Downstate illinois innocence project
News, Links, Special Reports
- "Ten Lessons from the Innocence Project"—Read what Nathan Frisch (BA '10 Legal Studies) learned while on the job with the Innocence Project.
- "Law Students Assist Downstate Innocence Project," SUIC Research, April 6, 2011
- "Bill Clutter: 20 million reasons to abolish death penalty," SJ-R, January 2, 2011, written by Innocence Project investigator Bill Clutter
"UIS Downstate Illinois Innocence Project receives major grant to use DNA testing in actual cases," November 2010, story and video
Bringing Justice to the Innocent
In 2002, without any direct evidence of her guilt, Julie Rea Harper was wrongfully 
convicted of brutally killing her son. She was sentenced to 65 years in prison.
When serial killer Tommy Lynn Sells confessed to the crime, investigator Bill Clutter took notice. Clutter, director of investigations on UIS’ Downstate Illinois Innocence Project’s, had worked on Harper’s case when it initially came to trial. He had been convinced of her innocence, and Sells’ confession offered an opportunity for Clutter to prove that innocence.
Working with students from UIS’ Innocence Project, Clutter corroborated Sells’ confession and provided objective evidence of Rea Harper’s innocence.
In 2006 Julie Rea Harper was retried. This time she was found innocent.
With your gifts, you can help set a wrongly convicted inmate free. Please give!
A Team Effort
Proving Harper’s innocence required an immense work of lawyers, investigators, and students reviewing the evidence in the case, along with the help of family and friends.
Unfortunately, most innocent inmates have few resources with which to pursue their cases before the courts. When they do obtain those resources, it usually takes years before they can gain exoneration.
In fact, the average time spent in prison by those achieving exoneration across the country is about 17 years. Students and faculty working in the Downstate Illinois Innocence Project hope to lower those odds.
Experiential Learning
The Innocence Project was designed to help people like Julie, using students working with investigators and lawyers to provide the manpower and the brainpower to achieve exoneration.
When the Project was formed in 2000, it was a deliberate decision to house it within the university. In doing so, it became the first such effort in the country to use “ordinary” students (i.e., not journalism or law students) to help in such activities as interviewing witnesses, analyzing court transcripts, and doing a variety of research tasks unique to each case.
Two Important Goals
So we really have two important goals as part of our work:
- First, we want to help the wrongfully convicted gain exoneration;
- Second, we want to educate students to the challenges of our system of justice, inspiring them to pursue goals in their own lives that will help make our society a more just place within which to live.
The University of Illinois at Springfield has contributed to our Project by providing support for our overhead costs, and for teaching and advising students. The Springfield Dominican Sisters, who recognized the need to fight the injustices of wrongful conviction, also provided the Project with operational seed money to get the Project going.
Extraordinary things happened: Within a space of six years we were able to achieve two exonerations. We found ourselves in the midst of a national movement in the fight against wrongful conviction and were flooded with requests for help.
As our reputation grows, students flock to the Project and its classes. But funding remains a problem.
We Need Your Help
If we are to continue our work with people like Julie, we need basic organizational support, as well as stability within the Project for our students and staff. You can help us to get through this critical period.
Please give generously. Donate
