60 Minutes - Sunday, October 15, 2017

Episode Date: October 16, 2017

The Drug Enforcement Administration's plan to crack down on the opioid epidemic was thwarted Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Joe Ranicisi ran the Office of Diversion Control at the DEA. And tonight, in a joint 60 Minutes Washington Post investigation, this high-ranking whistleblower says the opioid epidemic spread because Congress was influenced by the drug industry and Washington lobbyists. You know the implication of what you're saying, that these big companies knew that they were pumping drugs into American communities that were killing people. That's not an implication. That's a fact. You're a professor at one of the finest law schools in the country. Is that something that you thought you would be able to do?

No. It makes me laugh hearing you say it out loud because there are days where it doesn't make sense to me, and I've lived it. Here's why. Professor Sean Hopwood is a convicted felon who spent 11 years in federal prison and is a foolish, reckless 21-year-old in Nebraska listening to a friend with a really bad idea. He said, what do you think about robbing a bank? And most people would have laughed

that off or said, maybe we need another beer or anything other than that sounds like a great idea, which is what I ended up saying. I'm Steve Croft. I'm Leslie Stahl. I'm Bill Whitaker. I'm Anderson Cooper. I'm Scott Pelley. Those stories tonight on 60 Minutes. game day coverage on TV connected devices and tablets. From Thursday night football to Sunday doubleheaders, we have all your NFL on CBS excitement covered. Start your free trial now at cbs.com slash NFL. That's cbs.com slash NFL. In the midst of the worst drug epidemic in American history, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration's ability to keep addictive opioids off U.S. streets was derailed. That, according to Joe Renicisi, one of the most important whistleblowers ever interviewed by 60 Minutes. Renicisi ran the DEA's Office of

Diversion Control, the division that regulates and investigates the pharmaceutical industry. Now, in a joint investigation by 60 Minutes and the Washington Post, Ranasisi tells the inside story of how, he says, the opioid crisis was allowed to spread, aided by Congress, lobbyists, and a drug distribution industry that shipped almost unchecked hundreds of millions of pills to rogue pharmacies and pain clinics providing the rocket fuel for a crisis that over the last two decades has claimed 200,000 lives this is an industry that's that's out of control what they want to do is do what they want to do and not worry about what the law is. And if they don't follow the law in drug supply, people die. That's just it. People die. Joe Rannicisi is a tough, blunt former DEA deputy assistant administrator with a law

degree, a pharmacy degree, and a smoldering rage at the unrelenting death toll from opioids. His greatest ire is reserved for the distributors, some of them multi-billion dollar Fortune 500 companies. They are the middlemen that ship the pain pills from manufacturers like Purdue Pharma and Johnson & Johnson to drugstores all over the country. Renicisi accuses the distributors of fueling the opioid epidemic by turning a blind eye to pain pills being diverted to illicit use. This is an industry that allowed millions and millions of drugs to go into bad pharmacies and doctors' offices that distributed them out to people who had no legitimate need for those drugs.

Who are these distributors? The three largest distributors are Cardinal Health, McKesson, and AmerisourceBergen. They control probably 85% or 90% of the drugs going downstream. You know the implication of what you're saying, that these big companies knew that they were pumping drugs into American communities that were killing people. That's not an implication. That's a fact. That's exactly what they did. In the late 1990s, opioids like oxycodone and hydrocodone

became a routine medical treatment for chronic pain. Drug companies assured doctors and congressional investigators, as in this 2001 hearing, that the pain medications were effective and safe. Addiction is not common. Addiction is rare in the pain patient who's properly managed. With many doctors convinced the drugs posed few risks, prescriptions skyrocketed, and so did addiction. Many people who had become addicted to painkillers turned to shady pill mills, pain clinics with rogue doctors to write fraudulent prescriptions

and complicit pharmacists to fill them, one-stop shopping for controlled narcotics. Pain clinics overnight popping up off an entrance ramp or an exit ramp on an interstate, and all of a sudden there's a pain clinic there. Had you ever seen anything like that before? Never. In fact, it was my opinion that this made the whole crack epidemic look like nothing. These weren't kids slinging crack on the corner. These were professionals who were doing it. They were just drug dealers in lab coats. You know what a chilling picture that paints? I do, because I watched them get arrested,

and I was the one who approved the cases. Despite arrests of unscrupulous purveyors, opioids kept flooding the black market. The death toll kept rising. This map shows the U.S. death rate from drug overdose in 1999. By 2015, the map looked like this. Most of these deaths were opioid-related. Joe Ranicisi told us prosecuting crooked doctors and pharmacists wasn't stemming the epidemic. So he decided to move up the food chain. There had to be a choke point, and the choke point was the distributors. What took you so long to go to that choke point of the distributors? This was all new to us.

We weren't seeing just some security violations and a few bad orders. We were seeing hundreds of bad orders that involved millions and millions of tablets. That's when we started going after the distributors. A distributors representative told us the problem is not distributors, but doctors who over-prescribe pain medication. But the distributors know exactly how many pills go to every drugstore they supply, and they are required under the Controlled Substances Act to report and stop what the DEA calls suspicious orders, such as unusually large or frequent shipments of opioids. But DEA investigators say many distributors ignored that requirement. They had a business plan. Their plan was to sell a lot of pills and make a lot of money.

And they did both of those very well. Jim Geldof, a 40-year DEA veteran, ran pharmaceutical investigations from DEA's Detroit field office. Frank Yonker supervised the agency's operations in Cincinnati. Joe Renicisi was their supervisor. They saw distributors shipping thousands of suspicious orders. One example, a pharmacy in Kermit, West Virginia, a town of just 392 people, ordered 9 million hydrocodone pills over two years. All we were looking for is a good faith effort by these companies to do the right thing. And there was no good faith effort. Greed always trumped compliance. It did every time. But don't sit here and tell me, well, we're not sure what a suspicious order is. Really? I mean, this pharmacy just

bought 50 times the amount that a normal pharmacy purchases, and they're in a town of 5,000 people. You don't know that that's suspicious? I mean, at some point, you're just turning a blind eye to it. These companies are a big reason for this epidemic. Yeah, absolutely they are. And I can tell you with 100% accuracy that we were in there on multiple occasions trying to get them to change their behavior, and they just flat out ignored us. In 2008, the DEA slapped McKesson, the country's largest drug distributor, with a $13.2 million fine.

That same year, Cardinal Health paid a $34 million fine. Both companies were penalized by the DEA for filling hundreds of suspicious orders, millions of pills. Over the last seven years, distributors' fines have totaled more than $341 million. The companies cried foul and complained to Congress that DEA regulations were vague and the agency was treating them like a foreign drug cartel. In a letter, the Healthcare Distribution Alliance, which represents distributors, told us they wanted to work with the DEA. Effective enforcement, they wrote, must be a two-way street. Frank, you said you were tough but fair.

Industry says you guys were unfair, that you were taking unfair hits at them. It's all about the people who lost their sons and daughters. See how fair they think it is. In 2011, more than 17,000 Americans died from opioid prescription overdoses. That same year, Cardinal Health, the second largest distributor, started pushing back at Joe Renicisi. The company's attorneys went over his head and called his bosses at the Justice Department, who called in Renicisi to have him explain his tactics.

It infuriated me that I was over there trying to explain what my motives were or why I was going after these corporations. And when I went back to the office and I sat down with my staff, I basically said, you know, I just got questioned on why we're doing why we're doing what we're doing. This is this. This is now this is war. We're going after these people and we're not going to stop. Do you really think you are getting this pushback because you are going after

big companies, Fortune 500 companies? I have no doubt in my mind. So the question is, why would it be any different for these companies as compared to the small mom and pops that we had done hundreds of times before? What's the difference? The difference is they have a lot of money and a lot of influence. And that's the difference. Renascisi says the drug industry used that money and influence to pressure top lawyers at the DEA to take a softer approach. Former DEA attorney Jonathan Novak said it divided the litigation office. He said in 2013 he noticed a sea change in the way prosecutions

of big distributors were handled. Cases his supervisors once would have easily approved now weren't good enough. We had been achieving incredible success in an almost unstoppable wave. And then suddenly it stopped. Novak prosecuted cases brought to him by Joe Renecisi's investigators. He said his caseload started to slow down dramatically. These were not cases where it was black, where it was gray. These were cases where the evidence was crystal clear that there was wrongdoing going on. He said his bosses started to bog down the system, demanding ever more evidence. But now, three undercovers by four officers over three months, that wouldn't be enough.

Maybe we need an expert to explain how recording equipment works. Maybe we need an expert to explain the system for prescribing. What's a prescription? It felt honestly confusing and almost insane. Where was this coming from? Jim Geldof says his investigations were getting bogged down, too. He was looking into one midsize distributor that had shipped more than 28 million pain pills to pharmacies in West Virginia over five years. About 11 million of those pills wound up in Mingo County, population 25,000. Suddenly, he said, he ran into roadblocks from one of attorney Jonathan Novak's bosses. I spent a year working on this case. I send it down there, and it's never good enough. Every

time I talk to this guy, he wants something else. And I get it for him, and that's still not good enough. You know, and this goes on and on and on. And when these roadblocks keep getting thrown up in your face, at that point, you know they just don't want the case. But this is the DEA. That's what you're supposed to do. Yeah, you would think. The DEA's toughest sanction is to freeze distributors' shipments of narcotics, a step they haven't taken in almost two years. I mean, there's no denying the numbers. At the height of the opioid epidemic, inexplicably, they slowed down. He said one big reason for the slowdown, D.C.'s notorious revolving door.

Novak said he saw a parade of DEA lawyers switch sides and jump to high-paying jobs defending the drug industry. Once they'd made the leap, they lobbied their former colleagues, Novak's bosses, and argued the DEA's cases were weak and ultimately would lose in court. It had a chilling effect on DEA litigators. Some of the best and brightest former DEA attorneys are now on the other side and know all of the weak points. Their fingerprints are on memos and policy and emails going out where you see this concoction of what they might argue in the future. You and the other attorneys had been winning these cases. All of the time.

The Justice Department is the agency that oversees the DEA. A senior attorney at the department at the time told us in a statement, Department of Justice leadership was not advised that DEA had changed enforcement strategies. Any significant policy shift should have been brought to our attention. There was a lot of pills, a lot of people dying, and we had tools in our toolbox to try to use and stem that flow. But it seemed down in headquarters that that toolbox was shut off. You're watching an out-of-control epidemic,

and yet you both feel that at the height of this epidemic, your hands were being tied. Yeah. If it's a war on drugs, then treat it like a war. The addiction rate was still increasing. The amount of people seeking treatment was still increasing. It was all increasing. Still the amount of prescriptions were increasing. And we started slowing down.

In 2013, Joe Renicisi and his DEA investigators were trying to crack down on big drug distributors that ship drugs to pharmacies across the country. He accused them of turning a blind eye as millions of prescription pain pills ended up on the black market. Then a new threat surfaced on Capitol Hill. With the help of members of Congress, the drug industry began to quietly pave the way for legislation that essentially would strip the DEA of its most potent tool in fighting the spread of dangerous narcotics. If I was going to write a book about how to harm the United States with pharmaceuticals, the only thing I could think of that would immediately harm is to take the authority away from the investigative agency that is trying to enforce the Controlled Substances

Act and the regulations implemented under the act. And that's what this bill did. The bill, introduced in the House by Pennsylvania Congressman Tom Marino and Congresswoman Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee, was promoted as a way to ensure that patients had access to the pain medication they needed. Jonathan Novak, who worked in the DEA's legal office, says what the bill really did was strip the agency of its ability to immediately freeze suspicious shipments of prescription narcotics to keep drugs off U.S. streets, what the DEA calls diversion. You're not going to be able to hold anyone higher up the food chain accountable.

Because of this law? Because of this law. How hard does it make your job in going after the wholesale distributors? I would say it makes it nearly impossible. This 2015 Justice Department memo we obtained supports that. It states the bill could actually result in increased diversion, abuse, and public health and safety consequences. They're toothless. I don't know how they stop this now.

It's a very sad state of affairs. Who drafted the legislation that would have such a dire effect? The answer came in another internal Justice Department email released to 60 Minutes and the Washington Post under the Freedom of Information Act. Quote, Lyndon Barber used to work for the DEA. He wrote the Marino bill. Hi, my name's Lyndon Barber. I'm the director of the DEA litigation and compliance practice in Coral's and Brady's health law group. Barber went through the revolving door. He left his job as associate chief counsel of the

DEA and within a month joined a law firm where he lobbied Congress on behalf of drug companies and wrote legislation. He advertised what he could offer a client facing DEA scrutiny. If you have a DEA compliance issue or you're facing a government investigation or you're having administrative or civil litigation involving the Controlled Substances Act, I'd be happy to hear from you. It's not surprising that this bill that has intimate knowledge of the way that DEA regulations are enforced, the way that those laws work, was written by someone who spent a lot of time there, charged a lot of cases there.

Knew the workings. Very much so. Eric Holder was the attorney general at the time. He warned the new law would undermine law enforcement efforts to prevent communities and families from falling prey to dangerous drugs. The major drug companies, distributors, chain drug stores, and pharmaceutical manufacturers mobilized, too. According to federal filings, during the two years the legislation was considered and amended, they spent $106 million lobbying Congress on the bill and other legislation, claiming the DEA was out of control, making it harder for patients to get needed medication. A particular thorn for the drug industry and the bill's sponsors was Joe Renicisi. He had been a witness before Congress more than 30 times and was called on again to testify about this bill.

16,651 people in 2010 died of opiate overdose, okay, opiate-associated overdose. This is not a game. We're not playing a game. Nobody is saying it is a game, sir. We're just trying to craft some legislation. Renizzisi, who admits to having a temper, felt so strongly about the damage the bill could do, he lashed out at Marino's committee staffers. It is my understanding that Joe Ranazzisi, a senior DEA official, has publicly accused we sponsors of the bill of, quote, supporting criminals, unquote. This offends me immensely. Congressman Marino from Pennsylvania said that you accused him of helping criminals. I've never accused Congressman Marino of helping criminals.

I said that this bill is going to protect defendants that we have under investigation. And if Congressman Marino thinks I accused him of something, I don't know what to tell you. But a week after the hearing on legislation that would hobble the DEA's enforcement authority, Marino and Blackburn wrote the inspector general for the Justice Department demanding that Renicisi be investigated for trying to, quote, intimidate the United States Congress. There were people in industry that didn't care much for Joe Renicisi, wanted him silenced or wanted him out of the way, basically unceremoniously kick him to the curb. After almost 30 years with the DEA, Matt Murphy, Renicisi's lieutenant, became a consultant for the drug industry, an industry with which he is now disillusioned. He said he was shocked at the animosity he

witnessed toward his friend and former boss. My theory is that, you know, the industry through lobbying groups donated a certain amount of money to politicians to get a law passed that favored the industry and also maybe using those political ties to have Joe removed. Congress launched an investigation of him. Right. And he was out. Yeah, pressure was put on for him to be moved out. I'm pretty confident of him. Right. And he was out. Yeah, pressure was put on for him to be moved out. I'm pretty confident of that. There was no reason to take the guy who was the most qualified person in DEA

to run the Office of Diversion Control out of the Office of Diversion Control. The investigation requested by Congressman Marino against Renicisi went nowhere. But soon after, Renicisi was stripped of his responsibilities. He says he went from supervising 600 people to supervising none. So he resigned. We were totally focused on all these people dying and all these drugs being diverted, and we were not really looking at our flanks, waiting for somebody to come after us.

So maybe that was my fault, and I just never realized that that was something that would have occurred. In the end, the DEA signed off on the final version of the Marino bill. A senior DEA representative told us the agency fought hard to stop it, but in the face of growing pressure from Congress and industry lobbyists, was forced to accept a deal it did not want. The bill was presented to the Senate in March of 2016.

I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to the... Majority leader Mitch McConnell introduced the legislation, and it passed the Senate through unanimous consent, with no objections and no recorded votes. Without objection. It passed the House the same way, with members of Congress chatting away on the floor. Without objection, the bill was read a third time and passed.

A week later, with no objections from Congress or the DEA, President Barack Obama signed it into law without ceremony or the usual bill-signing photo op. Marino issued a press release the next day claiming credit for the legislation. The drug distributors declared victory and told us the new law would in no way limit DEA's enforcement abilities. But DEA Chief Administrative Law Judge John J. Mulrooney, who must adjudicate the law, wrote in a soon-to-be published Marquette Law Review article we obtained that the new legislation, quote, would make it all but impossible to prosecute unscrupulous distributors. I just don't understand why Congress would pass a bill that strips us of our authority in the height of an opioid epidemic

in places like Congressman Reno's district and Congressman Blackburn's district. Why are these people sponsoring bills when people in their backyards are dying from drugs that are coming from the same people that these bills are protecting. Why do you think that is? Because I think that the drug industry, the manufacturers, wholesalers, distributors, and chain drug stores

have an influence over Congress that has never been seen before. And these people came in with their influence and their money and got a whole statute changed because they didn't like it. Seven months after the bill became law, Congressman Marino's point man on the legislation, his chief of staff, Bill Tai, became a lobbyist for the National Association of Chain Drug Stores. Since the crackdown on the distributors began, the pharmaceutical industry and law firms that represent them have hired at least 46 investigators, attorneys, and supervisors from the DEA,

including 32 directly from the division that regulates the drug industry. Mike Gill, chief of staff for the DEA administrator, was hired by HDJN, one of the country's largest health care law firms. And most recently, Jason Hedges, a senior DEA attorney overseeing enforcement cases during the slowdown, joined the pharmaceutical and regulatory division of D.C.-based law firm Hogan Lovells. He declined to speak with us. Amerisource Bergen and McKesson declined our request to appear on camera. So did Cardinal Health, which three months ago hired the author of the bill, Lyndon Barber, as senior vice president. With Scott Hyam and Lenny Bernstein of The Washington Post, we called the head of public relations of Cardinal and asked to speak with Barber.

This is Bill Whitaker. I'm a correspondent with 60 Minutes. I was calling to see if we could speak with Lyndon Barber. We were told the company would not make him available. We also tried for several months to speak to Congressman Marino. Finally, we went to his D.C. office. Hello, I'm Bill Whitaker with 60 Minutes. Yes. We'd like to speak with Congressman Marino, if we could. I'm going to have to refer you to our chief of staff. We were told he was not available. OK, can you please turn the camera off? And we have to ask the camera to leave you. OK. His staff then called the Capitol Hill police on us.

Just accept the uninvite and leave the area. When Joe Renicisi looks back, he has one regret. You know, all these people had died, happened under my watch. The one thing I wanted to do, the one thing I just thought would have the most impact is to lock up, arrest one of these corporate officers. You arrest a corporate officer, you arrest somebody that's involved in the decision process, knowing what the law is. If you make that arrest, then everybody sits up and takes notice because three-piece suit guys just don't do well in prison. They don't.

Joe Renicisi now consults with state attorneys general who have filed suit against distributors for their role in the opioid crisis. Tennessee Congresswoman Marsha Blackburn is running for the Senate. As for Congressman Marino, he was just nominated to be President Donald Trump's new drug czar. Jailhouse lawyers are prisoners who manage to learn enough about the law while incarcerated to help themselves and other inmates with legal problems. We get letters from them every week. Tonight, we're going to introduce you to Sean Hopwood, themselves, and other inmates with legal problems. We get letters from them every week.

Tonight, we're going to introduce you to Sean Hopwood, who is arguably the most successful jailhouse lawyer ever, having had one of his cases argued before the U.S. Supreme Court while serving a 12-year sentence for armed bank robbery. Since his release, he's built a resume as a legal scholar and been published in top law journals. We met him at one of the nation's premier law schools, where he's become its newest professor. A tale of redemption as improbable as any you're likely to hear. Question one is, was there a constitutional violation? In his first semester at Georgetown University, Professor Hopwood is teaching criminal law.

Were the first statements unlawfully obtained? Yes. The irony isn't lost on him or his students, who know that he's a convicted felon and that less than a decade ago was an inmate at the Federal Correctional Institution in Pekin, Illinois. You're a professor at one of the finest law schools in the country. Is that something that you thought you would be able to do? No. It makes me laugh hearing you say it out loud because there are days where it doesn't make sense to me, and I've lived it.

So I can see why it doesn't make sense to hardly anyone else. It's easier for me to imagine you as a Georgetown law professor than it is for me to imagine you as a bank robber. Well, that's because the bank robber has long been dead and gone. Hopwood was born here 42 years ago in the small farming community of David City, Nebraska, surrounded by cornfields and cattle. He was a bright, cocky, stubborn kid from a solid family and he hated rules. A good athlete and a miserable student who won a basketball scholarship to Midland University and partied his way out of it in one semester. He drank himself through a two-year hitch in the Navy, then added drugs to the mix when he returned to David City,

working in a feedlot. How much has David City changed since? He was broke, unrepentant, and frustrated that things weren't going his way. I wanted to live an exciting life, and shoveling cow manure in small-town Nebraska and living in my parents' bedroom wasn't quite cutting it. So this is where it started. One night, he got a call from a friend asking him to come down to the local bar for a drink and listen to what turned out to be a very bad idea. He said, what do you think about robbing a bank? And most people would have laughed that off or said, maybe we need another beer or anything other than that sounds like a great idea, which is what I ended up saying. Really?

You know, I don't think either one of us thought that night that we were going to actually do it. It sounded exciting. It sounded exciting. It sounded like easy money that we didn't have to work for, something that fit with where my mind was at at the time, which was a reckless, immature, foolish 21-year-old. It wasn't until months later when they started scouting locations that Sean realized they might actually do it. So this is one of your banks?

It is. This is the third bank. The idea was to stick up very small banks in tiny towns like Gresham where there was no police presence and little risk of armed confrontation. We wanted to get in and out of the bank as quickly as possible, not hurt anyone, grab as much money as we could, and run. And that's basically what we did in all five bank robberies. Were you any good at it? No.

I did 11 years in federal prison for stealing $150,000. I don't think that's good. Eventually, the FBI put out a composite sketch and began closing in. In July 1998, he was apprehended in this Omaha hotel, 10 months after his first robbery. When they arrested me, they searched my car and found $100,000 in cash that was directly traceable to the bank I had just robbed and multiple guns and a scanner and binoculars. They had you. They had me.

And they would have him for a long time. When he entered the federal penitentiary in Illinois in May of 1999, he was 23 years old. Was it dangerous? Of course, in part because there's not a lot for the inmates to do. He doesn't talk about the things that he witnessed and experienced in federal prison. He doesn't want his family to know, and he sees no value in reliving them, except for the job he landed in the safety of the legal library, which every federal prison is required to have. And for the first six months I worked at the prison law library,

I didn't hardly touch the books. They were big, they were thick, they were intimidating. What was the spark that got you to start opening the books and looking at them? Self-motivation. It all started with a Supreme Court ruling that Sean thought might help him get his sentence reduced, and it ended with him assisting other prisoners with all sorts of cases. I spent two months working on my own case, researching, and I was never able to get any legal relief for myself the entire time I was in federal prison. But you were for other inmates. I did.

Lawyers had made really bad mistakes, and it really cost their clients sometimes, you know, a decade or two in federal prison. Inside the walls at Pekin, he won the respect of fellow inmates and discovered that he had an aptitude for something, the law. I would be sitting in my cell reading a federal reporter, which is a compendium of federal court of appeals cases, and I would just read that cover to cover as if it was a novel, just for fun.

Was it fun? I think the law is fascinating. In what way? It was like a big puzzle for me. Three years into his prison term, he got an opportunity to show just how much he'd learned when John Fellers, a friend and fellow inmate, asked Sean to appeal his drug conviction to the highest court in the land. He came to me and said, would you take the case and would you file this petition to the Supreme Court?

I said no, absolutely not. Why? His case was very complex and I didn't think I could do it, but John was very persistent. He would spend months working day and night on the petition. It required him to master the facts of the case, understand the statutes and legal precedents, identify the errors made by lawyers and judges in the appeal process, and then craft an argument in the language of the court before mailing it off to Washington. Did the Supreme Court know that the brief had been written by a prisoner? The first hint would have been the fact that it was typed on a typewriter. I don't think law firms in 2003 were using typewriters to knock out Supreme Court briefs. Four out of nine Supreme Court justices must agree for a case to be heard. That year, more than 8,000 petitions were filed. 74 were accepted. One of those was written by Sean Hopwood.

And one morning, a friend of mine came running and screaming my name. Sean, Sean, Sean. And what he had was a copy of the USA Today. And I read the article and it said that the court had granted John Feller's case. What went through your mind? I was shocked. I was shocked that the court had granted the case. And that I had done something that, you know, lawyers wait their whole lives to do and done it the first time.

It's not that unusual for prisoners to file their own petitions. What is freakishly unusual is for one of those petitions to be granted. Seth Waxman, a prominent appellate lawyer and the former Solicitor General of the United States, is not easily impressed. But when he was asked to argue the Feller's case before the Supreme Court, he said he would do it only if Sean Hopwood would work from prison as part of the team. I wanted him to be involved because I was really curious. It seemed actually almost inconceivable that somebody with his level of education and his level of exposure to the life of the law

could actually write a much better than average cert petition. So this would have been good for a Washington lawyer. Even for a licensed appointed lawyer representing a federal prisoner, you would say, wow. Waxman won the Feller's case before the Supreme Court in the unanimous decision and became Sean's mentor during his final six years in prison. When a former Solicitor General of the United States says that you did a good job writing a brief, that has an impact, especially when you're surrounded in this environment where prison guards are telling you every day that you're worthless and you don't amount to anything. Did you win some more cases? I did. I won another case in

the Supreme Court. I won a case in the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals. And I won cases mostly on resentencing motions for federal prisoners and federal district court cases kind of all over the country. He found a purpose in life, and when Ann Marie Metzner, who had once had a high school crush on Sean, began writing letters and paying him visits,

he started to think he might have some kind of future when he got out. But he knew there were huge obstacles ahead. Did you decide you wanted to be a lawyer while you were in prison? I did, but I didn't think I could. I had had countless number of lawyers tell me I could not go to law school. And even if I could, I would never get licensed by any of the state bar associations, given my crimes. When he was released to a halfway house near Omaha in 2008, he had never seen an iPhone, never been on the internet, and was computer illiterate.

But as if by miracle, he saw an ad for a document analyst at Cockle Legal Printing, one of just a few companies in the U.S. that helps attorneys assemble briefs for the Supreme Court. Andy Cockle and his sister Trish Bilotti remembered that Sean showed up for his interview in ill-fitting clothes with a rumpled letter from Seth Waxman and an 11-year gap in his resume. We work with attorneys every day, all week long, that are trying to get their case granted, and none of them do. And this guy comes out and says, I had two of them granted. And so that, yeah. Did you believe him?

No. I thought he was delusional. But his story checked out, and they gave him the job. You're glad you hired him. Oh, yeah. It was sad to see him go. He spent three years with the Cockles in Omaha, completing the undergraduate degree he'd begun in prison and continuing to impress the lawyers he worked with. With their help and against all odds, the University of Washington Law School took a chance on him.

He won a full scholarship from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and upon graduation was admitted to the bar. How did you do in law school? Surprisingly well. You were already a lawyer. Well, I mean, it was a new experience doing well in school. He did well enough to land a prestigious clerkship with the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, the second most important court in the country. The idea that a convicted bank robber was going to go work for Janice Rogers Brown, a very conservative judge on a very important court. Surprising in the absolute sense? Yes. In

the context of who Sean Hopwood is and what he was setting out to do, not that surprising. A year later, it led to a highly competitive teaching fellowship at Georgetown Law's Appellate Litigation Clinic, where he did so well, the faculty awarded him a position as a professor of law. How hard is it to get a job teaching law at Georgetown? It's very hard. Professor Stephen Goldblatt is the faculty director for the Supreme Court Institute at Georgetown Law.

To have somebody who's a credible voice, who actually lived the experience, who understands what it's like to spend a day in prison, much less 11 years, is highly unusual. So I think this was a unique opportunity to get somebody for whom there are no others out there, and that the potential was enormous. Along with his other accomplishments, Sean Hopwood also got to marry that girl from David City, Annie Metzner, who is now a law student herself. They have two children. Are you surprised how this has turned out? Yeah, yeah.

I had no idea of what the future would hold for us. Neither one of us had any clue that all these wonderful things would happen. We'll motivate you. Thank you. Hopwood's main interest now is criminal justice reform. He's an advocate for shorter prison sentences for most crimes and more vocational training, drug treatment, and mental health counseling, which are often nonexistent. Prison is not the place for personal growth.

We warehouse people and then we kick them out into the real world with very little support and hope that a miracle happens. But somehow all the things stacked against you, you were able to do it. Yeah. It was people that helped, that went out of their way to provide grace to me that made the difference. I'm Bill Whitaker. We'll be back next week with another edition of 60 Minutes.