In the world of basketball, Maya Moore is one of the most accomplished athletes to ever play the game. A two-time Olympic gold medalist, four-time WNBA champion, and newly inducted WNBA Hall of Famer, there’s nothing she hasn’t achieved on the court.
However, her most significant victories may have occurred in a different court — intertwined with the life and freedom of her husband, Jonathan Irons, who was wrongfully imprisoned and sentenced to 65 years for a crime he didn’t commit.
Moore remembers their first encounter vividly.
“When I met Jonathan, that was my first time in a prison,” she said. “I was very unaware of prison life.”
When they met, Moore was 18, and her aunt and uncle had been working with a prison ministry when they met Irons. He was serving the 10th year of his 65-year sentence, after being convicted at 18 for an armed burglary offense. Throughout his trial in front of an all-white jury, Irons maintained his innocence, but was still convicted despite no physical evidence.
Moore heard about his story and wanted to meet him. She didn’t know what would come from it but was eager to find out.
Irons, on the other hand, had become accustomed to people coming and going from his life.
“I felt like it was a concrete fact that people were going to come into my life, say hi, and then be gone the next minute,” he said. But meeting Moore was different. “She smiled at me with this warm, loving smile, and it rocked me. I shed some tears. I didn’t expect it at all.”
Their initial meeting sparked a friendship that continued for years, during which they got to know each other’s stories.
“I was inspired by his fight, by his desire to want to live and to want to be free,” Moore shared.
“My highest call isn’t to be at the top of my craft. My purpose has to do with how I treat people and my connection to the Lord.”
For both Moore and Irons, faith was a cornerstone of their bond. Both grew up with family members who were strong Christians.
“One of the things I’m so grateful for was something I couldn’t control, and that was the family I was born into,” she said.
This foundation of faith guided her throughout her basketball career, helping her navigate fame and success without losing sight of her true purpose.
She also understood from an early age that things were better when you had strong teammates on your side. And while she often drew on the strength of her family, it was her basketball teammates who helped her realize the importance of community and support systems.
“Once you taste and see how good living on a team is, you don’t want to live any other way,” she said. “I just don’t know how we can live any other way.”
For Irons, the support of his loved ones and newfound allies was crucial to him surviving prison.
“If you have no one in life in general, but specifically prison, if you have no one to put a hand out, it will consume you,” he said.
During his time in prison, Irons reflected on the faith and strength of his grandmother, who he said had “wisdom and presence to basically make you feel calm in the worst storms. Her teachings about trusting God in dark times became a lifeline during his years in prison.
But he didn’t just depend on the faith of others. He knew he needed to figure out for himself what he did (and didn’t) believe.
“I got to a place where I just knew God is real and He sees me,” he said. “It took some time, but it became real to me. I know who God is. I have a relationship with God. It’s not following a bunch of rules. I know He fully loves me and understands who I am, my flaws and all.”
Over the course of a decade, Moore continued to visit Irons in prison, growing their friendship into something stronger. The two got to know each other on a deeper level, and Moore became convinced she needed to use her platform and resources for something greater than herself and her career.
While Irons was still serving in prison, Moore dominated the WNBA. She was the first overall pick in the 2011 WNBA draft, joining the Minnesota Lynx. During her seven-year career, she won four WNBA championships (2011, 2013, 2015 and 2017), a WNBA Most Valuable Player award, a WNBA Finals MVP award, three WNBA All-Star Game MVPs, two Olympic gold medals, a WNBA scoring title and the WNBA Rookie of the Year award. She was also selected to four WNBA All-Star teams and three All-WNBA teams. To top it all off, she was included in Time’s 100 Most Influential People of 2020.
However, while her career was exploding, by visiting Irons she was becoming more aware of the vast issues within the American justice system. What she discovered gave her a newfound purpose.
It also led her to hang up her jersey at the height of her career in 2019. Moore stepped away from basketball to focus all her effort on overturning Irons’ sentence.
“She should be celebrated in the highest regard and is someone who will go down in history as one of the greatest — if not the greatest — players to ever play the game,” former Minnesota Lynx assistant coach James Wade said. “But her life was meant to be more than about basketball. The stuff she has accomplished off the court is going to be more profound and more meaningful than the stuff she accomplished on it.”
Moore’s newfound mission eventually led her to focus on helping more people than just Irons find justice. And as it turns out, there are a lot of people who need help: the U.S. prison population is 1,230,100 people incarcerated across 209,000 prisons. The U.S. locks up more prisoners per capita than any other nation in the world.
“We have this mass incarceration problem in the U.S.,” she said. “The land of the free, the home of the brave, and we house the most prisoners in the world? It just doesn’t make sense.”
Of those locked up, the U.S. prison population currently stands at 32% Black, 31% white and 23% hispanic. However, in 2023, Black men received sentences that were 13.4% longer than white men, while hispanic men received sentences that were 11.2% longer.
Studies estimate that between four to six percent of people incarcerated in U.S. prisons are actually innocent. In other words, if five percent of individuals are actually innocent, that means one out of every 20 criminal cases result in a wrongful conviction.
But identifying and overturning a wrongful conviction is never easy. Currently, the criminal appeals court will often only consider an appeal if the wrongfully convicted person can show prosecutorial misconduct, newly discovered DNA or other evidence to support reopening their case.
And that’s just one hoop defendants have to jump through: There’s also the cost of legal fees and finding a team that has the time and resources to find evidence.
Although it took several years, Irons was able to find the help he needed to successfully overturn his conviction. His legal team worked tirelessly to prove his innocence, and on July 1, 2020, he was freed after serving 23 years.
To celebrate, nine days after his release, Moore and Irons married.
“For a long time, our lives existed worlds apart, yet we leaned into those little moments where we could be creative with one another,” Moore shared. “This inevitably sparked so many special and unusual moments of displaying love that we couldn’t have ever anticipated. The challenge of our situation created such a depth of meaning. Everything—every word and moment and snapshot and smile—meant more.”
Their story inspired Moore to launch the Win With Justice campaign, a nonprofit organization focusing on prosecutorial reform.
“One of the big reasons he was wrongfully convicted was prosecutorial misconduct,” Moore explained.
Through Win With Justice, Moore seeks to educate the public on the power and responsibility of prosecutors and the importance of holding them accountable.
“What does real justice look like?” Moore asked. “Real justice is not taking a 16-year-old Black boy and throwing him away in prison. Even if Jonathan had done it, a non-fatal armed burglary should not be a death sentence for a kid. Right? So we’re asking people to think, what does restorative justice look like as opposed to punitive punishment?”
On Irons’ end, he focuses primarily on the need for effective re-entry programs.
“There are prisoners that want work, and they’re chomping at the bit to get out and have a job,” he said. “I was one of them. They want to get out, get a job and live a good life. And we need to help them.”
A study released by the Bureau of Justice Statistics in 2021 surveyed more than 50,000 individuals who were released from federal prison in 2010 and found that at any time during a four-year period, only 40% of formerly incarcerated individuals were employed. And for those who were able to secure employment, nearly all struggled with keeping their job after several years.
“If you want to see injustice, look where people are vulnerable.”
Moore and Irons feel this initiative is their calling from God. It’s also changed the way they see their faith.
“We have to slow down, put down our lens, pick up another lens, and then we can engage with Scripture more accurately,” she explained. “The more Jonathan and I study God’s story, we’ve realized that it shouts at you how much God is about love and justice and valuing everyone and valuing creation and everybody having right relationship with each other. The whole story of God’s story is about having right relationship with everything — with Him, each other and creation.
“The work that we do as Jesus followers is to redeem and correct all the broken areas where we’ve been relating to each other wrong,” she continued. “So when it comes to justice, that’s about righting the broken relationship and trying to make right the harm done.”
But what does it look like to right the wrongs of justice?
“Injustice can look like so many different things, but if you’re ever valuing or pursuing justice that doesn’t restore a relationship, you’re missing the point,” Moore said. “It’s just going to keep being broken.”
She used the metaphor of someone stealing from you: Some would argue justice is prosecuting them to the full extent of the law. But that version of justice is not restorative. Instead, restoration would look like getting back what was stolen but also helping the person who stole, not causing them further harm.
“God’s justice is deeper,” Moore said. “It’s always about human beings, how we’re living together. That’s where the system work comes in. Whenever we see brokenness, it’s probably due to a broken system that has been created and allowed to remain. And if the system is set up for people to flourish, that correction, that restoration can happen much more fluidly and easily.”
Irons added that the ones who need the most restoration are also often the most vulnerable.
“God calls us to be mindful and remember other people as though you’re with them,” he says. “These are the people that are vulnerable. Prisoners are vulnerable. God has continued to hone my focus on these areas to try to speak into them. He’s told me, ‘I got you out, son. I have empowered you. Now it’s your turn.”
Moore and Irons have taken that calling to heart. But before they can help restore others, they first want to make sure their own relationship is rooted in justice.
“We want to create just systems in our own home,” Moore said. “We want to practice empathy and looking at other people’s perspective. We want to practice sacrificially loving each other and creating and cultivating joy and working hard.
“And then we take that to our communities and then we try to make that what our nation looks like and we just keep doing it until it becomes a reality,” she continued. “But we have to start in our own selves, in our own homes, to try to create systems of flourishing and then hold people and our leaders accountable and empower leaders who model that in their life.”
These days, Moore and Irons are doing everything they can to encourage people to join alongside their fight. In their new book, Love and Justice: A Story of Triumph on Two Different Courts, the couple shares their testimony to the resilience of the human spirit. Their book, which alternates between their perspectives, offers a detailed account of their experiences and the lessons learned along the way.
It wasn’t easy reliving the trials they went through, especially for Irons. But in the end, they know their story has the potential to bring about real change in the justice system and the Church can be a major asset to their ongoing battle. They believe that if there’s ever going to be true, long-term changes to the system, they need all hands on deck.
“God cares about what’s happening to prisoners so much that one of the first people that went to paradise with Jesus was a criminal on the cross, a convicted criminal who was sentenced to death,” Irons says. “All throughout the Bible, there are a ton of Scriptures that tell us to ‘remember the prisoners.’”
While writing the book, Moore’s perspective on her own story strengthened her belief that her calling was to be an advocate for the vulnerable, not just a WNBA legend.
“When we were thinking back on our story, it made me even more in awe of how God did what He did through this super devastating situation and the resilience and what can really happen when people just persevere and stay the course in the name of love, in the name of human dignity, in the name of freedom and family and restoration,” Moore said.
“You can’t make this up,” she joked. “This actually happened the way it did. And it’s just, it’s incredible when we look back on it.”
