Wesley student receives full law scholarship

By Abigail Hill (Whetstone Staff Writer)

Haley Workman

Finding the Law

The subtle glow could be seen for miles.

The Sussex Tech High school Football stadium had always lit the sky the way a candle lights a jack-o-lantern. It meant the big Friday night game was on.

In 2005, Haley Workman, a senior and varsity cheerleading captain at Seaford Senior high school, drove her Mitsubishi Eclipse to the game, accompanied by three junior varsity cheerleaders, her friends.

They wanted to watch the neighboring cheerleading squads from Laurel and Sussex Tech.

Workman was waiting to turn left at a green light at 6:10 p.m., when a drunk driver behind the wheel of a Ford truck going 65 m.p.h. plowed into her vehicle from behind.

Workman was lucky, but one of her friends suffered a fractured skull and another got severe lacerations to her face and serious back and knee injuries. The driver, a 16-year-old boy, received only one year of probation.

After this incident, Workman became interested in criminal justice law. Some day, she wanted to be a lawyer and prosecutor.

Law had always been an interest of Workman’s. Her father, Rodney Workman, 46, is a sergeant in the Delaware State Police.

But now she had found her cause.

She soon discovered that Delaware has a “Zero Tolerance Law:” … Anyone under the age of 21 years, who drives, while consuming or after having consumed alcoholic liquor, shall have his or her driver’s license and/or privileges revoked for a period of 2 months for the first offense and not less than 6 months nor more than 12 months for each subsequent offense.”

However, the boy driving the Ford truck had not reached the age legal limit for drunken driving, and he was not punished.

“It was a miscommunication of the laws, which let him get off with a slap on the wrist,” said Workman, a senior at Wesley College. “He didn’t really get punished as much as he deserved.”

Learning the law

Deep in the Wesley College library, in a room about the size of walk-in closet and hidden by mounds of archives – behind the Atlantic Reporter, between the Legal Webster and Britannica, and near the United States Code – you may often find beneath brown hair and behind dark brown eyes, the soft-spoken but opinionated Workman, 21.

Workman’s job since her first year at Wesley has been sorting and giving order to legal archives, including filing away new pocket parts — pages stating the new cases and how they have changed the law — into the backs of law books.

Archiving allows Workman to stick her nose into the books she’s come to love since her accident.

“I love to read and my mom said that I was good at arguing, and those are two of the things that lawyers do most,” she said.

After high school, Workman majored in English education at Delaware Technical Community College. After earning her Associates degree, she came to Wesley, switching her major to legal studies to better prepare her for law school.

“She is intelligent, diligent and highly motivated,” said Elizabeth Marchioni, a professor of law. “She is in my “evidence” class this semester and she has an excellent grasp of the material.  This would definitely benefit her as a prosecutor.”

Set to graduate in May, Workman will be attending Baltimore University School of Law in the fall on a full scholarship.

Going to Baltimore came to her by accident.

While walking through the halls of Wesley’s legal department, a flyer on a bulletin board put up by Professor Flora Hessling, Wesley’s only full-time law professor, caught her eye.

“Open House at BU!”

Workman convinced her mother to go, so they took the trip to Baltimore University School of Law. Workman hadn’t considered the school, and already had applied to the University of Maryland as well as to William and Mary School of Law.

Workman’s mother, Teresa Spedden, 47, a cosmetologist, was on her way to the bathroom, and ran into one of the admission deans.

“Do you think Haley will need to take her LSAT again?” she asked him.

She gave him her daughter’s test score and GPA.

“If she gets her application in to Baltimore University as soon as possible, we have a lot of scholarship money left over and she could probably get a full scholarship,” the dean said.

Shocked, Workman began typing up her application on her laptop during the car ride home. She turned it in that weekend.

Three days before Christmas, Workman got a letter from BU telling her she was accepted and awarded a full scholarship.

“It was shocking and not something I ever expected and a relief,” Workman said. “Who has an extra $200,000 to go to law school? It was great.”

Workman also is interning in a Georgetown, Del., prosecutor’s office this spring. She has been to court in an attempted murder case and is currently working on a high profile rape case where the defendant may get life in prison.

“Working with the prosecutor’s office has made me realize that prosecution is not as interesting where I live in Georgetown as it is in big cities, and federal courts,” Workman said. “I may explore different areas such as personal injury, malpractice, or contract law.”

She has four years of law school to figure it out.