Paul Butler

Paul Butler was born in Chicago, and later attended Yale and Harvard Law School. Having taken a federal prosecutor job in 1990, Butler, who is now a law professor at Georgetown, found his role troubling: “I didn’t go to law school to put black men in prison, and that’s basically what my job was.” He was arrested during his time as a prosecutor in DC for a crime he had not committed, “a silly dispute over a parking space.” The jury decided he was “not guilty.” “I was innocent,” he later said, “but the fact that I was innocent didn’t seem to be the most important reason why things worked out well for me…it opened my eyes.”