Second Chances: Rewriting Life Through Clemency

Katya Valasek:

We're joined today by Venetia Mayhew, a criminal defense lawyer who specializes in post-conviction relief. I know for you, second chances are really important, and I want to go into greater detail about how that manifests in your professional work. But before we do that, I want to start with your second chance.

You started community college at 39, transferred to a four-year college, and then started law school at 43. To some ears, your life before college will sound pretty glamorous. You moved to the U.S. from London at 21 to work in the film industry and on music videos. You were a truck driver on the African continent, a cook in Italy, and an owner-operator of an events company in New York City. But at the same time, appearances can be deceiving. So can you tell me a bit about what you were going through shortly before you decided to go to school and pursue higher education?

Venetia Mayhew:

I was living in New York in 2008, 2009, and I had an events catering business. It was one of the first industries to cratered when the crash happened. I had felt just a sense of grief, I think, in my life that I was a caterer. It's not really what you dream of being when you're a child, at least I didn't, and I felt demoralized that I hadn't known something more worthwhile with my life. I had done some events for organizations like the Innocence Project and seen how meaningful the work was to the lawyers there, and I had felt pangs of regret, but it never occurred to me I could become a lawyer.

After the crash, we had to leave New York. I lost my business and I landed in Portland at the end of 2009, and just in, I don't know how it came into my head, but I decided to go to community college, thinking actually at the time I'd be an EMT, and that lasted about an hour. Then I started on a more academic course and eventually becoming a lawyer just became the thing I was gonna do. And it was, I couldn't believe it happened for me, to be honest. It was extraordinary, the opportunities that were presented to me once I decided to do that.

Katya Valasek:

You came to the United States when you were young and you began working in the film industry and on music videos, industries where storytelling is incredibly important. Do you feel like you've always been able to tell stories or to make other people's stories be seen?

Venetia Mayhew:

I think I'm good at using language to tell a story, yeah. I mean, in music videos, we were doing country music videos, so it was very, very much storytelling videos. The first video I ever produced was about a man who ends up on death row getting executed. So I guess it was destined. So I think, yeah, I think it's always been a big thing of even when I was doing catering and stuff, the whole wedding is a story of a couple. So you had to kind of learn who the people were and then kind of express it in that way for them. So I think I had a background in finding that quite natural, yeah, without realizing it would help.

Katya Valasek:

Resilience has played a major role throughout your life. Did that impact your approach to law school?

Venetia Mayhew:

I think so. I think for me, law school was a lot easier than it was for the younger students. I was one of the oldest. I wasn't, there were three other women in their 40s, all of whom were mothers. So I was a single mother at the time. So that was an added kind of financial stressor for me. You know, I had to always work. I was working as a house cleaner and a waitress while I was at law school. But it was a lot easier for me because I think having had a business fail and the crash, you know, that was the worst thing that ever happened to me. It was just devastating to every part of myself. And so being at law school just felt like an amazing privilege and opportunity. So I didn't find exams that stressful. The stakes seemed very low. And I'd see a lot of the younger students really buckling under the pressure, whereas I think I could take it in stride much easier. I definitely felt like I had an advantage.

Katya Valasek:

Now I wanna talk about your legal career. You were a staff attorney for your law school's criminal justice reform clinic after graduation. What were you doing there?

Venetia Mayhew:

At the time, it was my law professor, Aliza Kaplan, who had just set up this legal clinic. And we were aware that Governor Brown, our governor at the time, might be interested in commuting the sentences of some women, because there were too many women in the women's prison and they were contemplating opening a second prison in the state. And Elisa thought that maybe we could pick a bunch of amazing women and persuade the governor to release them through clemency.

There's several different types of clemency. So the most sort of, it's called the pardon power in the federal constitution. And the pardon power has a series of types of grants, one of which is a full pardon. And that means essentially eliminating any evidence that the conviction ever existed disappears from your record. The types of clemency we were going for were commutations where the governor would shorten their sentence and release them earlier than they were otherwise sentenced to be. So all our clients were in prison and we were trying to get them out of prison through a commutation.

So we started this clemencies project thinking that we would work with women. At the time, Governor Brown's people had told us, just looking for some low-level offenders, something minor to commute. And we looked into it and we were like, no, the people that she needs to commute are people with life sentences because they're the least likely to offend. And we also became aware that a lot of women had been convicted of murder and there weren't very good defenses for domestic violence. And we felt that the governor might be sympathetic to those kinds of people. So my job was essentially to find these cases and then work with students to write petitions for them and persuade the governor to release them.

Katya Valasek:

What is that process like? What goes into a petition?

Venetia Mayhew:

Basically, we realized that Governor Brown would be interested in people who had incredible stories of rehabilitation, but we also realized we had to tell the whole story. And so essentially we would interview our clients really quite extensively about their lives prior to the crime through their childhoods, the story of their lives, essentially, what happened, who they were at the time of the crime, and then what they had done since with their lives to become the person they were now. And so it was a storytelling, but it had to be an argument. And we couldn't be trying to get sympathy because we're talking about people who have killed people. And so you can't reIlly tell a story if you're trying to act like a victim because no one's going to care about that. So it's quite a delicate story to tell, to be persuasive when there are such bad facts involved.

One thing about clemency and why it was so meaningful for me personally is because I really understood the stories of my clients. I really felt it personally. So it became very natural for me to tell their stories. You know, I have made a lot of mistakes in my life. And so I always had, I was able to kind of see their story and feel their transformation very personally.

Katya Valasek:

It was your job to go into the prison and try and find the people that you felt would be a good fit. What did that actually look like?

Venetia Mayhew:

At the beginning, we spoke with the chaplain who run the lifers group, and she kind of connected me to a few women who she thought might be good. It was difficult at the beginning because no governor had been granting clemency in decades. And so I sort of felt a little bit like a snake oil salesman really coming in and sort of, hey, there's hope we can do this for you.

But I would meet with women and the women were always wanting to share, oh, you must talk to this woman or this woman because she would be a great candidate. So they were very generously trying to help each other out, which is a theme I've seen expanded into the men's prisons and the men were also just phenomenal at always wanting to help each other out and recommending that we talk to different people.

So I got a line of really probably the most outstanding people who had served a long time, who had done the most incredible things in prison. And then I started working with them.

Katya Valasek:

You mentioned research previously, and it struck me that when people think of lawyers doing research, they think about researching case law, but you were citing statistics about the likelihood of someone to do something out of prison that might send them back. Was that sort of research really important to the clemency work that you were doing in addition to case law?

Venetia Mayhew:

I think it's sort of a well-established fact for people who are interested in the criminal justice system that people who serve long sentences, especially people who commit murder, and especially people who are older have much lower rates of recidivism, extraordinarily low rates. So I don't think that was a particularly big part of our research. I think the greater research we did was the research of Oregon's history, its prior use of clemency so that we could persuade the governor that this was something she should do. And Aliza and I wrote a law review article that I think was very influential to the governor. That was the main kind of more legal research we did.

Katya Valasek:

Were you also talking to Governor Brown and their staff to make sure that you were on the right track with the people that you were pursuing for clemency?

Venetia Mayhew:

We faced an enormous amount of failure at the beginning. And I had horrible, horrible times when I had to go into the prison and tell women they weren't gonna get out and felt it was really, really hard.

It took a while for her to get there. We did things like we would invite her clemency team into the women's prison so that they could meet people and humanize them. And we did whatever we could to try and make the governor's staff see that these are people who are worthwhile helping because it's a politically difficult thing for a governor to do.

But we started in 2017. We got a couple of juvenile grants for short kind of more simple things. It wasn't until February, 2020 that we got our first grant. And I'd almost given up at that point. Personally, it was just so painful. And then once the grant started, they became more frequent.

Katya Valasek:

So in 2019, you left the clinic to start your own firm. Were you doing the same sort of clemency work after you left?

Venetia Mayhew:

Yeah, I was cause I was probably the most well-known clemency lawyer at the time. And so I was just inundated with letters and calls from people. So I started working with a lot of the men. I had some very great private clients who paid me extra so I could take more pro bono clients. And then I also funded it by getting a post-conviction contract and starting doing post-conviction cases at the same time and also parole.

Katya Valasek:

What does that mean?

Venetia Mayhew:

In Oregon, everyone has a statutory right to a post-conviction attorney. So essentially what happens is after somebody's convicted of a crime, if they pleaded guilty, they don't get any appeals. If they went to trial, they go through a direct appeal process. If and when that fails, they can then file for post-conviction and people who take a guilty plea can file for post-conviction immediately. Post-conviction is looking at whether there are any constitutional violations in your conviction of such an egregious nature that it would warrant a reversal. And so essentially most of the time that involves was your attorney ineffective? The most famous case on this in constitutional law is Strickland vs Washington. Obviously Oregon has its own body of law as well. The standard you're looking at essentially is you're kind of examining everything that happened in the case from the minute they're arrested to the minute they're convicted, the investigation that was undertaken, all the legal choices that were made, and you're determining whether there was, whether the attorney was ineffective. And if he was ineffective, whether it was of such a nature that it would have led to a different outcome if he hadn't been ineffective. So it's really the only chance after a conviction where you can make a new factual record for your client. It's extraordinarily difficult for people to win. The standard is very high.

Katya Valasek:

That's fascinating to me. I guess I'd never put together that it's not just the trial itself that is under consideration for post-conviction relief. It's everything from the moment you're arrested, like you said. Tell us what led to you having to shift your practice?

Venetia Mayhew:

Governor Brown left office at the end of 2022 and so ended clemency. The new governor made it obvious that she wasn't interested in doing it for a while and she may well change her mind at a later date in her second term, perhaps. So at that point, I changed direction and got more full-time with post-conviction and also parole.

Katya Valasek:

I would imagine that for some of the cases you take on, you're looking at pages and pages of documents and images and maybe videos. How do you get started when you're reviewing a case?

Venetia Mayhew:

Well, it's usually pretty exciting because it's all new stuff. I just had one big case finish and I've just started another case right now and I'm only working on murder cases now. So all of them are huge, just thousands and thousands of pages. I have two investigators working, doing a lot of work on the case as well, but there's no way around it. You've just got to read everything. And so it takes weeks and weeks and weeks to get to grips with a new case and then start considering what should have been done, what could have been done. You have to obviously get experts. If they didn't hire experts at the trial level, we need to get experts now to say if this expert had been called, what would they have said and would this have changed the outcome? It's a lot of work. Yeah, and it's really important because this is your clients, it's basically their last chance.

Katya Valasek:

So when you were working at the clinic, I would imagine your paycheck was pretty regular. You were paid by the school. When you went out to start your own firm, that must have been scary for you to try and figure out how to build this practice. You were well-known, you had a reputation, but you need to have that money to hire those experts from somewhere. So how did you start to not only build your book of business, but also build that bankroll so that you had the freedom to hire the experts and spend that time reviewing all those documents?

Venetia Mayhew:

Well, it was a lot easier than you think. First of all, I've been self-employed a lot in my life, so I didn't have any particular anxiety about doing that. And also, I was very poorly paid at the clinic. You don't get rich by working at a legal clinic. But actually, the state of Oregon will fund all the experts. You just have to request a justification for it.

So I don't really consider it to have been a financially risky endeavor for myself. I was able, because of the experience I had, having done clemency and having worked on a lot of murder cases during that time, they felt comfortable giving me a contract right when I left the clinic. And at the beginning, I was on a contract where I had a monthly check that was sent to me, and I had to take a certain amount of cases. And so those were baby cases. And I stayed on that contract for a while. Now I don't have an actual contract. I just tell them I can take another case, and then I take another case when I'm ready.

Katya Valasek:

How many cases are you typically juggling at any one time? Murder cases seem high impact, but I imagine they have huge case files that you're working through.

Venetia Mayhew:

Yeah, and I mean, I don't have that many cases anymore. It's lovely, by the way. I think I have about seven murder cases that I have, and I do some parole work as well.

So I feel like it's much more manageable doing bigger cases in many ways, although they're all massive, but you know that going in. When I used to do the littler cases, it was, you know, you didn't know what you were getting in any case. It could be a ton of work or no work.

Katya Valasek:

You reach out and you say, I'm ready to take on another case. What's the first thing you do?

Venetia Mayhew:

The first thing I do is write a letter to my client and send them a release form so I can start gathering all their records. Just let him know about the process a little bit so that they have a realistic expectation of timelines and things like that. And I usually go in the media and see what's said about the case.

Katya Valasek:

Do you go in and speak with your clients before you review the record, or do you look at the court documents first?

Venetia Mayhew:

I get the trial court file quickest. So I'll quickly review that and just get an overview of the case. And then I'll want to go and talk to my client and meet them and kind of let them know that I'm going to work hard for them and that they, you know, just get a little sense of the case from them. Because a lot of my clients, obviously they know their case better than anyone. And sometimes it's just a good idea to get a sense of the client as soon as you can.

Katya Valasek:

This is a lot of work. Do you have help?

Venetia Mayhew:

The state will appoint investigators for me. And so I have two investigators who I work with all the time, but other than that, no, no help. It's just me.

Katya Valasek:

How do you deal with someone that may just be at a point where they've lost all hope? Do you ever find that you have to encourage someone to be open with you and involved in the process?

Venetia Mayhew:

I think a lot of the time I'm helping people come to terms with their reality. Most of the time I can't get a reversal for them and they're facing a sentence. Maybe they feel they've been over convicted or even wrongfully convicted.

And so a lot of the time, I think I have a lot of experience from working with people during clemency and understanding how prisons work. And so a lot of the time I feel like I'm just helping them accept their fate a little bit because sometimes they think that their attorney didn't do a very good job for them and maybe that's true, maybe that isn't true. So a lot of the time it's just kind of helping them process life and where they're at.

Katya Valasek:

So what judge are you working with at this point in the process?

Venetia Mayhew:

So each case is tried in the county in which the person's incarcerated. So we have several big prisons in Oregon. The majority of the cases I do are in three counties and we're at the trial level. So they have plan B judges, which are these retired judges who tend to do the majority of the post-conviction cases. You become quite familiar with the judges that we are before.

Katya Valasek:

So these are individuals who have potentially exhausted all their appeals. So you're no longer in the appellate court. When you get involved, you go back to the trial court for the work that you're doing?

Venetia Mayhew:

Whether I win or lose at the trial level and it's very hard to win, then DOJ, the Department of Justice, will have the option of appealing or we will appeal. And so they then go straight up through the appellate process again. So essentially after you're convicted, you go straight up through the direct appeal process and you go through the post-conviction process. And if you exhaust that, the third option is to go to federal court and do federal habeas, which is even harder.

Katya Valasek:

Do you follow your clients through the appeal process if you lose at the trial level?

Venetia Mayhew:

Oh yeah, I do. Because a lot of the time I'm very upset because I think the judge has got it wrong. So I suffer from optimism. So I always hope that it will get fixed on appeal. And we have great appellate attorneys in Oregon. I actually interned for them when I was at law school. So I know them and I know they always wanna make sure that they get the issue and that we do our best.

Katya Valasek:

Are you ever worried that someone whom you advocated for is going to commit another crime?

Venetia Mayhew:

Well, there's two different types of clients. So my clemency clients, I would be furious if they committed another crime. I would, oh, they'd be in so much trouble with me. So far it hasn't happened. I believe I picked really great people who won't do that. I would of course be very, very upset if they did. And I don't believe they will.

On my post-conviction cases, well, it's a legal, it's more of a legal role I play. My role is to make sure that the state or their constitutional rights weren't violated. As for what happens in the future that I can't, I don't feel I'm responsible for that because it's my duty and it is good for the citizens of this country that there are lawyers challenging constitutional violations.

Katya Valasek:

Do you ever struggle with a situation where you're doing post-conviction relief work and you know that they did it or you feel like they probably did what they're accused of, but they weren't treated properly through the trial process? Does that, is that ever a struggle for you internally?

Venetia Mayhew:

No, no, because first of all, if you think you, if you need your clients to be completely innocent, then you shouldn't go into defense work. And a lot of the time I see people are guilty of something, but maybe not exactly what they were convicted of. So I can't, I can't be worried about things like that. I just have to look at the issues.

Katya Valasek:

One of the benefits of being at a firm is having other attorneys that you can talk through cases with, sort of noodle through an issue, get some feedback. Not only are you on your own, but you're also in this very niche type of law that you're practicing. Who is your sounding board? Do you have people that you can turn to if you're really struggling on a particular issue?

Venetia Mayhew:

We always just look sort of jealously upon people at law firms, imagining all that wisdom they can call on at any point. And we're always bitterly jealous. There are some incredible, really experienced attorneys in our community who always are willing to help.

But I suppose on a day-to-day basis, I have a few of my students who then became lawyers when I was doing the clemency project. I did clemency petitions with them. They are now doing post-conviction as well. And so we are in contact on a daily and hourly basis helping each other out. And I do not know where I would be without them.

Katya Valasek:

When you say in our community, are you referring to Portland?

Venetia Mayhew:

The small post-conviction community and the defense community in Portland. So we have a couple of listservs where people can pose questions to each other and it's really helpful. And you're always stressing, am I bugging him too much? But I try and pick the times when I ask for help. But a lot of the time I am on my own and it's nerve wracking because you could be wrong.

Katya Valasek:

What's your relationship like with the prosecuting attorneys in your area?

Venetia Mayhew:

I try to be collegial. Obviously we have a very different worldview. I think the prosecutors see things in black and white. They have a very different situation from me. They have to go to crime scenes. They have to deal with victims and all their grief and pain. So I do have some empathy for that. But at the same time, I see them, once they've decided one person is good and one person is bad, I feel like they don't look enough at what's really going on. And I see a lot of tunnel vision investigations where they've just made their mind up and that's where they go. And it doesn't lead to justice in my opinion. But as I said, I don't have to go through what they go through.

Katya Valasek:

Are there any that you think admire the work you do?

Venetia Mayhew:

None that I've met. I'm sure they do. I mean, I think mature prosecutors know that we have a job and it's an important job to do. So I'm sure that they do, not that they've ever said to my face.

Katya Valasek:

I can see how they might feel some sort of way about the work that post-conviction relief lawyers do.

Venetia Mayhew:

I think it's a real pity. I mean, no one wants the prosecution to be reversed, but I think it's a real pity in this country that we have a culture where you're either a prosecutor or a defender. It'd be a much healthier system if prosecutors did defense and defense attorneys did prosecution, and it wasn't such a cultural divide because it's not good for the community as a whole.

Katya Valasek:

You're really on your own working on these massive important issues. How do you make sure you're not getting burned out?

Venetia Mayhew:

Well, I was getting burned out a while ago. I had to say no to everything for two years to get to a normal level. I think it's a real problem for people in public defense, especially if you've got a bit of a bleeding heart is that everyone needs help. And I took on way too many cases, especially during clemency. And I thought, my sons were like, you're gonna have a nervous breakdown. You can't carry on like this. So I did have to slow down and you have to know that you can't help everyone. You just can't.

Katya Valasek:

I really admire your optimism. I don't think it's a curse or something that's working against you. I'm from Jersey, so I maybe don't have quite enough optimism in my life. How do you maintain that optimism when you're doing this tough work?

Venetia Mayhew:

I think if you wanna win, then become a prosecutor. So if you go into defense work of any kind, you just have to know that you're gonna be losing most of the time. And you just have to, if you can't live with that, then you've got no business doing it.

There's a lot of other ways to do it. My professor Aliza said, when we started doing clemency and I had a lot of angst about giving people hope, she said, even if you just get to tell their story for them in a really good way, it's gonna be good for them. And I thought she was just full of shit.

And then the truth is, is it really mattered to people that their story was told, that they were heard, that a lawyer listened to them. And it didn't seem like much to me, but I realized it was meaningful. And for a lot of the people that I got clemency for, if I hadn't been so insanely optimistic and if I hadn't pushed through, they would still be in prison. And I had about six or seven clients who were sentenced to die in prison who are now in the community leading productive, good lives. And so you come to terms with that. You get a lot of losses, but the wins are just very, very sweet.

Katya Valasek:

When you get to the end of the day, what do you do to refuel your own tank?

Venetia Mayhew:

Well, I mean, I definitely had a real struggle with that. For a long time, I've had a case that just resolved where my client, I'll go to my grave knowing he's innocent. It was really five years of pain to get him a pathway out of prison, which we just got. And I couldn't switch off, it's not that easy. You have to really force yourself to. So, it was only, I started forcing myself to take the weekends off unless an emergency situation would happen. Took me years to get to that point. Because at law school, I just worked seven days all the time because you sort of have to. And because I had the kids, I just didn't have any luxury not to.

But now I've definitely got much better at stopping work. And I make a big effort to not be obsessing about it. I mean, it's hard, it invades you. And I do a lot of exercise. I do a lot of bike riding and stuff like that, which kind of helps me flip the switch. At the end of the day, if I go and do a tough workout, it tends to reset me to being a more relaxed person. It's not particularly dynamic, but that's my solution. I mean, it's really, you have to force yourself, otherwise, you lose your friends and you don't want to be that person who can't switch off. And I'm older, so I've learned.