If experience is, as they say, a good teacher, then James King’s personal experiences in a legal system that, at one point, left him incarcerated, disillusioned and stripped of a promising professional football career, should hold him in good stead as an attorney with the Public Defender Service (PDS) for the District of Columbia.
King, a graduate of the University of the District of Columbia School of Law, was recently hired by the PDS — considered one of the premier public defender services in the U.S. — as a staff attorney. He was selected over 80 students from some of the best law schools in the country who had clerked there last year.
“This is a dream come true for me,” said King of his three-year commitment at PDS, where he will begin in October working in the Juvenile Division.
King’s journey from jail to juris doctor could not have been more circuitous. It all began one fateful night in 2004.
The future was bright for the then-college senior. A star Division I player at Central Michigan State University, the Detroit native was considered a top prospect for the NFL — until one incident changed the course of his life.
Leaving a bar with a friend, King was swept up in a brawl. In the melee, a young man fell and hit his head on the concrete, sending him into a coma from which he would never recover. A week later, the man died, and King would be thrown into a legal nightmare that would last more than three years.
“I was one of those people who believed that people in this type of situation must have done something wrong,” King recalled of his ordeal, “until it happened to me.”
