Shon Hopwood

Hopwood has been profiled by The New York Times, NPR, and other media. He was featured on a 60 Minutes segment in 2017 and repeated in 2019, where he was interviewed by Steve Kroft.

In 2015, Hopwood accepted a position as a graduate teaching fellow in Georgetown University Law Center's Appellate Litigation Clinic, where he was pursuing a Master of Laws degree. In 2017, Hopwood became a professor of law at Georgetown.

On September 4, 2014, the Supreme Court of Washington approved the recommendation made by the Character and Fitness Committee of the Washington State Bar Association, permitting Hopwood to take the Washington bar examination, and to become an attorney if he passed. His ability to become of a member of the Washington State Bar Association was named one of the 14 memorable National Law Journal Supreme Court of the United States stories of 2014. In 2015, Hopwood became a licensed lawyer in the state of Washington.

Hopwood's memoir, Law Man: My Story of Robbing Banks, Winning Supreme Court Cases, and Finding Redemption, co-written with Dennis Burke, was published in August 2012. In the memoir, Hopwood details both his life as a jailhouse lawyer and his romance with his wife, Ann Marie Hopwood, who Hopwood wrote during eight years of his imprisonment. Law Man received critical acclaim from a number of book reviewers.

Hopwood was released from the custody of the Bureau of Prisons on April 9, 2009. In 2010, he was working at Cockle Printing in Omaha, Nebraska, a leading printer of Supreme Court briefs.

He also won honorable mention in the PEN American Center 2008 Prison Writing contest.

In 2005, the Supreme Court granted a second cert petition prepared by Hopwood, vacating a lower court decision and sending the case back for a fresh look. Hopwood has also helped inmates from Indiana, Michigan and Nebraska get sentence reductions of 3 to 10 years from lower courts.

He prepared his first petition for certiorari for a fellow inmate on a prison typewriter in 2002. Since Hopwood was not a lawyer, the only name on the brief was that of the other prisoner, John Fellers. Once the Supreme Court agreed to hear the case, he worked with Seth Waxman, a former United States Solicitor General, in preparing the case. Waxman stated that the petition for writ of certiorari was probably one of the best he had ever seen. The court received 7,209 petitions that year from prisoners and others too poor to pay the filing fee, and it agreed to hear just eight of them. One was Fellers v. United States. The court, in a 9-0 decision, found that police had acted unconstitutionally in questioning Fellers, who had been convicted of a drug conspiracy. Fellers's sentence was ultimately reduced by four years.

Hopwood pled guilty on October 28, 1998, to robbing several banks in Nebraska. United States District Judge Richard G. Kopf sentenced Hopwood to 12 years, three months in prison followed by three years of supervised release and ordered $134,544 in restitution. Kopf was stunned by Hopwood's later transformation and said, "my gut told me that [he] was a punk—all mouth, and very little else. My viscera was wrong." In Kopf's own opinion, "Hopwood proves that my sentencing instincts suck."

Shon Robert Hopwood (born June 11, 1975) is an American convicted felon, appellate lawyer, and professor of law at Georgetown University Law Center. Hopwood became well-known as a jailhouse lawyer who served time in prison for bank robbery. While in prison, he started spending time in the law library, and became an accomplished United States Supreme Court practitioner by the time he left in 2009.