license to enter into Maurice's thoughts. Now and then, in brighter moments, Maurice liked to entertain the idea that they had become at one with the Pacific. But times like this expose the absurdity of such a view. Boats, like humans, are in a state of permanent decline. Every time a boat touches the water, it degrades. They were not meant to be here.

I'm only skimming the surface of the existential depths of "A Marriage At Sea." This is a tale that makes you understand the lure of the open water - and why it's best, perhaps, that most of us resist it.

GROSS: Maureen Corrigan is a professor of literature at Georgetown University. She reviewed "The Salt Stones" and "A Marriage At Sea." Tomorrow on FRESH AIR, our guest Stacey Abrams will talk about her work advocating for voting rights and discuss her new novel - a thriller about a former Supreme Court clerk investigating a murder inside an AI company in the medical field. Abrams is a former minority leader in the Georgia House of Representatives and was the first Black woman to run for governor in a major party. I hope you'll join us. To keep up with what's on the show and get highlights of our interviews, follow us on Instagram @nprfreshair.

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GROSS: FRESH AIR's executive producer is Danny Miller. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham. Our managing producer is Sam Briger. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Meyers, Ann Marie Baldonado, Lauren Krenzel, Therese Madden, Monique Nazareth, Thea Chaloner, Susan Nyakundi and Anna Bauman. Our digital media producer is Molly Seavy-Nesper. Our consulting visual producer is Hope Wilson. Roberta Shorrock directs the show. Our co-host is Tonya Mosley. I'm Terry Gross.

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