Soon after she was sent to Rikers in 2010, Kelly Harnett became a regular at the jail’s law library. She was looking for a loophole, a technical error, something that might set her free.

Harnett was 28 and facing murder charges for the killing of a stranger in a park in Queens. She was innocent, she would tell anyone who would listen; she had been a bystander, unable to stop her abusive boyfriend from choking the man.

Harnett paged through the law books. At first, nothing made any sense. But she decided that if she could simply memorize the statutes, she would understand them and could maybe even become good at law. “And everyone loves something they’re good at,” she told me.

She filed a motion to dismiss her indictment. She wrote and revised briefs, citations, arguments. On one occasion, Harnett was working under a deadline when flying water bugs hatched in an adjacent storage room and flooded into her cell. A guard refused to move her: “Guess what I did? I sat right on the floor, on top of the bugs but on a tipped-open garbage bag that I double-bagged, and got to work.” The motion was denied, but the story became, in her mind, one of triumph and resilience.

In the end, neither the prosecutor nor the jury bought Harnett’s story. In 2015, she was sentenced to 17 years to life and transferred to Bedford Hills Correctional Facility in Westchester. There, she was tapped to be a clerk at the law library. She worked with an aging PC with no access to the internet, a kiosk...

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