‘For Life’: How 50 Cent Helped One Man’s Tale of Injustice See Daylight

Convicted on false testimony, Isaac Wright Jr. learned the law and got his life sentence overturned. 50 Cent knew a good story when he heard one. It’s not often you’re with a guy who’s been shot nine times — and gone on to become a famous rapper and actor — and his story isn’t automatically the wildest in the room.

Still, it happened in February, when Curtis Jackson, better known as 50 Cent, came together for a joint interview with the lawyer Isaac Wright Jr. Only three decades earlier, Wright had been charged with being a drug kingpin, convicted on false testimony and sentenced to life in prison plus another 70 years. Jackson had been a teenager selling drugs on the streets of South Jamaica, Queens. Neither had sunny prospects.

Here in 2020, Jackson and Wright sat wearing impeccable suits, both purple, in a backstage dressing room at the ABC studios near Lincoln Center. Their new series for ABC, “For Life,” had debuted a week before, and they had just finished taping an appearance on “The View. ” In the series, Jackson plays a kind of career inmate, a man with so much power inside the prison that he keeps finding ways not to leave. The actor Nicholas Pinnock plays a different kind of lifer in the same prison, an inmate who obtained his law degree while behind bars and is devoted to fighting his own conviction — a fictionalized version of Wright.

Wright said he had recognized a kindred spirit in Jackson. “You have a guy that survived nine assassin’s bullets to become one of the most influential entertainers and businessmen in the world,” observed Wright, who, like Jackson, is an executive producer of the series. “You have another guy that was sentenced to life in prison plus 70 years, represented himself, changed the law, got a police officer to confess that eventually gave him back his freedom. ” “Those are miraculous results to immeasurable challenges,” he continued.

“These two lives ultimately came together to create this show. ” Three decades ago, Wright knew better than to wait on miracles. Confined at the maximum-security New Jersey State Prison, in Trenton, he worked to become a paralegal helping represent fellow inmates, always with his eye on his own freedom. Aided by his case-law experience, he and his lawyer proved in 1996 that his conviction had been “based in part on an illegal seizure of cocaine,” as The New York Times reported, “and on perjured testimony by three co-defendants who had been offered leniency” by a corrupt former prosecutor.