ten lessons from the innocence project
Nathan Frisch (BA '10 Legal Studies) decided to become a lawyer after meeting Brandon Overton, a man wrongly accused of murder. Thanks to a fund which provided extra support for capital crimes, Overton was found innocent and released from jail before being convicted.
"That really sparked my interest in the legal system," Nathan says.
An innocence case led Nathan to the law, but he didn't learn about UIS' Downstate Illinois Innocence Project until his last semester here. Following volunteering for a few months after his graduation, Nathan joined the Innocence Project as a fulltime staff worker in October, 2010.
Now Nathan is headed for law school. Before he left, he prepared the following for you to read:
TEN THINGS I LEARNED WHILE WORKING AT THE INNOCENCE PROJECT
1. That the Innocence Project exists. I didn’t know about the Innocence Project here at UIS through my undergrad years.
2. Our only purpose is innocent people. We don’t work on cases where the attorney didn’t represent a client well or where inmates want to get off because of a technicality.
3. We want the same thing as law enforcement does. When I tell people I’m working for the Innocence Project, they often say, “Oh, you’re getting criminals out of prison.” No! We want to get the innocent people out of prison, but we also want to get the real perpetrator in prison.
4. Witness identification is the number one cause of wrongful convictions. If you think about who served you lunch today, could you describe that person? You might remember age or gender or possibly height, but that does not narrow the identification down very much.
5. False confessions are the second leading cause of wrongful convictions. If you know the tactics that the police use to get confessions—and that’s what they want, confessions—you wouldn’t be surprised that innocent people confess. The police keep suspects for hours and hours. They lie to suspects, say that suspects failed the lie detector, and that if suspects want a lawyer that must mean they are guilty. A lot of false confessions come from juveniles or from people who are borderline or are mentally retarded, and who want to please the authority figure. And the police are trained to get confessions.
6. We are housed on campus at UIS, but we are not fully funded by UIS. Most of our support comes from private citizens. The only way that the Project can keep running is through donations. Because of funding, this is the first year that we have had an attorney. It’s our tenth year anniversary year, and we’ve never had an attorney on staff before, and because he's employed by the Bloodsworth grant, he can only work on the DNA cases.
7. Exonerated inmates have spent an average of twelve years in prison. That’s a really a long time, and I’ve met people at the National Innocence Conference who were in prison for thirty to thirty-five years. Our exonerees Herb Whitlock and Keith Harris were both in prison for over twenty years.
8. It’s hard for innocent people to get out of prison. First, inmates have to write their own post-conviction petition—one that raises a Constitutional claim. Many inmates don’t even know what a Constitutional claim is. They have to write the petition without an attorney, and their petition goes back to the same judge who sentenced and convicted them. That judge is often biased, so the petition gets dismissed. Then it has to go to the appellate level, and only then can they qualify for an attorney and only if the petition has merit. Given that a lot of inmates can’t even read and write, not many file petitions. The process of trying to be declared innocent after conviction is almost designed to fail; it’s uphill all the way.
9. The State makes it hard for people to prove their innocence There are some really good state’s attorneys out there, but most of the time the State is reluctant to consider even the possibility that they were wrong. It’s just human nature. They got that big conviction, and they want to keep it. They want to believe they were correct the first time.
10. DNA is available in only a very small percentage of cases—maybe one out of ten. That is a big hurdle for Innocence Project. When the DNA testing is done at the trial level, it’s done by labs that are part of the Illinois State Police. It’s not a neutral lab. The evidence goes to the Illinois State Police Crime Labs. At the end of the day, when you get their lab reports and it says Illinois State Police, it casts a little doubt.