Being a member of the Innocence Network Board of Directors and the co-Chair of the International Committee, I am gifted with the opportunity to travel abroad to meet our colleagues working on similar issues. I spent last week in Bordeaux, France where I was graciously hosted by the faculty and students at the Montaigne-Montesquieu – Bordeaux IV, Ecole de Droit (Law School). While there, I lectured on the topic of wrongful conviction and criminal procedure in the United States. Based on a week’s worth of conversations with my colleagues in the law school, and graduate students studying law, a few things became apparent to me. First, the students were extremely interested in the idea of being able to apply their legal training to questions of unsafe convictions. To a number, their questions were probing, thoughtful, and enthusiastic. However, to my knowledge there is no history of clinical legal education like what exists in the United States (and what manifests as innocence projects) in France for the faculty and students to participate in. Moreover, French defendants do not have access to their investigation, trial, and appellate documents making post-conviction case investigation virtually impossible.
While not insurmountable obstacles to the creation of innocence projects and the investigation of wrongful conviction more generally, a significant amount of transnational dialogue should take place between Innocence Network members and French legal scholars, students, politicians, and justice practitioners to better describe what it is that the Network does, and how that might be replicated in France. One way that we might be able to accomplish this is by developing relationships with French universities and hosting law school students on summer internships. The Arizona Innocence Project and Northern Arizona University is proposing just such a relationship with the University of Bordeaux Law School, as well as a summer study abroad. The point is to enhance our interactions with our French colleagues so that we may better understand their systemic issues, while also sharing what we know about case investigation and litigation, and legal scholarship. Of course, other non-university relationships should also be developed with justice practitioners. The Network International Committee will be engaging in these efforts.
For now, with so many French people interested in this international wrongful conviction blog, perhaps we can hear more from them about ways to proceed.
Wrongful Convictions Blog 