Tiffany Murphy has a resume with a strong emphasis on righting the wrongs committed by an imperfect justice system. A University of Arkansas associate professor of law and head of the UA Criminal Practice Clinic, Murphy has worked tirelessly on many post-conviction capital cases and practiced at the Federal Defender's Office Capital HabeasUnits in Philadelphia and Las Vegas. She also helped found the Oklahoma Innocence Project, helped revive the Midwest Innocence Project, and served as the director for both. At the UA, she is the recipient of the Arkansas Alumni Distinguished Service Award for her commitment to community service. Murphy is licensed to practice law in Florida, Pennsylvania, Missouri and Arkansas.
"She doesn't like it when I say it, but I always say that she's Xena, Warrior Princess," says University of Arkansas Dean Emeritus Cynthia Nance.
Through Others’ Eyes
“Some of her best friends are the friends she went to high school with. The group she graduated from the University of Michigan Law School, they’re still pen pals and on the phone and Skyping all the time. A friend of hers from Seattle got a job at the University, and had to move. So Tiffany calls me and says, ‘I’m going to stay with you for a month this summer because I’m giving my house to this girl while she looks for a house to live in.’ If a friend needs something, anything, she is there.” — Willa Murphy
“By the time you get the case, the person has had at least a couple of lawyers fail them, and their trust in the legal system is not good. To have someone trust you, open up to you, and believe in you, work with you — it’s a skill, it’s a talent. The lawyers who are great connect with their clients. Tiffany connects with her clients.” — Brian Pomerantz
“Her students respect her and try to emulate her. One of the pedagogical goals of a law school clinic is to instill best practices in the students while allowing them the opportunity to gain real-life practice experience under the tutelage of a seasoned legal practitioner. Tiffany balances this goal with an equally important one; she gives her students a sense of responsibility for their clients, allowing them to experience the gravity of holding a person’s fate in their hands. Her approach makes them stronger advocates, more sensitive citizens, and all around better human beings.” — Danielle Weatherby
Next Week
Ken Patterson
Fayetteville
This legal powerhouse has always had a natural curiosity and strong impulse to help others, says her mother, Willa Murphy.
"[Tiffany] was always one to be in charge, and she was always very outgoing, always wanted to help somebody," says her mother, a retired Detroit public school teacher and former principal. "She grew up thinking everyone was the same. She had more opportunities than some other people did, and she tried to give that to everyone else. That has always gratified me."
"I always liked to argue, and I always wanted to do public service," says Murphy of her career planning toward the end of her undergraduate years at the University of Michigan, where she also earned her law degree. She had grown up watching her parents devote their lives to helping others, her mother working in the schools and her father serving as a Detroit police office.
"[Michigan] was a top 10 law school," says Murphy. "I knew that at the time, but I didn't know what the full implication meant. Mostly it meant that you were supposed to go to one of the big law firms and do that whole thing." Instead, Murphy set her sights on becoming a prosecutor, because she thought she could do the most good in that position.
"My first summer, I was at a local prosecutor's office," Murphy remembers. "You got control over your cases: You prosecuted what you wanted to, you charged what you wanted to, and if you didn't want to bring a case, you didn't have to. You're in control, and you can mitigate, and you can decide what the plea deal looks like, and if you don't want to do a plea deal, if you don't want to go to trial ... you're in control."
'They look like me'
But she was soon introduced to the major differences between a local position and a federal one.
"I got an internship at the U.S. Attorney's office for the 7th district of New York, in Manhattan, which is like, 'You have arrived,'" Murphy says.
"It's very structured," says Murphy. "The first year or two you're in general crimes, then you spend your time in the drug courts. That's where [the office was] losing a lot of people of color, because they felt like 'We just can't do this.' A lot of them didn't want to stay in the position, because they said, 'We are tired of prosecuting drug crimes and putting people who look like us away for significant amounts of time because of [sentencing] guidelines. That's not what we signed up for.'"
According to The Sentencing Project, a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization, "Since [the drug war's] official beginning in the 1980s, the number of Americans incarcerated for drug offenses has skyrocketed from 40,900 in 1980 to 469,545 in 2015. Furthermore, harsh sentencing laws such as mandatory minimums keep many people convicted of drug offenses in prison for longer periods of time." These mandatory sentencing laws disproportionately affect people of color.
Murphy says the breaking point for her was a man who had divulged information to the authorities on his entire family in order to get a "downward departure," a sentence lower than the federal guidelines.
"I will never forget this case," she says. "This was like the dividing line for me. He had pretty much given up information on his entire family, but the supervisor decided not to do it. So he's now completely ostracized his family and did not get the downward departure for assistance that he was promised. [The supervisor] had just destroyed this man.
"I just realized, 'This is not how I can help people who look like me.' I remember I was in my car in New York crying, and it was pouring rain. I called my professor, Andrea [Lyon, clinical professor and death penalty expert]. I said, 'I can't do this, I don't know what I'm going to do,' and she said, 'When you get back, we'll talk about options. It's going to be OK.'"
"She had an idea of what justice was and went to the place she thought would dispense justice, and she realized she was wrong," says longtime friend and fellow University of Michigan Law School graduate Brian Pomerantz. "It's a hard thing to be raised in an idea, see the world in a certain way, and then recognize the error in that way and say, 'I'm going to take the thing that I was striving towards and fight that.' That's a powerful thing. I know very few people who have done that."
Serving on death row
After Murphy served a year-long stint as a federal defender in Eastern Washington and Idaho, Pomerantz recommended she apply for a position in Florida with the Capital Collateral Regional Counsel, an organization that handles the cases of death row prisoners who have lost their direct appeals.
"I was pretty much the last line between my clients and being executed," says Murphy.
Her parents had varying reactions to her new job focus.
"I said, 'Now, Tiffany, this is your life, and if you feel comfortable with this, that means the Lord has given you protection," her mother remembers. "She was going in to do work for someone who couldn't take care of it themselves, and I believed she would be protected. People are so afraid of everybody, they only see the negative. They don't see the good. There is some bad, we know that, but we can't live underneath the fear. We have to do things that are helpful and productive for other people."
"My dad said, 'You cannot do this. You can't go in there alone,'" says Murphy. "And I said 'Yeah, I've got to meet my clients, they're on the row! They're not coming to me!' He was petrified! 'They're going to lock you in a room with these guys?'"
Murphy's new job was grueling. And frustrating. And heartbreaking.
And she was very good at it.
"If you're doing any criminal defense work, especially capital work, my outlook is, you've got to realize what's in your hands," says Pomerantz, who is in the same field. "You're what stands between them and getting killed or them and freedom. You have to be prepared to work in a manner that's consistent with that responsibility. And Tiffany has always done that. I can call her up in the middle of the night, and she's working. I can call her in the early morning, and she's working. She doesn't mess around."
Joyce Mayer met Murphy when they both worked at the University of Missouri at Kansas City School of Law, while Murphy was the director of the Midwest Innocence Project. Mayer would later follow Murphy when she left to start the Oklahoma Innocence Project.
"[When I first met her,] she started telling me more about the Innocence Project, because I really had not been out in the world and didn't have the slightest idea just how rampant -- and I will go so far as to say epidemic -- wrongful convictions are," says Mayer. "She would talk about these things, and we would have these conversations about legal arguments and, I have to say, I was completely enamored. Because, on some level, I was watching a hero in action."
Murphy would confront the racial disparities in the justice system on a daily basis. Study after study points out that people of color are disproportionately incarcerated on death row in the United States. Her position also drove home the fact that representation of people of color among the legal community was so low that, often, her clients -- and, sometimes, staff at the prisons and courthouses -- found it difficult to believe that she was a lawyer.
"Most of my clients were stunned, because they had never seen a black attorney," she says. "They would say, 'Are you actually an attorney?" and I would say, 'Yeah.' And they would ask again, "You're really an attorney?' They were stunned. I was the first attorney of color they had ever seen. I've gone into courtrooms, and they've said, 'You've got to wait for your attorney," and I say, "No, no." When I first went to circuit court here, I walked in, I'm in a suit, and they said, 'Oh, you must be here for jury duty.'"
So many innocent
Murphy had a solid education in the issues surrounding death penalty cases, but she still found herself shocked by the process once she had her first capital punishment case in front of her.
"I was expecting to kind of look over the case and make sure everything was fine," she says. "Make sure the Constitutional claims that were supposed to be litigated were litigated, do any investigation we needed to, and go from there. But I was seeing people who had absolutely horrific defense attorneys. Or I was seeing that evidence had been withheld by the state. Or I am finding that the person is so mentally impaired and should have had that fact as a mitigating factor, and there's no mitigation presented. The things that people do to people -- parents keeping their children in cages and feeding them out of dog bowls. Selling their children for sex. And you expect someone to come out of that state normal and able to adapt?"
More shocking still, Murphy estimates that around a third of the death row inmates whose cases she was assigned were innocent.
"I remember the first time I read a case and thought, 'I don't know why this person is in prison,'" Murphy recalls.
Take the case that Murphy has worked on for the last four years. Karl Fontenot was convicted of the murder of convenience store clerk Donna Denice Haraway, who disappeared in 1984 in Ada, Okla. He was convicted almost solely on the basis of his own confession and one made by Thomas J. Ward (whose nine-hour police interrogation was only videotaped for 30 minutes). Both men later recanted their confessions. Furthermore, the physical evidence completely contradicted the details of the confessions once Haraway's body was found nearly two years later.
When Murphy and the OIP took on the case in 2013, she discovered significant evidence that had been withheld from the defense, including affidavits of people who affirmed Fontenot's alibi at the time of the abduction of Haraway. There were also details about the improper collection of evidence at the original crime scene and at the site of Haraway's body. The case gained national prominence when it was the subject of Robert Mayer's book Dreams of Ada in 1987 and John Grisham's 2006 book An Innocent Man. After researching the case, both authors felt confident that the men convicted for the crime were innocent.
Though Murphy has moved on from her job as director of the OIP, she continues to fight for Fontenot as his attorney -- just one more example of the dogged determination her colleagues and friends mention again and again.
"She has lived, breathed, eaten, slept this case for years," says Pomerantz. "These are old cases that don't get easier to litigate, the older they get. Witnesses die, evidence 'disappears'. It is remarkably difficult to get justice in these cases, and it takes someone remarkable working on them.
"It's hard to do this work. You're going to lose, and you're going to lose on cases you know should be won. If you have an ingrained sense of justice in what's fair and right, then I think you're really great at this work. I think Tiffany has that. I think that's what makes her so good."
But it's not surprising that a job of this nature burns through even the most dedicated public servants at a rapid rate.
"I had gone through a couple of executions, and I realized, 'I can't do this,'" says Murphy. "A lot of my clients, I would know more about them than they knew about themselves. I would just go to prison to talk, because we're the only people who can get in and spend time with them for any amount of time. One client, I would play chess with. That's what keeps them going. You end up becoming really close to these people and understanding how the system has completely failed them.
"I was so fed up with the number of innocent people I had, and if you're working a warrant, you're working nonstop. I was living at the office. I had a pull-out sofa, and I was there many nights just filing, filing, filing, drafting, drafting, drafting, just trying to find a way."
Changing the future
Murphy realized there was another valuable way to change the system -- teach law students to avoid making the kinds of mistakes she had seen in her case files time and time again.
"My mom was a firm believer in, 'If you can fix it, fix it,'" she says. "If you can help these kids, that's what you should do. So I went into academia and helped restart the Midwest Innocence Project." After a stint there and at the Oklahoma Innocence Project, the University of Arkansas School of Law got lucky.
"Her background was amazing," says Nance. "I think it's good to have a woman of color on the faculty in this particular area, given all of the disparities that we know are in the criminal justice system. To have a scholar who can speak to those issues in this state and be a resource for the state is extraordinary. Her expertise is invaluable. She's even listed by the Bar president as an expert for legislators."
"Tiffany is the only person on our faculty to have engaged in the representation of the wrongly convicted," says Danielle Weatherby, UA School of Law associate professor. "Against this backdrop, Tiffany brings a unique perspective to the law school's criminal law curriculum and has helped develop the criminal law certificate program."
In addition to Fontenot's case, Murphy continues to be a resource for others in post-conviction work and is actively involved in pro bono work.
"I call her so much for help," says Pomerantz. "She doesn't just care about her cases, she cares about everyone's cases. I can call her and ask, 'Do you have time?' and the answer is either, 'Yes' or 'Can you wait an hour?'"
Though her contributions -- both past and current -- are obvious, they don't do much to soothe Murphy or her desire to change the system.
"I am not optimistic," she says. "I am always sackcloth and ashes. It [makes me angry] because, most of the time, for me as a black woman, it's 'There but for the grace of God go I.' Most of these people are black or people of color. These are people that are poor and have no one and nothing, and it irritates me -- irritate is not even the word -- to constantly see a criminal justice system constantly churn out and roll over the disadvantaged and the poor.
"I just don't feel like I've done enough. Part of that is, 'I can do more.'"
This persistent drive to "do more" will come as no surprise to Murphy's close friends and colleagues, who know her as someone who never fails to give all that she's got.
"When the students needed her, she always said, no matter what time of the day or night, 'I will assist you,'" notes Mayer. "She still has clients that she assisted in the past that she talks to and tries to provide encouragement for, tells them not to give up, says 'I'm still here for you, and I'll always be here for you.' She may leave a position or a city, but she doesn't forget.
"She is a rock star."
NAN Profiles on 08/27/2017