Jalen Rose talks to attorney MiAngel Cody about ending unfair drug sentencing

When she started college, MiAngel Cody expected to become a doctor. However, MiAngel, who is my guest this week on “Renaissance Man,” switched her career course and ended up healing a lot more people than she could have as an MD. She became an attorney who has devoted herself to freeing incarcerated people unjustly given life sentences under draconian drug laws.

“I went to college and told everybody in my family that I wanted to be a doctor,” she told me. But while attending Xavier University, a HBCU in New Orleans, she found another calling. “I was there between 1997 and 2001. And that was a time in New Orleans where the DA was prosecuting lots of young black men and seeking death sentences against them. So I got involved in the anti death penalty movement there in New Orleans and really just being galvanized and inspired to tell people’s stories who were thrown away. I went to my mother and I was like, ‘you know, I think I want to change my major and I want to be an organizer and an activist.’ ” Her mother wasn’t convinced that was a career path, so she took the LSATs just to see how she’d score. She didn’t reveal the number, but it must have been pretty damn good. She went to law school, started practicing and then founded the Decarceration Collective, a female-led firm devoted to taking on the cases of people unjustly rotting away in prison. In 2019, she and fellow lawyer Brittany Barnett founded the 90 Days to Freedom campaign, which drew financial support from Kim Kardashian. It was a legal sprint to see how many people serving life sentences could be freed. They brought 17 people home. In all, she has seen 44 clients previously resigned to being locked away forever, walk out of prison.