How a marijuana case fuelled Jasmine Crockett's rise to presidential critic
In 2023, Jasmine Crockett became a House Representative for Texas’s 30th congressional district and was appointed as the co-chair of Kamala Harris 2024 Presidential Campaign.
What you need to know:
- Jasmine Crockett, once a math and science enthusiast, redirected her career toward law and social justice after experiencing racism in college.
- Beginning as an underpaid public defender in Texas, she built a reputation defending marginalised clients, including a falsely accused Black teenager facing 47 years in prison.
- Her advocacy propelled her from a failed district attorney run to becoming a US House Representative and Donald Trump's fierce critic in Congress.
Jasmine Felicia Crockett is a math and science enthusiast who grew up in the Midwestern American city of St Louis, Missouri. Her academic ability was moulded at an all-girl’s Catholic high school called Rosati-Kain, before she relocated to neighbouring southern state of Tennessee.
She completed her Bachelor of Arts in Business Administration at Rhodes College in northern Memphis, where she was one of only 18 blacks in a class of 400 students.
She bore witness to Rhodes's racial discrimination. Bananas would be taped on dormitory doors and her mailbox was flooded with bigoted mails. These unsavoury acts of racism fermented her outspoken personality. Her passion for maths and science was immediately replaced by compassion for social justice.
When the word ‘nigger’ was keyed on her black friends’ cars, it instigated a desire that prevented her from becoming an anaesthesiologist. She developed an insatiable affinity to law. She joined the University of Houston and in 2006, she graduated with a Doctor of Jurisprudence. She then became a member of the Dallas Black Criminal Bar Association.
Jasmine began her legal career in class action defence for a firm known as Shook, Hardy and Beacon in Kansas City. Class actions involve a group of people with similar claims. They are at the financial pinnacle of litigation earnings for lawyers. Jasmine moved to Texarkana, a city in eastern Texas, to work for a firm known as Rocket Docket that dealt with several intellectual property cases. The working hours were extensive and she despised handling the cases she was assigned.
Texarkana established an Office of the Public Defender (OPD). To emphasise her passion for defending the subjugated, Jasmine moved to the office. A public defender is the least desirable legal practice and is often delegated to distressed lawyers foraging for greener pastures. A public defender is a lawyer appointed by court to a case when an accused person cannot hire an attorney.
An OPD’s career is dominated by chaotic courthouses, a hint of danger from sharing the same space with alleged criminals. The space is overcrowded and full of conflicts between victims and their assailants. Jasmine had an unwavering conviction to protect the vulnerable and ensure fair treatment of victims of police brutality and systemic racism that embodied American existence.
The starting salary for an OPD was $36,000 annually. Senior-most public defenders earned $57,600 yearly and had been threatening to quit. It is within this underpaying culture that Jasmine chose to harness the voice of diversity, equity and inclusion. She was the only black female lawyer in the OPD. She created a rapport with her clients, a tact that none of the other public defenders in Texarkana nurtured. Her biography, Jasmine Crockett: A Trailblazer's Journey to the Top by Pradeep Maurya, articulates how discriminatory prosecutions are sought, handed and directed at black defendants in rural Texas.
One of Jasmine's clients was a 17-year-old black boy, who was falsely accused of being an accomplice in murder. In the case file, the word ‘accomplice’ was not mentioned. He was facing capital murder, an elongated prison sentence and had already spent two years in prison because he couldn’t afford a pre-trial. This discriminatory treatment prevented him from graduating from high school.
The presumption of innocence didn't work for blacks. Texas is only one of five American states that stipulates that at the age of 17, a minor is an adult only for criminal justice purposes. His anguish was compounded by his father’s imprisonment and his mother and stepfather who were both on felony parole.
The state was ready to sentence him to 47 years in prison, but he was provided with the option of a plea deal to serve 10 years if he pleaded guilty to a previous lesser drug possession charge. Jasmine refused to accept the plea bargain, maintaining that there was no evidence for either crime. She fought and had the case dismissed.
She experienced many such cases as a public defender and delivered a sustained level of excellence to her countless crestfallen clients. A black juvenile caught with a brownie laced with marijuana in small towns is granted a mandatory felony conviction.
In 2010 at the age of 28, in an effort to make a change, Jasmine raised $7,000 and ran for District Attorney of Texarkana but lost. A decade later in 2020, she ran for House Representative in Texas and won owing to the legal accord she had established. In 2023, she became a House Representative for Texas’s 30th congressional district and was appointed as the co-chair of Kamala Harris 2024 Presidential Campaign. She has since become the voice of the deprived and DC’s fiercest critic of President Donald Trump’s administration.
The writer is a novelist, Big Brother Africa 2 Kenyan representative and founder of Jeff's Fitness Centre (@jeffbigbrother).