The Wisconsin Innocence Project will receive a grant from the National Institute of Justice to start a post-conviction DNA testing program.
A nonprofit organization based on the University of Wisconsin campus, The Wisconsin Innocence Project is comprised of UW law students who work to free those in prison who have no lawyer and claim complete innocence.
The project is looking to start an 18-month venture beginning in January 2010 to use the program to investigate cases of prisoners who have been convicted of crimes and who may be exonerated with DNA testing, according to Byron Lichstein, staff attorney for the Wisconsin Innocence Project, who has overseen past cases UW law students have worked on, such as the Robert Stinson exoneration.
The Wisconsin Innocence Project, located in the Frank J. Remington Center at the UW Law School in Madison, takes 12 law students a year.
According to Keith Findley, clinical professor of law at UW and co-director of the Wisconsin Innocence Project, students begin their work in the summer after their first year of law school. They then work full time in the summer, part time in the fall for 7 credits and in the spring for 3 credits.
“The students in the Wisconsin Innocence Project do everything that an attorney on a case like this would do,” Findley said. “They interview clients and witness; negotiate with prosecutors; look for other kinds of evidence and documents; review trial transcripts and other court records; do legal research on the issues involved; draft affidavits, motions, and briefs; and sometimes appear in court. All of this they do under the supervision of clinical faculty attorneys,”
According to Findley, the project always has 30 to 40 cases they are working on at any given time. While the project has occasionally taken on other student volunteers, it is primarily for UW law students.
“We focus [our cases] primarily on inmates in Wisconsin prisons, but occasionally handle cases from other states in extraordinary circumstances,” Findley said. “The inmates must be claiming innocence, must not have another attorney or be eligible for appointment of an attorney and generally need to have at least 7 years remaining to serve on their sentences.”
The cases of the clients the Innocence Project take on must also have the potential for finding new evidence that can be used to exonerate them.
UW is the only college or university in the state with a chapter in the Innocence Project. The project is entirely nonprofit and receives funding from UW and a small percentage from grants
Lichstein says the upcoming grant will allow the project to hire three more attorneys to systematically go through the cases of those who claim innocence.
To date, the Wisconsin chapter of the Innocence Project has exonerated 12 of their clients, two of whom were women.
“Certainly one highlight [in the Wisconsin Innocence Project] for me was our exonerations,” Lichstein said. “Watching someone walk out of prison is a pretty powerful thing to be part of. Watching the students develop into lawyers is a joy.”
