This winter, University law students will help save lives and get class credit for it.
The University will join more than 30 other schools in hosting the Innocence Project, an effort to help free prisoners who claim they were wrongly convicted of crimes by investigating case evidence and working with defense lawyers in court.
Innocence Projects across the nation are typically run out of university and college law schools, but a few journalism schools play a role as well.
Classes will start this month for University law students and will begin for journalism students spring or fall 2005.
“This is real-world stuff,” journalism Dean Tim Gleason said. “I think that’s one of the things that makes it attractive — it’s the opportunity to work on stories where there are real-world consequences.”
Until now, Oregon was one of only two states not covered by an Innocence Project, said Cheri Brooks, a third-year law student who helped launch the program at the University. She said the goal is to provide help for prisoners
who may be innocent and who
previously did not have access to an innocence project.
Professors in support of the
project hope it will provide valuable
experience to students and help bring about positive change.
“Our job will be to cull through a lot of people who are asserting they’re innocent and find those that truly are, because we know they’re out there,” said Rita Radostitz, who will be teaching the first class
offered through the project beginning this month. Radostitz, who practiced as an attorney for 15 years, recently obtained a master’s degree at the University’s journalism school. “It’s been shown in so many other states, and Oregon just hasn’t had any systematic way for cases in which the system didn’t work.”
Five Oregon residents have been released from prison after being wrongly convicted of crimes,
according to a 2004 study at the University of Michigan Law School. The same study found that over the past 15 years, 328 innocent people were freed after it was learned they were wrongly convicted.
The journalism school will offer a class beginning in spring or fall term, but exactly how the school will link to the project is in the
“experimental, exploratory stages,” Gleason said. The program offers valuable potential for students to learn investigative reporting
techniques while also learning about legal procedures, he said.
The law and journalism classes will work on different cases at
different points in the court system. The classes must be separate
because of differing ethics codes, but students will hopefully have a class together to discuss the differences, Radostitz said. One difference, she said, is law students are not allowed to talk to somebody already
represented by a lawyer without that attorney’s permission, but journalists have no such restriction.
Radostitz said journalism
students will focus on the initial screening of cases and look for clues of actual innocence, not just wrongful convictions, while the law students will work with lawyers who already have cases in the court system. A wrongful conviction could include a person who did not get a fair trial or who committed a crime but not the one he or she was convicted of.
The Oregon Innocence Network, a student group funded by
incidental fees, has been key to
setting up the project, Radostitz said. She added that although there is some overlap of people involved, the group is a distinct entity from the project.
Support for the endeavor has been widespread, Radostitz said. When a person is convicted of a crime he or she did not commit, that means the real criminal is still out there, she said.
“It’s a great opportunity for
students to learn and it’s obviously a huge need in the community,”
Radostitz said. “There’s hardly anybody that can be opposed to releasing innocent people from prison.”

[email protected]