每年, the UMKC 校友 Association recognizes the achievements of outstanding alumni with an awards celebration. The university and the association are honoring Sean O’Brien (J.D. ’80) with the Class of 2023 Alumnus of the Year Award.
O’Brien became interested in the practice of law at his first traffic stop.
“I was 16 years old and the man who was running for sheriff came to my car after the police officer left,奥布赖恩回忆道. “My dad’s car had the candidate’s sticker on it, and he told me that since I was a constituent, he could arrange for the ticket to disappear.”
When O’Brien recounted the story to his father, his dad was furious.
“He called the man and told him that law should work for everyone,” O’Brien says. “That was my first lesson in equal protection, and it stuck.”
法学院毕业后, O’Brien experienced another defining moment in his career in the face of inequity.
“At breakfast at a local business organization, the keynote speaker used the appointment of the honorable Fernando Gaitan’s (J.D. ’74) appointment as a springboard to everything wrong with the justice system based on his race. I walked out and turned in my notice without another job to go to.”
“UMKC法学院 prides itself on producing practice-ready lawyers, and that was true in my case.”
A month later, O’Brien interviewed with Chief Public Defender Jim Fletcher.
“It felt like coming home,” O’ Brien says. “他们当场给了我一份工作. 我接受了它，再也没有回头.”
1988年参议员汤姆·伊格尔顿, 罗伯特·波普尔, 迪安, UMKC法学院 , professors Ellen Suni and Nancy Levit wrote a grant to create the Missouri Capital Punishment Resource Center to recruit and train good lawyers to assure that people sentenced to death have access to legal representation when they need it. Already recognized as a tireless advocate for the wrongly convicted, they hired O’Brien to run it.
In some ways O’Brien feels that he never really left UMKC. After directing the Missouri Capital Punishment Resource Center for 15 years, Dean Emerita Ellen Suni hired him as a visiting professor. After two semesters he applied to be the permanent criminal law professor. He finds that if someone finds work that they are passionate about, 这不是真正的工作, 这是一种召唤.
“I am proud of the work I have done, but my feelings about it are complicated,” O’Brien says. “It is much harder to free an innocent person than it should be and much too easy to wrongly convict them in the first place. You never lose sight of how much these innocent men and women have lost during their years or decades of wrongful incarceration, and how deficient our social safety net is.
“It’s a struggle for them to find work, health care and housing. 有些人确实找到了好工作，创造了快乐, 富有成效的生活, but they all suffer some degree of post trauma stress injury, especially people exonerated from death row. The day they walk out is just the beginning of a new struggle.”
O’Brien considers his most significant professional accomplishment the Supreme Court victory in Schlup vs. Delo, a landmark case which set the standard for innocence claims in federal habeas corpus proceedings.
“It’s impossible to brief an innocence argument anywhere in the country without relying on Schlup. It has helped free hundreds of people from prison.”
He credits his education at the UMKC法学院 for providing the foundation for his success.
“UMKC法学院 prides itself on producing practice-ready lawyers, and that was true in my case.”
But his proudest accomplishment is not related to his career.
“I have two amazing daughters who are brilliant, 有创造力和好奇心,” O’Brien says “I am prouder of them than anything I have done professionally.”