How a lawyer cashed in on criminal justice reform by fanning the hopes of inmates' families
LOS ANGELES — When California enacted landmark criminal justice reforms several years ago, inmates and their families saw a chance at freedom.
Aaron Spolin saw a business opportunity.
After the laws went into effect in 2019, the then-33-year-old attorney incorporated a law firm in West Los Angeles and began marketing legal services to the incarcerated and their loved ones.
Spolin, a Princeton-educated former McKinsey consultant, bought up online search terms so that people googling the laws saw ads touting the firm's expertise. He mailed pitch letters directly to some of the state's 100,000 prisoners introducing himself as a former prosecutor now "in the top 1% among California criminal lawyers" and informing them they might be eligible for "sentence shortening under various new laws."
Nearly 2,000 individuals signed on with Spolin, according to the resume of a former office manager. He became a celebrity inside prisons, his name passed around in exercise yards from Folsom to Calipatria, and in Facebook support groups for wives and children. Families of limited means borrowed against their homes, took out high-interest loans, dipped into 401(k)s, worked double shifts, ran public fundraisers and amassed credit card debt to pay Spolin fees that could run north of $40,000.
A Los Angeles Times investigation found that Spolin built a booming enterprise by fanning false hopes in some families desperate to get their loved ones home. He encouraged people to spring for pricey legal services that he knew or should have known had little or no chance of success, the newspaper found.
He told families of men incarcerated for murder and other violent crimes that progressive L.A. District Attorney George Gascón could move to free them in less than a year under one new resentencing law. None of Spolin's attempts, for which families paid about $10,000 each, appear to have been successful, and Gascón's office told The Times it generally does not consider such offenders to be good candidates for resentencing.
In another example, Spolin presented a commutation from the governor, which experts say is a long shot for even the most rehabilitated of candidates, as "a very real possibility for all types of inmates." Hundreds paid up to $14,000 for him to submit applications. None has been granted, The Times found, and some were patently unsuitable. One inmate he proposed for commutation this year had pleaded guilty in May 2022 to running a drug ring from his cell at Corcoran State Prison.
The Times found that Spolin's firm relied on the work of some low-paid contract lawyers who were not licensed in California and had little or no experience in criminal appeals. Among those helping draft legal memos and court filings were lawyers from the Philippines and other developing countries making about $10 an hour.
Spolin denied exploiting inmates and their families and blamed district attorneys' offices and others who he says have taken too narrow a view of which individuals should be freed.
Stephanie Charles, an actor whose brother, Wesner, has been behind bars since 2002 for robbery and attempted carjacking, said she now worries the $19,000 she and other loved ones scraped together to pay Spolin for a commutation and other services was wasted. "A lot of us don't know the law, a lot of us are vulnerable," she said. "We just want someone to help us solve the problem and not take advantage of us."
Supporters of the state's criminal justice reforms are among Spolin's biggest critics.
"This guy is getting rich off the most vulnerable people and (giving) them false hope that could really hurt them. It needs to stop now," Karen Nash, a deputy L.A. public defender who represents prisoners seeking resentencing under the reforms, wrote in a January email to the State Bar of California.
The new laws are designed so that prisoners who qualify get free legal representation.
"It wasn't contemplated that this would become ambulance chasers who would see this as a way to make money off the backs of people who are in prison," said Hillary Blout, a former San Francisco prosecutor who helped write one of the reform measures.
Spolin acknowledged to The Times that he had given some people assessments that turned out to be overly optimistic.
"We are different than other lawyers in that we fight
