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Twenty Years with the Innocence Project
Two defense attorneys, and good friends, Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld envisioned a movement to free every innocent prisoner and transform the criminal justice system. This is the story of how that vision took shape – starting when the Innocence Project opened its doors at Cardozo School of Law in 1992 – as told by those who contributed to the organization’s early success.
The Innocence Project staff in 2003. Seated at the table are Co-Directors Barry Scheck, left, and Peter Neufeld. Behind them from left to right: Gregory Bennett, Sarah Tofte, Nina Morrison, Aliza Kaplan, Vanessa Potkin, David Menschel and Huy Dao.
PART ONE: WHEELS IN MOTION
MATTHEW DILLER: When I talk to alumni who came through the Innocence Project, one of the things I hear again and again is what superb mentors Barry and Peter are. The students who study with them form bonds that carry through for decades. They still vividly remember and rely on the things that Barry and Peter taught them. The Innocence Project has not only freed all of these innocent prisoners, they’ve trained a new generation of lawyers.
MARC SIMON: I became a clinic student during my second year at Cardozo Law School, 2000. In the first week, we receive the files – the pages are yellowed, the folders smell dank, they come from basements and storage rooms. Then, you open them up, and there’s this history from all of the students who have worked on the cases. It was all so cinematic. Even in our first meetings, Barry and Peter would say “What’s the plot?” They have all these cases, so they want to get a synopsis. Who is this individual claiming innocence? What’s the theory of conviction? What’s the theory of potential exoneration?
HUY DAO: You have a claim of innocence coming in. You get more details from the defendant, mostly about whether DNA can play a role in the case. Then you get the documents from the world (the police and lab reports, the trial transcript), to see how the case went down and if DNA still applies. Then you move to accept the case.
NINA MORRISON: It was a small legal clinic at the time and didn't have much of a formal organizational structure. So they needed someone who could help manage the litigation on a daily basis, help keep the policy advocacy going, focus on fundraising, and help get Huy the resources he needed for intake because the demand for our legal services was growing. On my first day, we were planning the press rollout of the 100th exoneration and talking to someone from The New York Times about a front-page story. Everybody would help edit the press release when an exoneration happened. It was a group effort, but it wasn’t the most efficient model.
HUY DAO:
I had a lot of roles in those early years: intake, supervising the students, fundraising, developing and maintaining the website, host for the exonerated, support for policy, stuffing envelopes, taking press calls.
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Senior Staff Attorney, Nina Morrison (who was then the Executive Director) gets some help packing from her exonerated client John Restivo, as the Innocence Project relocates to the 100 Fifth Avenue building in 2004. |
BETTY ANNE WATERS: I spoke to Huy, and was put on a list, and then they sent all the intake forms to be filled out by Kenny. When I graduated from law school I told Huy, and then I called him when I found the evidence. When it came to that point, he said, listen, Betty Anne (we knew each other by phone by then), I know Barry would take this on as a consultant right away. I remember that Huy didn’t want to take credit for anything, but he was my first contact, and your first contact is the person who can make it or break it.
STEPHEN SALOOM: I had been to the clinic at Cardozo School of Law in 2003, and there were definitely more boxes and paper than there were people. You’d see staff behind these piles of paperwork, and it was just a maze. By the time I started in late 2004, those people had moved into offices and it was this bright and shiny new non-profit and there was a real sense of excitement about the work ahead, a sense that this thing was going somewhere.
MADDY DELONE: The office had moved to 100 Fifth Avenue by the time I interviewed. There was a lot of space and only about 10 staff members. I heard about all the plans about reform of every issue under the sun around the country. I saw the massive number of unopened letters. There was no particular sense of funding or prospects. Yet, the Innocence Project had the ability to command resources and volunteer support in ways that I had never experienced in any other criminal justice related work I had ever done. When exonerees got out, you could call up the local store and say that we needed something to outfit an apartment and people would say yes. Or you could call up a law firm and say we have a brief that we need written in the next two weeks can you assign somebody to do it? And they’d say yes. Or when Barry met somebody in the airport and the person pledged $100,000 to the Innocence Project. These amazing acts of generosity both in terms of time and talent and funds were extraordinary every time.
PART TWO: “SOME HECK OF A RIDE”
KIRK BLOODSWORTH: I imagine any exonerated person would remember the day they got out, as well as the day they went in. I remember that day so vividly. I had a jailhouse tan, meaning I was white as a fish, but I was so happy. I was coming through the prison doors into a bank of cameras. 98 Rock, a local rock station here in Baltimore, picked me up in a limousine. I'll never forget it. It's been some heck of a ride.
NINA MORRISON:
To be a lawyer and feel like you helped make an exoneration happen is still just incredible to me. The moment when someone is exonerated, I feel so much joy that something good is finally happening – they’re getting their innocence acknowledged. If they’re lucky, they’re getting freed, often an apology or some official acknowledgement of what went wrong. Cameras are focused on them. Their families are there, loving and supporting them. Yet, every one of those cases involves so much pain and suffering, for the crime victims, for the exoneree and their families. I feel it all at that moment, acutely, while trying to juggle making sure the legal papers are correct, and fending off the press, and making sure everyone has water.
HUY DAO:
Bruce Godschalk called us in February 2002 and said “They’re kicking me out of jail.” They let him out, they didn’t tell anybody. Nothing had been set up for his release. Local counsel came to pick him up. He spent his first night out of prison at local counsel’s house. Then he came to New York, and it was me and the staff attorney and the students. That was what the Innocence Project was like back then. All of a sudden it was frantic. We found him a cheap hotel room. We found him some music that he liked. We took him out to dinner and just made sure that he wasn’t alone unless he wanted to be.
MADDY DELONE:
I remember Jeff Deskovic’s exoneration in New York very well. At that time, my kids were around the age that he had been when he was wrongfully convicted. It was very real, for me, what it meant to be 16. Michael Williams got out in Louisiana at the age of 40, and Michael had also gone in at 16. Some of the other exonerees had many immediate needs and not much family around to help them make the adjustment. We needed to add social work staff. We needed to figure out if we could raise money to provide financial support to exonerees. There was a strong sense that there was a more organized and supportive way to do it that would also allow the staff to go back to the work that they needed to do to bring the next group of people home.
NINA MORRISON:
When Marc Simon approached us about doing “After Innocence,” it was designed to start shifting the focus onto the life after exoneration needs, and that’s why we agreed to participate. We got approached about documentaries all the time, but Marc was a former student and was incredibly persuasive.
MARC SIMON:
At the premiere of “After Innocence” at the Sundance Film Festival in 2005, as soon as the credits begin to roll, there is this massive standing ovation, and it doesn’t stop. All of the exonerees join the filmmakers in front of the audience. The applause has been going on for five minutes. Then, a prosecutor stands up, crying, and says: “On behalf of all prosecutors in the country, I just want to apologize.” Wow!
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Nina Morrison, left, with Brandon Moon and Co-Director Barry Scheck, right, immediately after Moon’s exoneration hearing in 2004. |
CALVIN JOHNSON: You automatically have a sense of camaraderie with other exonerees. You may not know everything that they went through in prison, but you know they’ve suffered. Some of them may have been abused or been in fights. Some of them had to learn to survive in prison as young kids, and now they don’t know anything else. Some of them were lower income, less educated, low IQ. Now they get out, and they’re lost, paranoid, worried about being locked up again. You’re out there, but dependent, so you lose a sense of pride or dignity. You may have children that have grown up that you missed all these years and they’re looking at you to be there. How can you be there? Because you’ve been incarcerated, even though you’ve been exonerated, you have trouble getting jobs. At that time, it was still very difficult to get any payment from the state. I know guys now who still haven’t received any money. It’s not right that you should have to start over because there’s no telling where you would have been in life if this hadn’t been taken away.
MARC SIMON:
So many individuals are still struggling. The film is bringing attention to the issues, but there’s still a lot of work that needs to be done – even if you look at the individuals in the film. Vincent Moto and Scott Hornoff still haven’t been compensated and Vincent still hasn’t had his record expunged. That kills me. Unbelievable. So it shows that work still has to be done.
PART THREE: THE ROADMAP
MADDY DELONE:
Barry and Peter have, from the very beginning, thought about the policy reform potential. It was already in the mindset of the project before I arrived. Once we began to hire staff and raise additional funds, we began to see the potential realized. While there had certainly been successes before there was a policy department, they were kind of miraculous. It’s not every time that you introduce a good idea to the legislature that a law gets passed.
GARY WELLS: After Barry and Peter had done maybe a half dozen DNA exonerations, they started to realize that these are mostly cases of mistaken eyewitness identification. They were very curious about that. I was very interested in the fact that for the first time ever we had a litmus test to show that yes, this is not just a hypothetical problem. So, we began talking very early.
JENNIFER THOMPSON: The first interview I ever did was with PBS Frontline titled, “What Jennifer Saw,” which aired in 1997. Ronald had just come out, and it was the first time that a DNA test had been used to exonerate and then find the actual perpetrator, so the story had a very clean ending. It became a huge film that pushed the movement forward on eyewitness ID and human memory. I didn’t know the impact that the film had until years later when I learned that Janet Reno had called a task force on wrongful convictions and apparently she had the task force watch the film.
GARY WELLS:
By the time we met, Jennifer had already done the Frontline program, which was a huge thing at the time. We met at some venue, in which she gave her talk, her experience. Then I talked about what we know from the social science, psychological science, how these mistakes happen, what the processes are... among other things, the fact that it’s not a defect in the witness. I think one of the things that always puzzled her was how she could have been so positive and so wrong. My research has shown that we can replicate that. We can induce mistaken IDs and then very easily make people feel positive that they’re right, and that’s what happened in her case.
JENNIFER THOMPSON:
I remember Gary coming up to me and saying “Thank you for coming forward because you’ve finally put a human face on what I’ve been talking about for so many years.” Then I heard him speak, and it was a huge gift for me because I had put so much pressure on myself for being a bad witness.
DARREL STEPHENS: I was familiar with Gary’s research, it had been around a while. I was concerned that it was in a lab setting with college students and not real witnesses, so it was interesting, but not compelling to me. What began to make it compelling was the huge proportion of false identifications that we discovered with DNA and the number of people who were innocent that had been falsely identified and even witnesses clearly believing that they had made the correct choice... So, those things caused me to believe that we needed to make some changes in the procedures.
MADDY DELONE:
A lot of the federal legislation was achieved in 2004 with Barry and Peter and Nina and others working, which was really extraodinary considering how small our staff was at that time. They just had these amazing stories to tell and this amazing intellect. They were very persuasive, so they got a lot done. I remember our policy analyst taking a train to stay on Betty Anne Waters’ couch in Rhode Island so that she could go deliver testimony about eyewitness ID reform to the state legislature. And last year, after eight years of hard work, we got eyewitness identification reform passed in Rhode Island and many, many other places.
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Policy Director Stephen Saloom, left, and Board Chair Rodney Ellis. |
KIRK BLOODSWORTH:
I got this call one day from Senator Leahy to read this piece of legislation called the Innocence Protection Act, which had a post-conviction DNA testing law. Back in those days, real access to post-conviction DNA testing was a joke. The legislative process was very slow and laborious, but I wouldn't take no for an answer. My book, Bloodsworth, came out just as the Innocence Protection Act stalled in Congress. I had an idea. I passed a copy of my book around to every senator. And three weeks after that, in October 2004, the Innocence Protection Act became law by a landslide vote. You’re talking about non-partisan. I’ve got Orrin Hatch hanging out with Senator Leahy. As it turns out, Senator Leahy named it after me, the Kirk Bloodsworth Post-Conviction DNA Testing program. I have a copy of the law on my wall from Congress. Now five people, Thomas Haynesworth being one of the most recent ones, has gotten out of prison after all these years because of the Bloodsworth grant money for post-conviction DNA testing.
STEPHEN SALOOM:
The first Innocence Project exoneration after I became Policy Director was Brandon Moon, #151, I think. He was released in El Paso, Texas, wearing his cowboy hat around Christmas time in 2004. It was the first time that I witnessed the lead up to an exoneration – the excitement, the human impact of it, the news coverage. Barry, of course, knew that there was a lot of reform opportunity. By January 3, 2005, the Innocence Project had transformed the Moon exoneration into a Texas Senate criminal justice hearing on the need for a forensic science commission.
TEXAS STATE SENATOR RODNEY ELLIS: Everybody feels a sense of gratification and satisfaction and relief when someone is exonerated. It’s one facet of criminal justice that everybody can agree on. You don’t incarcerate people if they didn’t commit the crime. We still have problems, but we’ve come a long way in a conservative state with the political odds against us. The media attention that the Innocence Project has focused on wrongful convictions in Texas has helped a great deal. We’ve help change the dialogue and the mindset about the criminal justice system.
PART FOUR: THE DESTINATION AHEAD
STEPHEN SALOOM:
When the Innocence Project first became a non-profit, we were still forced to agitate from the outside. Increasingly, policymakers, police, prosecutors and judges started to make room for our perspective at the decision-making table. That’s when it became clear that this reform movement was here to stay. Now, if you’re invited to the table, it’s not polite to start throwing bombs. You want to keep prodding people toward reform, but you still have to respect that they might not be ready to go as far as you think they should. You have to decide if what you’re able to accomplish was enough for that step. That’s something we’ve had to adjust to. I think we’ve done a good job.
DARREL STEPHENS:
The Innocence Project has improved its overall relationship with police. It’s engaged in law enforcement training, and there is a dialogue about what is the most appropriate way to handle a legislative issue. Understanding the politics of any particular state or community – it’s not all going to be exactly the way we wanted it to be. But as long as there is steady progress towards addressing the issues, then I think that’s a win. Most people in the field want to do the right thing; it’s not always clear what that right thing is.
KIRK BLOODSWORTH:
Best practices are coming around. Post-conviction DNA testing is being allowed and even people in ultra-conservative states are starting to come around. It’s a lot different than it was two decades ago, I can tell you. People didn't want to hear it. “Oh this is just a bump in the road,” they would say. But we now have almost 300 bumps in the road.
BETTY ANNE WATERS:
We’re going to need the Innocence Project always. I see it evolving, but I don’t see it going away. I wish everybody did best practices and everybody was on the same side of justice and everybody tried to do everything they could to keep innocent people out of prison and send guilty to prison, but I don’t see that happening. There is too much human error, and too many egos involved in the system.
CALVIN JOHNSON:
If it wasn’t for the Innocence Project, I’d still be in prison. I’d be just a number. When you hear about these two guys, Barry and Peter, going for revolutionary change in the criminal justice system, it is truly amazing. The most powerful part is that it’s not for personal gain. They’re not afraid of backlash or repercussions. They’re fighting for rights and they’re making waves. And Maddy has taken this organization from a small group to a national organization. We have over 50 employees now, and I remember when it was just a handful. She’s been the backbone. I’m just proud and happy to be a part of this movement.
GARY WELLS:
People don’t realize what a sea change it has been. I remember a Chicago Tribune article from around 20 years ago when they interviewed me because they found my experiments to be interesting. I talked about how the eyewitness evidence was less reliable than people thought, which creates a dangerous situation that can lead to the conviction of innocent people. And they interviewed a couple of prosecutors who confidently asserted that there’s not an innocent person in prison in the United States. That was a widespread belief, in ‘89 and ‘90. The magnitude of the change that’s come from the DNA exonerations – largely spearheaded by the Innocence Project – is just mindboggling. Only old guys like me realize how huge this change has been.