Meet Brad MacLean, TIP’s New Board President
Tennessee Innocence Project’s New Board President: Bradley MacLean
Profile by Brooke Wanser
A schoolteacher who started Vanderbilt Law at age 28, Brad MacLean says his journey to criminal post-conviction defense and policy reform was a “calling.”
After practicing bankruptcy and commercial litigation at a large firm for 25 years, he was approached by the Capital Case Resource Center to work on a criminal appeal for Richard Taylor, a severely mentally ill man accused of murdering a prison guard.
“I thought it was just an appellate case,” he said. “I met with the lawyers, they said, ‘You can expect to spend a minimum of 2000 hours on the case,’ which is equal to all the billable hours in a year.”
MacLean worked with a team to relitigate the case, which eventually ended in Taylor’s death sentence being overturned and changed to life imprisonment.
“I just saw there were so many injustices, it became a calling,” he said.
Though fighting for clients’ rights and even working towards exoneration sounds exciting, “There’s a lot about the work I don’t enjoy,” MacLean admitted. “When you’re dealing with and fighting injustices, it’s not always enjoyable. It can be really discouraging and upsetting. You’re up against some long odds, you’re trying to bring some sense of equity to the case. You have to be committed.”
MacLean continued taking death penalty cases, and eventually went to work for the nonprofit Tennessee Justice Project, then for the state as assistant post-conviction defender.
One of his highest profile cases is the defense of Abu-Ali Abdur’Rahman, whom he still represents.
Abdur’Rahman was convicted for the 1986 killing of a man and attack on his girlfriend. Abdur’Rahman, who suffers from mental illness due to a history of severe trauma, says he was in a dissociative state at the time and couldn’t recall whether he participated. No conclusive evidence has been presented to suggest he committed the crime.
In 2019, a judge changed his death sentence to life imprisonment after MacLean’s team pointed to various layers of misconduct, including racial profiling in selecting jurors, from the prosecution in the original trial.
MacLean says the case has been complicated, and that elements exemplify the chasm between criminal and civil law practices.
“What is acceptable representation in the criminal law field, where people’s lives are at stake, and their freedom, is completely different from what is expected of lawyers in the civil arenas, especially with large law firms and wealthy lawyers.”
MacLean said it’s the responsibility of all attorneys to not just practice within the law, but to actively advocate for legal reform. “We’re in a unique position to do something about it, and yet very few lawyers even consider what we’re dealing with,” he said. “It takes a huge human toll. I couldn’t live with myself and my conscience practicing law and not trying to do something in our legal system.”
MacLean has also done advocacy work with drug-addicted felons. After volunteering with Judge Seth Norman’s Davidson County program, he helped found the Morgan County Residential Recovery Court at their men’s prison. Five years after the program began, the Oak Ridger reported the program had about a 66% success rate, with most graduates remaining sober and out of prison.
With the Tennessee Innocence Project, MacLean says establishing clients’ innocence and vindicating their rights is first and foremost.
But, he added, “there’s something much larger at stake.”
The movement towards awareness of flaws and bias in the justice system, he said, has been largely successful. The Tennessee Innocence Project carries the burden of this advocacy into the future.
“We’ve demonstrated that eyewitness testimony isn’t always reliable, confessions aren’t always accurate, people falsely confess to crimes. Some of the forensic science is bogus,” MacLean said. “It’s extremely important to put the innocence system to the test, and that we continue to expose where our system is vulnerable to error and injustice.”