Category Archives: Project Spotlights

Students in the Arizona Innocence Project

From Arizona Daily Sun:

Chris Duarte and Ryan Staab put in the legwork.

And based upon their work, they are convinced that a Prescott man was wrongfully convicted of manslaughter in the shooting of another man near his home.

Now, the case is seeing new light in the courts.

What happens in the end has yet to be determined. But Jason Derek Krause, who has served his 10 1/2 year sentence and now lives a quiet life, would like the system that convicted him to acknowledge his innocence.

“This is a man who lost his life, and I’d like to see him get his life back, above all else,” Duarte said. “I know in my gut and my soul this is an innocent man.”

Staab added, “He just wants a piece of paper that says he’s free and clear.”

Welcome to a day in the life of the Arizona Innocence Project at Northern Arizona University.

THE GAMUT

“No longer are these cases hypothetical,” said Professor Robert Schehr, executive director of the AIP.

The students who sign up for the AIP class are undergraduates who are close to Continue reading →

Welcome to innocence movement, West Virginia University Innocence Project! For those of you unfamiliar with this new initiative, here is a recent story about its founding:

CHARLESTON, W.Va. — After 11 years in a Mississippi prison, Leigh Stubbs and Tammy Vance were exonerated earlier this year of charges that they brutally assaulted another woman and left bite marks all over her body.

Stubbs and Vance were convicted in 2001 on charges of aggravated assault and drug possession and sentenced to 44 years in prison, at least partly because a discredited forensic bite-mark analyst gave bogus testimony during their trial that pinned them to the attack, Stubbs’ lawyer, Valena Beety, told the Gazette-Mail.

Beety is now the director of the West Virginia University Innocence Project, a new legal clinic affiliated with a national organization of criminal defense lawyers who help prisoners fight wrongful convictions.

“You get to feel great about what you do — push through all the obstacles that are in your way,” Beety said. “And when you get someone out of prison, it’s amazing.”

In the case of Stubbs and Vance, forensic odontologist Michael West testified during their trial in the early 2000s that bite marks found on the victim matched their dental records. West also told jurors that security camera footage depicted the two women carrying out the attack.

Prosecutors sent the video to the FBI for analysis. Federal investigators returned with a 20-page report that said they couldn’t tell if the people were men or women and that they didn’t appear to be engaged in any illegal activity.

The state, however, did not disclose that report to Stubbs and Vance. A Mississippi judge overturned their convictions earlier this year, and West has since admitted that his bite-mark analysis in the case was not sound.

Beety and recent University of Chicago Law School graduate Kristen McKeon, who is helping with cases as part of a yearlong fellowship, will handle the bulk of the casework for the WVU clinic. The clinic’s four law students are charged with screening applicants for the program, Beety said.

“We’re focusing as a project on freeing innocent people who are in prison, but also on policy problems, systemic problems that lead to wrongful convictions, and making eyewitness identification more reliable,” she said.

Seventy-five percent of the 297 prisoners exonerated through DNA evidence since 1989 were convicted because they were mistakenly identified as suspects, according to figures from the national Innocence Project, which is based in New York.

WVU’s clinic is still new, Beety said, so they haven’t received many applications for post-conviction help, but she has been reaching out to prisons, public defender offices and other avenues for leads on potential cases.

Eileen Ho, JD’12, left, and Jenni James, JD’12, proved James Harden’s innocence. (Photography by Eva Nagao/Exoneration Project)

From the University of Chicago Magazine:

On the night of April 18, 1990, taxi driver Billy G. Williams, 44, was found dead in his cab, shot in the head on Chicago’s South Side. Two days later, 20-year-old Shawn Whirl was arrested and confessed to the murder. He pleaded guilty and has been in prison ever since.

Rising third-year law student Caitlin Brown wants him out. “I really believe that Shawn is innocent,” Brown says. “There were a lot of errors in [Whirl’s] confession that didn’t completely line up with what was found at the scene.”

Since September 2011, she’s been studying his case—the interrogation, the police statements, the evidence—as part of the Exoneration Project, a University of Chicago Law School clinic that seeks to free wrongfully convicted prisoners.

In Whirl’s case, that means investigating his confession, made after allegedly being tortured by a detective in the Chicago Police Department’s Area 2, a division then notorious for systemic abuse. Whirl’s claim of being coerced into a confession were found credible this summer by the Illinois Torture Inquiry and Continue reading →

An Idaho murder case from 1996 is coming under new scrutiny with the help of the Idaho Innocence Project. On Friday, Aug. 24, NBC-Dateline will air “The Confession. A mother fights to free the man convicted in her daughter’s murder.”

The Emmy award winning program will showcase an all new one-hour special about Angie Dodge’s murder in her Idaho Falls apartment and the confession of Chris Tapp, who currently is serving a sentence of 25 years to life for the crime. The show airs at 9 p.m. on KTVB Channel 7.

The Idaho Innocence Project believes that Tapp is innocent. Biology and criminal justice professor Greg Hampikian is working on DNA aspects of the case, which is being handled by Rick Visser, IIP assistant director and staff attorney. Several Boise State students also have assisted in research and investigation.

From press release:

More than 17 years ago, Harold Richardson was arrested and later convicted for a crime he did not commit.

Kristin McKeon was then a grade school student in Connecticut.

Their paths crossed late last year when McKeon, JD’12, became part of a team of lawyers who won Richardson’s release from prison, using DNA evidence to show another man had committed the crime.

McKeon is one of about a dozen students each quarter who participate in the University of Chicago Law School’s Exoneration Project, a clinic that gives students hands-on experience representing prisoners seeking post-conviction relief. Students do it all — from voting on which cases the clinic should accept to writing briefs to standing before a judge — under the supervision of experienced, licensed attorneys.

“You’re doing something to help people,” says McKeon, who argued before a judge that Richardson, now 34, should be released. “With my other classes, you’re taking in information and being analytical, and it will all come in handy down the road.”

Since 2008, the Exoneration Project has helped earn the release of four prisoners — most recently, the May 30 dismissal of charges against James Kluppelberg, who had been convicted of arson and murder based on flawed evidence.

Students are guided by the project’s staff attorneys Tara Thompson, JD’03, Elizabeth Wang, JD’05, and Russell Ainsworth. Thompson explains that the goal of the clinic is to engage students in cases that many full-time attorneys simply don’t take, and to instill the importance of pro-bono work.

“There are very few people in the private bar who represent these people,” Thompson says, adding that the typical client is someone without means. “Students are learning how to do the work that needs to be done. But for the University and the students, they wouldn’t have an avenue for relief.”

Learning Duty and Providing Dignity

The clinic got its start thanks to the efforts of Jon Loevy, who staffs the clinic with attorneys from his Chicago civil rights firm Loevy & Loevy. But the students do most of the heavy lifting, which is no easy task: Witnesses are hard to find or their memories have faded, the legal process can move at a snail’s pace, writing briefs can be challenging, and standing before a judge for the very first time can make even the brightest law student weak-kneed.

But in arguing before the judge, McKeon says: “I know that what I was saying was really mattering in the moment.”

McKeon and others receive course credit for their efforts. But both McKeon and Continue reading →

Fresh off the presses, here is a copy of the Ohio Innocence Project’s new publication, a 24-page magazine of sorts summarizing our activities in 2011… We put a lot of work into this, and it’s our first one of this magnitude (we used to do 2 shorter newsletters each year).  Highlights in this issue include descriptions of our 5 case victories in 2011, and excellent article by Nancy Petro entitled, “How Can Three Eyewitnesses Be Wrong?”

Thought I would share the awesome new infographic about the Ohio Innocence Project made for us by the talented Liz Rose Chmela.  Take a look by clicking on the link below…

OIP_infographic_final

The University of Virginia Innocence Clinic got a nice write-up this weekend about its successes in the past year.  Full story here, excerpt below:

So far, 2012 has been “particularly insane” for the lawyers and law students who make up the University of Virginia School of Law’s Innocence Project Clinic, according to Deirdre Enright, the clinic’s director of investigation.

The Innocence Project has received a great deal of media attention this year for its work to exonerate Eric Weakley, one of the so-called Culpeper Three. Weakley, alongside Michael Hash and Jason Kloby, was arrested in May 2000 in connection with the 1996 shooting death of church organist Thelma Scroggins.

The project is also working to clear the name of a Mineral man who was wrongly convicted of rape based on an accusation that was later recanted, and his own false confession.

For the five-year-old Innocence Project, the recent successes have provided a national profile and drawn new interest from donors, the legal community and from prisoners who hope to convince people that their convictions are worth a second look.

“I strongly support the Innocence Project,” said Albemarle County Sheriff J.E. “Chip” Harding, who has worked closely with the Mid-Atlantic Innocence Project in investigating Hash’s case.

Full story here