Kenneth Lawson
law professor and former lawyer
Kenneth L. Lawson (born April 19, 1963) is the co-director of the Hawai'i Innocence Project, a faculty specialist at the William S. Richardson School of Law, and a former attorney.
Born in Cincinnati, Lawson spent the first three years of his life in an orphanage before being adopted. He played football in high school, and went on to attend Wittenberg College, graduating in 1986. While he was at Wittenberg, he married Marva Lawson after the birth of the couple's first child.
Lawson obtained a Juris Doctor in 1989 and became licensed to practice law in Ohio the same year. He was the first African American lawyer at Taft Stettinius & Hollister, but left to practice criminal defense law on his own in 1993. While working as a criminal defense lawyer in Cincinnati, Lawson became addicted to opioids and cocaine after being prescribed Percodan and Percocet when he tore his rotator cuff while weightlifting in the year 2000. He checked into a detox facility in 2007, and said in 2019 that he had not used drugs or alcohol since then. Lawson had his license to practice law suspended by the Supreme Court of Ohio in July 2008 for professional misconduct including failure to properly represent clients and theft of funds, was incarcerated in 2009 for conspiracy to obtain prescription drugs, and was disbarred permanently by the Supreme Court of Ohio in 2011 as a result of a second complaint about his actions while addicted.
Released from prison in 2010 and sent to a halfway house in Kalihi, Lawson began working as a research assistant for Randall Roth at the William S. Richardson School of Law.
“Kenneth Lawson” enters the record as law professor and former lawyer. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Kenneth, Lawson and professor can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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This entry incorporates text from “Kenneth Lawson” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.