‘For All of Us’

When retired Chief Judge Kevin Sharp’s portrait was unveiled in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Tennessee this past May, the only speaker to address the audience had not stepped inside a courtroom since Sharp sentenced him to life in prison.

Chris Young was convicted in 2014 for what Sharp called a minor role in a drug conspiracy case. At that point, three years after President Barack Obama put Sharp on the federal bench, Sharp had already spent many sleepless nights before sentencings, particularly those involving mandatory minimums; but Young’s was the most difficult. Sharp thought a fair sentence might be five years, but because it was the third strike for the 23-year-old, federal law forced Sharp to hand down two life sentences.

“I realized this is insanity,” Sharp says. “We are taking someone who could be a significant asset to himself, to his community, to his family, to all of us, and we are going to put him in prison for life. It started me on the road of asking, ‘Am I more valuable to society sitting up here or stepping down and doing something about it?’”

When Sharp did resign in 2017—just six years after the U.S. Senate voted 89-0 to confirm his lifetime appointment—one of the first things he did was represent Young in his clemency petition, making headlines when he and Kim Kardashian visited President Trump in the Oval Office. Trump commuted Young’s sentence in the final hours of his first term.

“He graduates next year,” Sharp says of Young, who is finishing a university degree and got permission from his professors during finals week to speak at the portrait unveiling. “He is an asset that we turned into a liability, and we brought him back as an asset.”

Since leaving the bench, Sharp has practiced civil rights and employment law as co-chair of the public interest litigation group at Sanford Heisler Sharp McKnight in Nashville. He’s also used his unique platform to advocate for people like Matthew Charles, the first convicted drug offender released under the First Step Act; and Leonard Peltier, the Native American activist convicted of killing two FBI agents at the Pine Ridge Reservation in 1975, whose sentence President Biden commuted in January 2025. 

“When Chris Young went to prison, we were all diminished in the same way. We were all diminished not just by the way Leonard Peltier was treated but the why that caused us to get to that point. That’s why it’s an important story and why I continue to advocate for voices that need to be heard; because it’s not just for them, it’s for all of us.”

I really thought I had made a mistake becoming a lawyer. Then I realized I’m just not representing the people I want to represent.

Sharp, whose father was a firefighter and whose mother sold encyclopedias door to door, has always related to working people. He was a petty officer in the U.S. Navy when he decided he wanted to go to law school to represent the underserved.

He spent two years at community college before finishing his undergraduate degree at Christian Brothers College, taking classes while working as a baggage handler for American Airlines. After law school at Vanderbilt, burdened by student loan debts, he took a job representing corporate clients at Stokes & Bartholomew.

“I hated it,” he says. “I really thought I had made a mistake becoming a lawyer. Then I realized I’m just not representing the people I want to represent.”

So he hung a shingle and started doing plaintiff’s employment and civil rights work. After several years of growing Drescher & Sharp to an office with a dozen lawyers, he received an unexpected phone call in 2010 letting him know that President Obama was considering him for a judicial seat.

“They came up with this list of people that shared his principles that they thought could get through the Senate confirmation process,” he says. “It was not anything I thought about doing until I heard I was being considered; and then it’s hard not to realize that this is an important job.”

After he’d been vetted by the White House, Department of Justice, and FBI (which found a $50 activity fee he’d somehow neglected to pay in college), he had a hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee and was unanimously confirmed in May 2011. The 89-0 roll call vote still sits in his office.

Asked if the Senate could agree on anything so decisively today, Sharp says unfortunately no. “It would require both sides to work together, to value common principled ideas,” he says. “One of the most damaging things to our country is the politicization of our judiciary. That wasn’t the case then. Someone who had the temperament and the judgment and the intellect to make these decisions would be approved regardless of your political party, or which one you had worked with in the past. It didn’t matter. Today that’s almost all that matters. That has so eroded the foundation of this country that I’m concerned about the future without an independent judiciary.”

On Sharp’s first day, the late Chief Judge Todd Campbell gave advice he took to heart. “The most important aspect of what you do will be on the criminal side; because the rest is about money, by and large, and this is about liberty,” Sharp remembers Campbell telling him.

Sharp had limited experience on the criminal side of the system; and though the law itself was not overly complicated, he found aspects difficult.

“The guys in the orange jumpsuits were mostly African-American males,” he says. “We have this assembly line of people coming through because we don’t want to deal with the hard education, housing, and economic equality issues, and what you end up with is a legislature that wants to pass its problems off to the judiciary to deal with—lock this person up. They end up getting elected and reelected by saying, ‘Look how tough I am on crime!’ Which is not to say there are not people who need to be separated from society, who are dangerous, but that is not what we are doing. We’re using the prison system as a way of not dealing with hard issues. That drove me crazy.”

In 2016, Matthew Charles, convicted in 1996 to 35 years for selling 216 grams of crack cocaine and illegally possessing a gun, came through Sharp’s courtroom for resentencing after the guidelines changed.

“He was a model prisoner,” Sharp says. “There were zero infractions. It’s amazing you can spend 21 years in prison and not have any infractions. He had taken courses, led Bible studies, was doing all the things we want someone to do. So my perspective was: What do we gain by having him do another decade in prison? Under the change in guidelines, he would have gotten less time than he’d already served.”

After receiving no objections from the U.S. attorney, Sharp sentenced Matthews to time served and told him he was free to go; but then the government appealed his decision.

“They didn’t ask for a stay while they appealed, so Mr. Charles is out. He gets himself a job, an apartment. He’s living his life while the 6th Circuit reviews what I did. And two years later they come back and overturn my resentencing. Mr. Charles has to report back to prison and do another decade. It was one of those things where you ask, ‘What are we doing here? What’s our goal?’”

Sharp spoke to Trump about clemency for Charles, too, when he visited the Oval Office in 2018; but before anything could happen, Charles became the first person released under the First Step Act in 2019.

The media exposure from the trip to the White House also led to Sharp’s involvement in Leonard Peltier’s clemency—after Connie Nelson, Willie Nelson’s ex-wife, and an indigenous rights activist, saw the coverage and reached out.

“I had only been off the bench about a year and half,” Sharp says. “I sat down and started reading transcripts [of the Peltier case] and was really shocked at how everything that I understood about the federal judicial system and our Constitution was ignored. I read it going, ‘Oh my god, how did this happen?’ I got back in touch with Connie and said, ‘If Leonard wants me to represent him in his clemency petition, I’ll do it.’ So she put us in touch with each other and we made the decision, with a lot of other people here at the firm, to take on representing Leonard pro bono.”

Peltier was four decades into a life sentence, but his supporters had long maintained he was wrongfully convicted. Sharp agreed.

“What happened that day at Pine Ridge, I don’t know,” Sharp says. “But I know what didn’t happen. I know Leonard Peltier was not the person who shot these agents.”

Sharp spent the next six years studying the American Indian Movement, Trail of Broken Treaties, and Wounded Knee. He learned about Indian boarding schools. Peltier had been taken from his grandmother at 9 years old and sent to a school where he was beaten, locked in a cellar and forbidden to speak Ojibwe.

One thing that struck him about Peltier’s case were the procedural violations—such as the failure to remove a juror who admitted she was prejudiced against Native Americans, and hiding ballistics evidence showing bullets at the scene did not match Peltier’s rifle.

“Except for the juror issue, everything I talked about had been raised,” Sharp says. “But I think what I was able to do—with the help of many others—was to tell the story a little differently to an audience that was very different. The consciousness of the country, and willingness and receptiveness to talk about broken treaties and mistreatment and boarding schools, is now different. People are open to hearing the story of the American Indian Movement and what happened at Pine Ridge—and more importantly, why. We had a president in Biden who was willing to listen. And in the end, Pope Francis gets involved and phone calls are made, and Native American groups speak with a unified voice.

“All of that leads to the president signing clemency papers on his way out.”

Sharp worries that the ability to listen has been lost in today’s political climate. What energizes him is the fact that the fight is more necessary than ever.

“It’s also the people I get to work with, who come out of law school and have that same excitement and drive that I have, to make this place better: to fight for the underserved and the oppressed,” Sharp says. “We don’t win all the time, but you keep fighting. And we’re better for that, too.”