The lawyer with the lock pick

What is her work? “Picking locks. Abolishing mass incarceration,” she says.

At Decarceration Collective, the black-women-powered law firm in Chicago that she founded in 2016, Cody represents clients for free. As an attorney, she has gained freedom for more than 40 prisoners, all who were sentenced to life in prison on drug-related convictions.

“Decarceration is more than people getting out of prison,” Cody says. “Leaving prison is one of its concentric circles, but if my clients walk out of prison and are arrested by poverty at the gate, that’s not decarceration. It’s about understanding the conditions from which people came that explain — not excuse — their incarceration, so you can disrupt those conditions when they leave prison.” 

'I want my clients and the people who see the work being done to see trailblazing black women doing it.' — MiAngel Cody 04L

That’s why Decarceration Collective doesn’t stop at freeing clients from prison. There is a clinical psychologist who speaks with clients about post-carceral trauma, survivor’s guilt, and what it feels like to survive a life sentence. There’s also a director of financial literacy who teaches clients how to save money, open bank accounts, and equip them with resources for starting their lives. “What comes after incarceration is a collective effort beyond prison release toward true liberation,” Cody says.

By nature, it is politically radical that a young, Black woman from the rural South defends clients against their maximum prison sentences for non-violent drug crimes that often target minorities at disproportionate rates. Cody says, “I want my clients and the people who see the work being done to see trailblazing black women doing it.”

Her experience with poverty also allows her to empathize with her clients on another level. “Being a descendant of poverty has made me aware of the ways in which poverty impacts the lives of my clients and their communities,” she says.

Cody’s grandfather was a sharecropper in Arkansas who was chased out by the Ku Klux Klan after a dispute with the landowner. “I come from Black people who were historically excluded from the legitimate economy, and that illuminates my work because I see that same history in every one of my clients, too.”

Cody was a student attending Xavier University in Louisiana when she saw how that history played out for Shareef Cousin. A few years earlier, while volunteering with Amnesty International, Cody learned about Cousin, the youngest convict in Louisiana to be convicted at 16 and put on death row at age 17. With her college roommates, Cody would go to Jackson Square Park, asking passersby to sign petitions against death penalty cases like Cousin’s. (His conviction and death sentence were overturned a few years later in 1999.)

In 2011, she saw that history in Reynolds Wintersmith, sentenced to life in prison at age 17. She spent an entire year writing his clemency petition before sending it to the White House. In 2013, she won her first clemency under President Barack Obama when he commuted Reynolds’ sentence. “I love that he got his freedom back, but his survivorship is so inspiring, too,” Cody said. “Now he’s a high school guidance counselor on the west side of Chicago.”

After seven years as a death penalty investigator, she moved to Atlanta and applied to Emory University School of Law. “I decided very early in my career to lead with my heart, my passion, and my purpose, which is to get people out of prison. I was rooted in that,” Cody says.

While attending Emory Law, she clerked with two Black judges, the Honorable Myron H. Thompson of the United States District Court for the Middle District of Alabama and federal appeals judge Ann Williams of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, respectively.

Today, Cody’s achievements in her legal career precede her— a 2014 Federal Bar Association’s National Younger Federal Lawyer of the Year Award, a 2018 Soros Justice Advocacy Fellowship, a 2019 designation as a Legal Legend by the American Constitution Society, a 2020 Ida B. Wells Achievement Award from the Chicago Black Women Lawyers Association, and a Top 200 Woke Change Agent in America by Essence magazine.

She’s also a frequent television and radio commentator with a digital storytelling platform to highlight her justice campaigns like The Third Strike Campaign, which centers the voices of men and women effected by America’s three-strikes law. During her historic #90DaysOfFreedom Campaign, Cody and her co-counsel won freedom for 17 federal prisoners sentenced to life without parole for drug offenses. Celebrity and law student Kim Kardashian West helped to fund Cody’s cause and magnified her efforts for criminal justice reform. “I was paying out of pocket court fees to file briefs, I mean shoestring funding,” Cody says. “That collaboration was more than amplification, it was support.”

Now, Cody has been awarded the Emory Law Trailblazer Award, nominated by Youshea Berry 02L. They attended the same alma mater, Xavier University, and matriculated at Emory Law at the same time.

“When I read the criteria for the Trailblazer Award, Cody immediately came to mind,” Berry says. “She is a freedom fighter who has committed her life to advocating for justice for those who are disadvantaged, those who have fallen between the fissures of society, and those who our education and justice systems have failed. […] She is the embodiment of a trail-blazer, and I couldn’t think of a better opportunity, or more critical time, for the law school to recognize Cody and highlight her important work.”

“I know what drugs can do to a family and to a community,” Cody explains. She had seen her father overcome addiction and spend time in jail. “My work is an ongoing practice of forgiveness and contrition. Movement toward restorative justice and repairing families is very rewarding.”