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Jewish World: They didn't do it
Yigal Scheifer
The entrance to the nondescript office space on the ninth floor at Yeshiva University�s
Benjamin N. Cardozo law school is crowded with bulging mail bins stacked one on top of the other, piled high with letters sent from prisons across the United States. Arriving at a clip of some 350 per month, the letters � some neatly typed, others handwritten in poor
English � usually bear the same desperate message. �I am innocent of these charges, I DID NOT commit this crime!� reads a typical one, recently received. �I am contacting you... to show you all that without a shadow of doubt an injustice has been perpetrated against me. I am
aware that you must receive hundreds upon thousands of requests for
your help... However, I implore you to please give my case more than just
a mere courtesy glance.�
The author has sent the letter to the right place. The gray-painted,
cubicle-filled office is home to the Innocence Project, a legal clinic that,
using DNA testing and the legwork of the law students who work here,
helps free innocent people from jail. Since its founding 10 years ago by
Cardozo law professors Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld, the clinic has
been responsible for the freeing of some 80 prisoners who had been wrongly convicted. �On balance, it has probably done more than any one other group to rectify serious
miscarriages of justice,� says Walter Rowe, a professor of forensic sciences at George
Washington University.
Now, with post-conviction DNA testing becoming more accepted and the technol- ogy behind it more sophisticated, the clinic is spearheading an effort to create a net- work of similar innocence projects across the U.S., and to use the stories of the people
it has freed to bring about legal reform. �I think we�re leading a sort of civil
rights movement that is going to reform the criminal justice system in America in sub- stantial ways,� says Scheck.
�DNA is not a panacea of the criminal justice system,� he
adds. �What is unique about this unprecedented number of post-conviction DNA
exonerations is that it gives us an opportunity to learn about our system. It�s a
chance to learn from these cases what�s wrong with our system and how to fix it.� Aliza Kaplan, a staff attorney at the Innocence Project, says the various cases they
have worked on reveal a consistent pattern of what can go wrong when someone is
convicted. �We�ve learned, and DNA has proved it,
that there are things you can�t trust
all the time. If a victim says, �That�s the one� in a lineup, or a scientist says the hairs
match, that�s not always true.� �There�s also a lot of prosecutorial mis- conduct,� she says. �Confessions are coerced, people are threatened with the death
penalty if they don�t confess. These things happen over and over.� The Innocence Project�s most recent success, the release in late August of Eddie
Joe Lloyd, is a good example. Lloyd was sentenced to life 17 years ago after con- fessing to the brutal rape and strangulation of a Detroit teen. At the time of the con- fession, Lloyd was living in a mental hospital and had approached the police about
helping them solve the case. Lloyd maintains that the police tricked him into
confessing, under the pretense that his confession would be used to smoke out the real
rapist. Seven years ago, after seeing an episode of the Phil Donahue TV show
about the Innocence Project, he wrote Scheck a letter pleading his case.
Once the Project was able to do DNA testing on a pair of long underpants used to
strangle the girl and a bottle used in the assault, it became clear that Lloyd was not the
rapist. His release made him the 110th person exonerated because of DNA evidence.
Twelve of them were men on death row. Of the 80 releases for which Cardozo has been
responsible, 10 were of men on death row. These 110 cases, says Neufeld, are only
the tip of the iceberg. �We�re convinced there are thousands more innocent people
languishing in prison or on death row, but we can�t do anything about it because
there�s no physical evidence to be found, so we can�t do DNA testing,� he says.
SCHECK AND NEUFELD, both in their early 50s, got their start in the
legal field as public defenders. �I always wanted to use law as a tool for social
reform,� says Scheck, whose college and law school days took him through the civil rights
and anti-Vietnam war movements. The two are most famous, though, for
their high-profile celebrity cases, and particularly for being part of O. J. Simpson�s
�dream team.� Their expertise in forensic evidence helped tear apart the prosecution�s
case against the ex-football star. That double-murder case � and their continued,
occasional involvement with flashy Simpson lawyer Johnnie Cochran � have earned
Scheck and Neufeld a fair amount of criticism. �They were pilloried for taking that
case by a lot of lawyers,� says a prominent attorney. �A lot of people said, �I thought
they only represented poor clients.�� Scheck responds that the high-profile cas- es help draw attention to the issues underlying their work on the Innocence Project.
The Simpson case may not have been a high-water mark in American legal history, he
says, but their attack on the shoddy forensic work has helped change the way law- enforcement agencies collect evidence.
Neufeld and Scheck first used DNA to overturn a conviction in 1992, proving the innocence of Marion
Coakley, a mildly retarded New Yorker who was two years into a 15-year sentence for rape
and robbery. When they first took the case in 1986, on referral from former legal aid colleagues,
Neufeld was in private practice and Scheck had started teaching law at Cardozo. That case, in
which Scheck used Cardozo students to do research, helped create a model for the project, and also played a
major role in changing the understanding of how forensic evidence can be used to prove
innocence or guilt.
�Five or six years ago nobody knew what we were talking about when we talked
about DNA testing,� says Kaplan. �Now you have post-conviction DNA testing
statutes you can file under in 28 states.� In addition to these state laws, Congress
is currently considering The Innocence Protection Act, which would set guidelines
for court-ordered DNA testing and which would grant inmates the right to petition
federal courts for DNA testing to prove their innocence. Meanwhile, the network
of loosely affiliated innocence projects is growing, with about 25
currently operating
across the U.S., mostly at law schools, and another 10 in the process of being set up
with Cardozo�s help.
CARDOZO�S INNOCENCE PRO- ject relies on an annual corps of
some 20 law students to do most of
the work. Kaplan says there are no strict
criteria for taking a case, though they will
look for certain patterns that would indicate
prosecutorial misconduct or forensic
mistakes. More importantly, they look for
indications that some evidence exists yield- ing genetic material for DNA. After a case is
accepted (there are currently about 150 ac- tive ones), students get busy tracking down
that evidence. If they are successful (and
Kaplan notes that in 70 percent of the cases
accepted, no such evidence will be found,
having either been destroyed or lost), the
project then starts setting in motion the legal
wheels which will allow for the DNA test- ing and hopefully the release of their client.
The testing usually costs $3,000-$5,000 �
paid for by the project, or the state or the
prisoners themselves. Kaplan mentions one
prisoner who was actually able to raise the
thousands needed for the test from his fel- low inmates. The students, who each take on five cas- es, say working at the clinic is an invalu- able opportunity � the best part of law
school, according to Carlie Parsoff, a third- year student. �It was an incredible feeling
when we met some of the people who had
been released, knowing we helped them get
their life back,� she says. Her most memorable case was the first
one she got � that of a man convicted of
robbery and murder in 1987 whose file said
�consider closing.� Not wanting to close
the case, Parsoff eventually found
five
boxes of unused evidence that had been
sitting in a New Jersey courthouse since her
client�s conviction. �This man was in jail
for 15 years and there were these boxes of
evidence in New Jersey the whole time!�
As part of the clinic, the students take a
weekly class in DNA evidence, which is
taught jointly by Scheck and Neufeld. They
make an odd pair: Scheck, short and
scrappy, his hair straight and windblown
and dressed in a dark suit; Neufeld, tall and
bearish, with gray curly hair, dressed in
faded blue jeans, a colorful belt and a blue
open-collar shirt.
Both, though, are naturals in front of the
class, not surprising considering the
amount of time they�ve spent making pre- sentations in court. �Barry and I are great
examples that you can do all this without
knowing science,� Neufeld jokes to one
class. �I didn�t get past eighth-grade
biology and Barry�s never told us how far
he got.� Turning more serious, Neufeld tells the
students that, when he and Scheck started
their work, they never dreamed of the im- pact they�d have. �We thought we could
exonerate some people. Hopefully, some of
you will have a chance to do that this year,�
he continues. �If you do that, it�s something
you can carry with you to your grave. It�s a
transcendental experience.�
Jewish World
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