Jeff Blackburn’s rough road to redemption and an unconventional kind of legal superstardom in the rough-and-tumble world of Texas criminal justice reform began the day his fifth wife committed suicide in his law office in Amarillo. Blackburn kept a bust of Lenin in that office, which was covered that day in the blood of his beloved.
By that time, Blackburn had already talked to a large group of people busted for drugs in 1999 in a tiny Panhandle town called Tulia—three dozen African Americans who all seemed to have been wrongfully arrested and railroaded in court. But in April 2001, he felt like his life was over.
