Law students’ efforts to re-establish the Oregon Innocence Project at the University have stalled for the remainder of the fall semester.
Program director Westbrook Johnson and other classmates who are in their final year of law school have assumed the challenge of turning the post-conviction investigation program into a student-run organization separate from University funding and management.
“A lot of people have papers due,” said Johnson, a third-year law student.
“Student work loads are a constant juggling act, but somehow we manage to make it work,” she said.
A student-staffed operation to exonerate Oregon prison inmates serving lengthy sentences who may have been wrongly convicted, the Oregon Innocence Project began in 2004 as a combination law course and legal clinic operated by the School of Law and the School of Journalism and Communication. Originally it was a clinic for third-year law students with a student group called the Oregon Innocence Network that got other students involved and got funding for the project through the ASUO, Johnson said.
Until the project’s inception, Oregon was one of only two states in the country that didn’t have a non-profit organization dedicated to helping wrongly convicted inmates prove their innocence, according to past news reports.
The program has undergone reorganization during its two-year existence despite vocal support from the University. It has experienced problems with funding and staffing, said Rita Radostitz, former adjunct professor for the program.
“Both deans were enthusiastic supporters,” said Radostitz, a former Texas capital case defense attorney. “Both were only able to give very limited financial support.”
No faculty members emerged to head the program, she said.
Now Johnson and classmates Luke McConnell, Aaron Gutierrez and James Harpold are working to establish tax-exempt, non-profit status for the program and to secure funding from grants. They are also working to establish a network of legal resources and to secure the services of an attorney with experience in Oregon’s post-conviction appeals process.
“We’re in an info-gathering phase,” said McConnell, a second-year law student who will inherit the leadership of the program next fall. “We’re going to have to do it by ourselves.”
Reorganization has been difficult, Gutierrez said.
“We keep running into all these brick walls,” he said. “It’s frustrating, but I think it’s worth the fight.”
Joe Metcalfe, assistant professor of law and faculty liaison to the program, said students would benefit greatly from having an Innocence Project on campus, gaining pro bono hours, networking with practicing lawyers and learning about Oregon law. They would also learn a sobering lesson about the U.S. justice system: Innocent people are sometimes convicted of crimes.
The program would help students “understand the nature of why people are falsely convicted at a rate that surprises many,” Metcalfe said.
Johnson and other third-year law students are unlikely to see these benefits. In order to rebuild, the program has stopped accepting new cases from inmates.
The program may take new cases in 12 to 18 months, Metcalfe said.
Yet the students continue their mission to rebuild the project, working out of a single filing cabinet in the law school’s student activities room.
“I want to know that there’s some recourse for these folks out there – that they have some option to turn to,” Gutierrez said.
Innocence Project is temporarily suspended
Daily Emerald
November 26, 2006
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