A Path to Redemption

“Everybody loves a good redemption story,” says Ginger Leigh Odom ’03. “Every sports movie is about coming from behind and having success, and I think that the expungement-and-sealing statute is an opportunity for redemption. It’s an opportunity for people to move past the past and step into the person that they intend to be.”

Odom is the director of the expungement unit in Illinois’s Office of the State Appellate Defender. In her current role, she helps facilitate the relief process for people throughout the state who have a criminal record by connecting self-representing litigants and legal aid and private attorneys with resources that can help guide them through the expungement process.

“Every year, Illinois prisons release 19,000 people back into society,” she says. “Every single one of those people is or will become eligible for some kind of relief. That’s an opportunity for service that I don’t get just doing one case at a time.”

Odom also does her best to get into the community to help make people aware of OSAD’s expungement program.  

She is co-chair of Chicago’s Pilsen Neighbor’s Community Council’s Expungement Expo at the annual Fiesta del Sol, and serves on several Forms committees of the Access to Justice Commission, where she helps draft forms for self-representing litigants to access criminal records relief.

But before she headed up the expungement unit, Odom was working one criminal appeal case at a time, including a case in Texas involving an inmate on death row. She says she “always hated the death penalty.”

“In school, I wrote on one of my books, ‘Why do we kill people who kill people to show people that killing people is wrong?’ It just makes no sense,” Odom explains.  

Odom worked her first death penalty case when she was still a student at Chicago-Kent College of Law, interning at Clinical Professor Richard Kling’s Criminal Defense Clinic.

“It was such a dramatic, made-for-TV trial where the star witness said, ‘This isn’t him, and he’s still out there,’ and the jury was shocked,” she remembers. “It was super dramatic.”

“The client was acquitted, and I was hooked.”

But her journey back to the courtroom wasn’t easy.  

Many of the “traditional” paths to career success weren’t options for Odom, a non-traditional student.

Odom grew up in Texas and moved to New York to study dance and theater as soon as she was old enough—in the mid-1980’s when the city’s artists were caught in the throes of the AIDS epidemic.

“I had a lot of friends that were impacted, very deeply impacted by AIDS and by the HIV virus,” says Odom. “My prom date from high school died when I was in my second year of college. There was a lot of angry anti-gay rhetoric floating around about AIDS. So his death led to me having a crisis of consciousness.”

After a few months of healing back home in Texas, Odom returned to New York and completed her studies in comparative literature and physical anthropology at Adelphi University before moving to Chicago.  

In Chicago she got a job at Whole Foods when it was launching its first store in the city. Odom eventually began to oversee the ordering of supplements and other alternative health products. But the United States Food and Drug Administration said that many of the supplements hadn’t been tested, and they took them off the shelves.  

Odom decided that she wanted to learn more about the law so that she could advocate for the small farmers she worked with to get the supplements on the shelves initially and for others who believed in alternative and natural medicines.

“I thought I wanted to be a lawyer, but I was scared to be a lawyer—and it was three years [of schooling], it was a lot of money,” she says. “I didn’t have a lot of money.”

Odom had also given birth at home to her daughter, an experience which also fueled her interest in advocating for alternate paths to health care. Odom was by this time a single parent and decided that her best plan would be to become a certified paralegal, but her mom pushed back and said she should pursue law school.  

That was all Odom needed. She enrolled at Chicago-Kent, where she fell in love with criminal law. She dedicated herself to getting a job at the Law Office of the Cook County (Illinois) Public Defender, but being a single mother created unique obstacles.

“Everyone told me that the way to get hired at the public defender’s office is you have to intern there,” she says. “I couldn’t volunteer at the public defender’s office because I had a family at home. I couldn’t work for free.”

Odom waited tables at a restaurant to get through school. She graduated with no job offers and continued to bartend to pay the bills while she studied for the bar exam.

“The night that I found out that I passed the bar exam, I got a call from a person that I had never met,” says Odom. “She asked what I would do now that I’d passed the bar. I told her I wanted to work on death penalty cases. She said, ‘Do you want to work for me?’”

The woman was Sheila Murphy, the first female presiding judge in Cook County. She gave Odom a job working a death penalty case out of Texas.  

With Murphy’s support and encouragement, Odom again applied to the Law Office of the Cook County Public Defender and the Office of the State Appellate Defender, both of which had rejected her just months ago.

This time both offices wanted her, and she wanted to eventually work for both.

“I thought if I worked at OSAD, I might learn from any potential mistakes and become a stronger trial lawyer,” she says. “Then I’ll go and do trial work.”

More than 20 years later, she’s still at OSAD, though she’s no longer dreaming of working on death penalty cases. “Illinois got rid of the death penalty in 2011,” she says, “which is the best way to lose a job that I can think of.”

Until 2020, Odom worked on individual cases, arguing on behalf of indigent clients. It’s a job that former classmate Wade Taylor ’03 says is relentless and unforgiving.

“She’s one of the most passionate attorneys I know in what she does, and what she does is important work,” Taylor continues, “She built the expungements program from the ground up. The fact that she can just keep her nose to the grindstone and keep doing this work, even though the odds are bad, is inspiring to watch.”

Odom has found happiness and fulfillment in a position that she sees as helping to bring true justice to communities.

“I feel very lucky, blessed, and highly favored,” she says, “that I found a career that that feeds me as much as I’m able to offer service to others.”