In 1996, Isaac Wright Jr. stood in a Somerset County courtroom and cross-examined the detective who had helped convict him five years earlier. Wright was not a lawyer. He was a prisoner serving a life sentence, representing himself, working from law books he had studied alone in his cell. He had one question left for Detective James Dugan.
Dugan’s answer would end the case against him and expose one of the largest prosecutorial frame-jobs in New Jersey history.
Before he was convicted as a drug kingpin, Isaac Wright Jr. was a 28-year-old talent manager and record producer living in New York City with his wife and young daughter. In the early 1980s, he appeared for several weeks on the televised talent competition Star Search as part of a dance trio called Uptown Express.
By the late 1980s, he owned an independent record label, X-Press Records, and had co-founded The Cover Girls, a platinum-selling pop group that included his wife, Sunshine Wright. “Everything was going really, really, really good,” he later told Esquire, recalling the years before a move to New Jersey upended his life. None of that protected him from what came next.
In 1989, police arrested Wright along with ten other people, alleging they ran a cocaine distribution ring that shipped product into New Brunswick before sending it out across Middlesex and Somerset counties. Prosecutors claimed the operation netted as much as $30,000 a day. Wright was charged under New Jersey’s 1986 drug kingpin statute, one of the first defendants ever prosecuted under the law. He spent nearly two years in jail awaiting trial.
Wright denied any involvement. He said he had friends who sold drugs but had never sold drugs himself, and called himself “a victim of circumstance.” He also argued that the new kingpin law was being used to hand low-level dealers and bystanders the kind of sentences once reserved for cartel bosses. When the case reached trial in a Somerset County courtroom, Wright represented himself. “This entire case is based on a lie,” he told the jury, calling it the product of jealousy, vindictiveness, and what he described as racial selectiveness.
On April 26, 1991, the jury found him guilty. Wright was sentenced to life in prison with no possibility of parole, plus 72 years on the additional charges attached to the case.
Before trial, Wright had met with attorneys about possible plea deals. The best terms anyone offered him, he later recalled in an interview with CBS New York, was a guilty plea in exchange for a sentence of 15 to 20 years. He turned them down. He later said he decided then to “put the gloves on, string up the boots, and get into the fight” himself, rather than pay a lawyer to negotiate his way into prison.
Wright did not stop fighting. Inside prison, he taught himself law and went to work as a paralegal, drafting briefs not only for his own appeal but for other inmates. The first time he picked up a law book, he later said, it felt like something he had been doing his whole life. He is credited with winning reduced sentences or overturned convictions for more than 20 fellow prisoners, several of whom were serving life terms of their own.
In 1993, while drafting a defense brief in another inmate’s case, State v. Alexander, Wright developed a new legal argument: that the jury instructions used in New Jersey’s kingpin cases ran contrary to what the legislature had intended for who could be charged under the statute. The argument won. The ruling, State v. Alexander, 264 N.J. Super. 102, held up even after the state appealed it to the New Jersey Supreme Court. Wright then used that same precedent against his own conviction. In 1996, the state’s highest court agreed in State v. Wright, 143 N.J. 580, and threw out his kingpin conviction along with his life sentence.
But Wright still wasn’t free. More than 70 years of sentencing on the case’s other charges remained.
With his kingpin conviction reversed, Wright filed for post-conviction relief, arguing that the police and prosecutors who built the case against him had lied. That motion led to his cross-examination of Detective Dugan. Under Wright’s questioning, Dugan admitted he had searched Wright’s apartment before any court had approved a warrant, and confessed to a wider pattern of falsified police reports.
The admission opened a far larger scandal. A superior court judge found that Somerset County Prosecutor Nicholas L. Bissell Jr. had personally dictated false testimony from witnesses against Wright and struck secret plea deals with defense attorneys, persuading their clients to tell the jury that Wright had been their drug boss in exchange for lighter sentences of their own. Bissell had also illegally seized cocaine and used it as evidence against Wright. Superior Court Judge Michael Imbriani, who had presided over Wright’s trial, concealed those secret deals through irregular sentencing arrangements of his own. In 1995, federal prosecutors indicted Bissell and his wife on separate corruption charges, opening a parallel investigation that fed directly into Wright’s case.
The fallout reached all three men. Dugan pleaded guilty to official misconduct and avoided prison. Imbriani was removed from the bench and later convicted on unrelated theft charges tied to a real estate partnership. Bissell learned of Dugan’s confession from a television news report. He fled to Laughlin, Nevada, with federal agents in pursuit, and killed himself in a hotel room as police closed in to arrest him.
Wright’s friends posted $250,000 bail, and in December 1996 he walked out of prison after more than seven years behind bars. A judge ordered a new trial, but in 1998 the Somerset County Prosecutor’s Office announced it would not pursue the case again. Wright was a free man, exonerated of every charge that had once carried a life sentence.
He went back to school, earning a bachelor’s degree from Thomas Edison State University, then a law degree from St. Thomas University School of Law in 2007. He passed the New Jersey Bar exam the following year. The Bar’s Committee on Character spent the next nine years investigating his character before recommending his admission. He later said he had gone to law school “to slay giants for a price,” and would take on the right case for free when the cause was big enough and the client could not fight alone.
On September 27, 2017, the New Jersey Supreme Court granted Isaac Wright Jr. a license to practice law. It was the same court system that had sentenced him to life decades earlier, making him, by his own account, the first person in American history to be sentenced to life in prison, secure his own release and exoneration, and then be admitted to the bar by the very court that had once condemned him.
Wright went on to practice at the Newark law firm of Hunt, Hamlin & Ridley, where he focused on defending the wrongly accused and pursuing corrupt officials, the same fight that had once consumed his own case. His story became the basis for the ABC drama “For Life,” produced by Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson, which premiered in 2020. In 2022, Wright published a memoir, “Marked for Life: One Man’s Fight for Justice from the Inside.”
He now practices law in the same state that once sentenced him to die in prison for a crime he never committed.
