Michael Onah Joins Phillips Black
Onah (’18) works as a fellow in the New York City office of the nonprofit practice, which is committed to representing inmates in the state and federal courts.
Raised by a Jamaican mother and a Nigerian father, Michael Onah (’18) says he felt an “ancestral connection to the larger international community” and always knew that he was meant to pursue a career in human rights. However, the decision to pursue law did not come until after Onah graduated from Wesleyan University, where he studied government and international relations.
Propelled by the verdict in the case against George Zimmerman, who fatally shot Trayvon Martin and was acquitted in 2013, along with the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner the following year, Onah narrowed in on the community immediately surrounding him. He understood that marginalization and civil rights are closely related to and impacted by the law and policy, and this was somewhere he could make a difference.
After submitting his application to BU Law and thinking his chances of attending the school that he heard had a “great reputation” were slim, Onah was relieved to get in and begin classes with the professors whose reputations had preceded them.
“There are so many great reasons to go to BU Law and get a great education,” he says. “I am very thankful for the series of accidents that led me there.”
Now a fellow at Phillips Black, Onah handles appeals for people who are on death row. BU Law spoke with him recently to learn about his experience in law school and how he feels it prepared him for practice.
The interview below has been edited for clarity and concision.
Q: What was your experience at BU Law like?
A: Boston University School of Law gave me an opportunity to be involved in a lot of things that I had only really flirted with, and that gave me a lot of courage to take initiative and do things that I normally wouldn’t have done.
I was involved in the Black Law Student Association (BLSA) and the American Constitution Society (ACS). With ACS, I organized a panel on debtors’ prisons to discuss the Supreme Court ruling against legal financial obligations on individuals who cannot pay their debts, which courts across the country do not follow. I was also involved with the operation of BLSA and had a part in raising issues that are specifically related to the black community or intersectional with other minority groups.
My time at American Journal of Law & Medicine (AJLM) helped me to become a better, more effective writer, and I had the opportunity to publish a note while I was there.
I participated in a lot of experiential learning opportunities like the Employment Rights Clinic, where I worked under [Clinic Associate Professor] Connie Browne. We handled a couple of cases and I got experience interviewing clients and preparing them for hearings. Trying to get as much information as you can from clients is important and Professor Browne taught me the different ways that to do that effectively.
For my Semester-in-Practice, I worked for Phillips Black, which is where currently I work as a law fellow. My faculty advisor was Professor David Rossman [director of the Criminal Law Clinical Program] who does some federal habeas corpus litigation himself. I gained a lot of basic skills on doing investigations for capital habeas cases, got to witness a client interview, and learned a bit about federal habeas law.
Did you have any influential professors?
All of my professors taught me how to analyze both sides of an argument or issue and to effectively frame my own ideas about how the world should work, or be better, using my legal experience. They taught me to think about the ways statutes are used or enforced, and how they interact with precedents. My professors also encouraged me to think about the way society interacts with the law and how the law gets changed, which has helped me learn to be an effective advocate.
To that end, I immediately think of Professor Khiara M. Bridges who was my faculty advisor. She was really foundational in my thinking about how race in the law works—or doesn’t work. A lot of the work as her research assistant involved collecting articles related to issues she was researching and editing articles and pieces that she was working on. I also helped review some sections of her book, The Poverty of Privacy Rights.
The second person I think about is Professor Jack Beermann. He is a really great thinker and is a magician at breaking down opinions and pointing out weaknesses through legal thinking.
Both Professor Beermann and Professor Bridges were really good at that sort of rigorous scrutiny of certain ideas—stripping down arguments to their elements and running them through the wringer of “does this make sense?” and “why is this at odds with larger tensions in society?” I think those two really shaped my young career and the way I think about the world in really transformational ways.
Did you feel that your law school experience prepared you for practice?
I work in capital habeas litigation for a small nonprofit where we handle appeals for people who are on death row. There are a lot of inter-related issues which I thought about in law school that have sort of culminated in this job. All of the critical race theory work for Professor Bridges comes to mind because the way the death penalty operates in the United States definitely has a very clear racial bias to it. I’m constantly thinking about that in my current work.
My opportunities with the Employment Rights Clinic have definitely related to my practice now. My clinical and experiential learning at BU gave me the skills to work in a public-interest sphere. I’ve relied on that training.
How did you find out about Phillips Black? What is the biggest challenge you face and what has been the most rewarding part?
A friend of mine, Kevin Smith (’18), introduced me to another BU alum, Genevie Gold (’14), who now works at Phillips Black. I found out that she had gone to work at this death penalty defense organization, and I felt that was really interesting, so I did some research on the firm and contacted one of the principal attorneys. I then did my semester-in-practice with [the organization], and at the end of that experience I was offered a job as a legal fellow.
We handle the appeals of people who are on death row by challenging convictions through habeas petitions primarily on the federal level. The work is like a beast unto itself. Keeping current and being well-read in federal habeas law and jurisprudence has been a challenge.
It’s hard litigating these cases for so many different reasons—seldom does this business see really positive results. What I find rewarding are the challenges to my conception of reality and the way we humanize—or dehumanize—people. I work with clients who have done things that are really difficult to talk about and to process, but in spite of that, just being able to see the humanity in them has been really rewarding.
What are your long-term career goals?
I would like to stay at the criminal justice/civil rights intersection. I’m doing criminal work but also viewing the death penalty as a civil-rights issue, and I think that’s important. I want to keep up that dedication to both fields over the course of my career.
I’ve also thought about doing policy work. Once I’ve gained more literacy of the different issues, from litigating cases and working with clients to seeing what the problems are in the system, I think applying that to advocacy would be interesting.
But for now, I am so enwrapped in this death penalty work that I would really like to continue with it.