Third-Place Winner of Constantine Cannon’s Sixth Whistleblower Essay Contest: Jake Strawn

By the Constantine Cannon Whistleblower Team

Congratulations to Jake Strawn, who received Third-Place (and a $400 scholarship prize) in the Constantine Cannon Whistleblower Team’s Sixth Law School Scholarship Essay Contest!

About Jake

Born in Little Rock, Arkansas, Jake earned both a B.A. and an M.A. in Political Science from Arkansas State University. While completing his studies, he was awarded the Middle East Studies Grant to travel abroad and study Arabic in Muscat, Oman. Immersed in this experience, he discovered a passion for international law and the study of how global systems have both benefited and failed communities. Jake is now pursuing a J.D. at the University of Arkansas School of Law, where he focuses on international and immigration law and hopes to advocate for individuals and communities affected by conflict and displacement.

Jake’s Winning Essay

Jake’s winning essay shares a personal account of seeing the impact of the Syrian civil war firsthand and how a whistleblower’s work there transformed his understanding of justice, displacement, and moral responsibility.

Here is Jake’s complete, award-winning essay:

Caesar’s Renderings: The Man Who Blew the Whistle on Assad and How He Inspired Me

Driving around the Jordanian town of Irbid on a late summer evening in 2024, I found myself being thrown around in the back seat of a rental Toyota as my host swerved to avoid packs of dogs roaming the residential roads. When I asked the otherwise stoic driver what was happening, he explained that these dogs had crossed the nearby Syrian border to escape nearly a decade and a half of civil war. As I watched them scavenge for food among unfamiliar homes, I was struck by the absurdity of it: even animals had been displaced by this conflict. In that moment, I began to understand the full effects of the crises that a life in the U.S. shielded me from.

In 2011, protests swept across the Middle East and North Africa in what became known as the Arab Spring. In Syria, calls for reform were met not with compromise, but with lethality on a scale that is still being accounted for to this day. The regime of Bashar al-Assad detained, tortured, and disappeared its own citizens with impunity. Yet within the very same system of repression came a beacon of rebellion who would expose these crimes to the world.

A week after leaving Jordan, I found myself wandering through the Mutrah Souq in Muscat, Oman. A Turkish lamp caught my eye, and after a brief negotiation, the shopkeeper offered me some of the local tea as we spoke. His young son ran around the stall, playing with a toy as we talked. The man told me he was Syrian, having fled Damascus with his child in fear of what the government might do to them. He described a life that had once felt ordinary until people he knew began to disappear, never to return. Then he mentioned the photographs. Images that showed what had happened to those who vanished. Images that made clear what his own fate could be if he stayed.

The man behind those photographs was a Syrian military police photographer who would later be known only by the pseudonym “Caesar.” Tasked with documenting the bodies of detainees in Assad’s prisons, he spent years cataloging evidence of systematic torture and execution. Between 2011 and his escape in 2013, he smuggled tens of thousands of images out of Syria, risking certain death to ensure that these atrocities could not be ignored. My Middle Eastern Politics class can explain so much, but to see the results of what this man did in front of me stuck with me in a whole new way. Caesar was no longer an answer on a test to me; he was the reason that this man and his son were alive alongside me.

After returning from my studies abroad in the Levant and the Gulf, I continued to encounter Syrians whose lives had been shaped by that decision. In the city where I attended college, I met another man who had fled his home with his family following the world’s realization of what fate would befall them if they stayed. Shortly after my return to the U.S., the Assad regime would collapse, leaving behind an uncertain but hopeful future for millions of Syrians. While no single act can account for the outcome of this decade-spanning conflict, I couldn’t help but think of Caesar as I saw this news.

Meeting individuals whose future is left entirely in their hands thanks to Caesar’s actions has forced me to reconsider my ideas of justice in a way no amount of John Grisham novels could. I saw first-hand the result of a man who committed treason in his country and escaped trial through undocumented immigration. Instead of being a pariah, this man is lauded as a hero for the lives he has saved, lives like the shopkeeper in Oman or the many Syrians I have met at home. In Caesar, I see how the law might be great for sustaining order, but that order must also be held to a standard and if it fails, it is our responsibility to make sure it is changed for good.

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