Shon Hopwood

Early life

Shon is the son of Mark Robert Hopwood and Becky Richards who raised him in a Christian home. He grew up in David City, Nebraska, approximately an hour’s drive northwest of Lincoln. Shon has four other siblings and is the eldest child. Shon excelled on standardized tests. He was a high school basketball standout, earning himself a scholarship to Midland University. After Hopwood realized he was a mediocre talent in basketball, he became disillusioned and did not go to classes.

After leaving school, Hopwood joined the United States Navy. He was stationed in the Persian Gulf. While in the Navy, he guarded U.S. warships with shoulder-mounted Stinger missiles. He almost died from acute pancreatitis in a Bahrain hospital, and was discharged from the Navy.

Bank robbery

Hopwood plead guilty on Oct. 28, 1998, to robbing several banks in Nebraska. U.S. District Judge Richard Kopf sentenced Hopwood to 12 years, three months in prison followed by three years of supervised release and ordered $134,544 in restitution. Judge Kopf was stunned by Hopwood's later transformation and said, "my gut told me that [he] was a punk — all mouth, and very little else. My viscera was wrong." In Kopf's own opinion, "Hopwood proves that my sentencing instincts suck."

Jailhouse lawyer

Hopwood served his prison sentence at Federal Correctional Institution, Pekin. While at Pekin, he spent five weeks in solitary confinement, and criticized the practice once he got out.

He prepared his first petition for certiorari for a fellow inmate on a prison typewriter in 2002. Since Hopwood was not a lawyer, the only name on the brief was that of the other prisoner, John Fellers. Once the Supreme Court agreed to hear the case, he worked with Seth Waxman, a former U.S. Solicitor General, in preparing the case. Waxman stated that the petition for writ of certiorari was probably one of the best he had ever seen. The court received 7,209 petitions that year from prisoners and others too poor to pay the filing fee, and it agreed to hear just eight of them. One was Fellers v. United States. The Court, in a 9-0 decision, found that police had acted unconstitutionally in questioning Mr. Fellers, who had been convicted of a drug conspiracy. Mr. Fellers's sentence was ultimately reduced by four years.

In 2005, the Supreme Court granted a second cert petition prepared by Hopwood, vacating a lower court decision and sending the case back for a fresh look. Mr. Hopwood has also helped inmates from Indiana, Michigan and Nebraska get sentence reductions of 3 to 10 years from lower courts.

He also won honorable mention in the PEN American Center 2008 Prison Writing contest.

Mr. Hopwood was released from the custody of the Bureau of Prisons on April 9, 2009. In 2010, he was working at Cockle Printing in Omaha, Nebraska, a leading printer of Supreme Court briefs.

Law school and legal career

Hopwood holds a B.S. degree from Bellevue University in Nebraska and a J.D. degree from the University of Washington School of Law, where he was a Gates Public Service Law Scholar. He accepted an offer to spend a year working as a law clerk for Judge Janice Rogers Brown of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit after he graduated from law school.

On September 4, 2014, the Supreme Court of Washington approved the recommendation made by the Character and Fitness Committee of the Washington State Bar Association, permitting Hopwood to take the Washington bar examination, and to become an attorney if he passes. His ability to become of a member of the Washington State Bar Association was named one of the 14 memorable National Law Journal Supreme Court of the United States stories of 2014. In 2015, Hopwood became a licensed lawyer in the state of Washington.

In 2015, Hopwood accepted a position as a graduate teaching fellow in Georgetown University Law Center's Appellate Litigation Clinic, where he is pursuing an LL.M. degree. In 2017, Hopwood became a professor of law at Georgetown.

Writings and views

Hopwood's memoir, Law Man: My Story of Robbing Banks, Winning Supreme Court Cases, and Finding Redemption, co-written with Dennis Burke, was published in August 2012. In the memoir, Hopwood details both his life as a jailhouse lawyer and his romance with his wife, Ann Marie Hopwood, who Hopwood wrote during eight years of his imprisonment. LAW MAN received critical acclaim from a number of book reviewers.

Hopwood is a criminal justice advocate, and he has written about the need for federal sentencing and prison reform. Mr. Hopwood told an ACLU event that his home state of Nebraska should reform sentencing guidelines for prisoners, keep good time credits and not build a new prison.

Contributions to scholarly journals