'A Fight Within Him'

As a Black man born and raised in Oakland, Adanté Pointer was accustomed to being tailed and stopped by the police without cause, and being suspected of illegal activity for no reason. But it wasn’t until 2003, while studying for the Bar exam at his home in West Oakland, that Pointer witnessed the police beating someone right before his eyes.

“I had the door open, the security screen on, and I heard a rustling of the fence from the vacant lot next to me. Then I heard somebody calling out in pain,” Pointer says. “I could see some flashlights—it was dusk—and it looked like the silhouettes of two people, like they were dealing with somebody on the ground, kicking them.”

As Pointer peered more closely, he realized he was watching two police officers beating up a man on the ground. He yelled to them, and the beating stopped. He saw the officers handcuff the man, put him into their car, and drive off.

Stunned, Pointer didn’t know what to do; he couldn’t identify the man or the officers. Two weeks later, however, an opportunity arrived: The man knocked on his front door, and Pointer referred him to civil rights attorney John Burris for representation.

“I didn’t really know everything Burris did,” Pointer says of his future mentor, “but I knew he dealt with the police.”

From childhood to adulthood, Pointer has witnessed how communities are resourced and policed differently. He and his older sister, Keesha, attended Catholic school in Piedmont, just a few miles from their home, thanks to a recommendation from a wealthy family within the parish. Pointer’s great-grandmother was their housekeeper.

The 300-student school provided Pointer with a solid education in a resource-rich neighborhood, but he was just one of a handful of Black students, and one of the few whose family wasn’t affluent.

His grandparents, who had moved to California from Mississippi and Texas looking for a better life, raised Pointer along with his mother and father. His grandfather, Roddie Proctor, was a skilled carpenter who bought and renovated homes. While many of his peers watched Saturday morning cartoons, Pointer was busy sweeping and cleaning the properties, as well as running errands for the business.

Pointer says his family always had enough. But he questioned why Piedmont, with its “overabundance of economic opportunities,” could be so close yet feel like a different world. In Oakland, Pointer’s neighbors stood in lines to receive food. “My classmates only saw that on the news, but I was living it,” he says.

Most of his classmates never witnessed the different treatment he received from the police, either—even when no one had done anything wrong. “If I was with my friends from the neighborhood, then everybody’s name was getting run, everybody was getting put in handcuffs, and the car was getting searched,” he says.

When Pointer was with white friends, however, the police were lenient—giving warnings even if his classmates had done something wrong. “Nobody’s name was being ran. Nobody’s ID was being asked about, and we weren’t having to get out the car and get the car searched,” he says.

Pointer’s idea to become a lawyer began in the first grade, when he was visiting a classmate’s home and requested cereal as an after-school snack.

“We opened the cupboard, and there were like eight boxes in there. That blew my mind. We had one box at home, and we had to mete it out,” Pointer says. “I asked right then and there, ‘What does your dad do?’ He was like, ‘He’s an attorney.’ As I matured, and understood better what attorneys did, I saw it was a way to perhaps be an advocate or a congressman.”

One thing was clear: He wanted to help his community.

Today, Pointer is a partner at Pointer & Buelna – Lawyers for the People, the Oakland-based firm he founded in June 2020, handling civil rights, police brutality, and wrongful death cases throughout the state. He says the work is not about taking sides with a particular group, but rather taking the side of justice. “I’m not coming from the position of all police—or all white people are this, or all Black people are that,” he says. “I’ve represented every nationality, ethnicity, gender, and sexual orientation in the course of my career.”

Part of Pointer’s mission is to ensure that police officers are called to account when they violate the public’s trust. “Police officers are on the front lines,” he says, noting the critical role they play in neighborhoods. “They are the representation of the state, and have the ability to take your car, put you in debt, haul you to jail.”

This was true for Maurice Monk, a 45-year-old Oakland resident whose June 2021 interaction with the police and the justice system escalated from being charged with a misdemeanor for not wearing a mask on a city bus to not being able to pay a $2,500 bail fee. Then he was neglected by the Santa Rita Jail staff, which resulted in his death that November.

Monk, who suffered from health issues including high blood pressure, bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, was in the care of the jail’s staff and medical team. “They didn’t care that he hadn’t left his cell in weeks. They didn’t care that all of the food trays were stacked up and the pills were on the floor,” says Pointer.
The neglect was so bad, he adds, that a fellow inmate who helped distribute food asked the guards, “Are we just waiting for him to die?”

The jail staff told Monk’s family he had died from a heart attack. The family hired Pointer to find the truth. After combing through 15,000 pages of discovery and hundreds of hours of videotape, Pointer says, “We were able to figure out what actually happened to Maurice Monk”: He had been dead, face down on his bed, for three or four days before the guards and medical staff realized it.

“Extreme dehydration caused his physiological processes to go haywire,” says Pointer. “We don’t exactly know when he died, but we know he was in the same position for days—in a puddle of his own urine, his pants around his knees. He was there so long that the ink on his shirt transferred to his bed. It’s egregious.”

The firm secured a $7 million settlement from Alameda County, which also agreed to reform its jail deputy training program. And Pointer continues to work on the family’s behalf, suing the private company whose medical staff was responsible for caring for him.

“Nobody wants to believe that, if you go to jail for a nonviolent crime, if you’re just in there because you’re poor, that you’re going to be treated as less than—like an animal,” says Pointer, noting that the company provides medical care for jails across the U.S. “But this happens every day in our country.”

For the first 15 years of his career, Pointer worked under the legendary civil rights attorney John Burris, who showed him how to face courtroom Goliaths head-on, with courage and conviction. Indeed, the one lesson that’s guided his entire career, Pointer says, Burris taught him: “You have to have an unyielding belief that you can win, and that you’re right.”

Burris represented Rodney King in the infamous 1992 police brutality trial against four Los Angeles Police Department officers; and, in 2003, he served as co-counsel in a groundbreaking class-action settlement against the Oakland Police Department, after a group within its officer corps was accused of unlawfully beating, detaining, and kidnapping local residents. The case led to a deep investigation of, and reform within, the Oakland Police Department.

Pointer began noticing Burris’ work after the ’03 case, around the same time he was looking for employment. While attending UC Hastings College of the Law, Pointer had been working for Congresswoman Barbara Lee, assisting constituents and working alongside her on the campaign trail. One day Lee asked him if he’d ever considered becoming a civil rights attorney, and if he knew Burris. Coincidentally, Pointer had been thinking about the man he had sent to Burris’ office the year prior, and in the following weeks, Pointer says, he “became fixated on Mr. Burris, sending him email after email.”

He never got a response.

But then the two serendipitously met at a stoplight. “He chased me down,” Burris says. “He chased me down on the street, pulled me over, and said he wanted to work for me.”

Impressed by his tenacity, Burris invited Pointer—who had graduated from law school but not yet passed the bar—in for an interview and hired him as a law clerk. He observed that the attorney-in-training was “bright, intelligent, and—probably most importantly—he had a commitment and appreciation for the issues I was involved in.”

Burris involved Pointer in nearly every case that came through his office, noting that he could oftentimes outsmart opposing counsel. “He could see between the lines pretty easily,” says Burris. “Much of the work is gray areas, and in cases where the opposition is strong, you have to have some moxie. And he had a great knack for that.”

Pointer’s moxie would be tried when Burris’ office received a call to represent the family of Oscar Grant, a 22-year-old Black man who was killed by a BART police officer on a train platform on New Year’s Day 2009. The case garnered nationwide media attention and was turned into the 2013 film Fruitvale Station, starring Michael B. Jordan.

The Grant family’s quest for justice consumed Pointer’s life for years. He was responsible for conducting depositions, handling written discovery, preparing witnesses for testimony, and—at times—arguing against more experienced attorneys. Pointer was also the point of contact with Grant’s family, including with his mother, Wanda Johnson. He coached the family on how to discuss the case and present themselves before the media.

Now the CEO of the Oscar Grant Foundation, Johnson says, “My family challenged Burris’ office, making sure that they were not just the attorneys—but also in the streets advocating for justice for Oscar. … When my family would have vigils after my son was killed, you would find attorney Pointer there, speaking. When my family would have galas and panel discussions, you would find Adanté right there on the front lines.”

The wrongful death claim Burris’ office filed on behalf of Grant’s family resulted in a $2.8 million settlement with BART in 2011. And although more than a decade has passed, Johnson says Pointer has never left her family’s side. “Even today,” she says, “I could call attorney Pointer and he’s like, ‘Yeah Mama Wanda, whatever you need.’”

Sadly, the calls for need haven’t ceased. But Pointer has been there to answer them.

In 2018, Vallejo officer Ryan McMahon killed Ronell Foster, and Pointer took the case. “The cop says, ‘Hey, I see a guy riding a bike recklessly, and I want to teach him about bicycle safety.’ It ended with the cop tasing him, beating him with a flashlight, and shooting him several times in the back—and back of his head,” Pointer says.

The case ended in a $5.7 million settlement, but would be far from an isolated incident: “The Vallejo Police Department is one of the most murderous in the country. Officers have testified to having barbecues to commemorate when they’ve killed Black or brown people,” says Pointer. “I settled another one, the Willie McCoy case, against them a month ago for $5 million. That same officer who killed Ronell Foster killed Willie McCoy nearly exactly a year later.”

Pointer also recently secured a $2.4 million settlement for the family of Miles Armstead, who was murdered by a neighbor in 2020 after repeatedly reporting the man’s threats and harassment to the Oakland Police Department. He’s taken up speaking in schools and churches throughout Oakland, teaching residents about their legal rights in police interactions—whether it’s a traffic stop or an interrogation.

“My hope for my community is that we’ll continue to fight for our rights, that we’ll continue to hold America and our society accountable for the ideals that we all are taught to believe in, which is liberty and justice … that all are created equal,” he says.

Some, like Johnson, say Pointer is doing exactly that. “[He’s a] social justice attorney working to make the injustices that people face to no longer be injustices. He has a fight within him, and it’s a fight to win.”