The Mid-Atlantic Innocence Project will be holding a legal clinic at Matthews Memorial Baptist Church in Southeast Washington DC on Thursday November 12, 2009 at 6:30 PM.

The clinic will feature speeches from two local men who were wrongfully convicted and then later released, Aaron Michael Howard and Leslie Vass. We will then be breaking into intake sessions where those interested in our help can tell us about their case or their loved ones and MAIP can begin the process of evaluating their case.

What: Mid-Atlantic Innocence Project's first ever legal clinic

When: Thursday November 12, 2009 at 6:30 PM

Where: Matthews Memorial Baptist Church 2616 Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd SE

Who: Anyone who wants to know more about MAIP or wants help with the case of someone they know. MAIP exonerees, Board members, staff members and law student volunteers will also be attending.

What to bring: Knowledge of the case to the best of your ability. If you have any legal docs we would be more than happy to take them.

Click here to see the information flier for MAIP's first Innocence Clinic

MAIP Client David Wayne Boyce is serving two life sentences for the 1990 murder of his roommate, Timothy Kurt Askew, 35, at the Econo Lodge motel in Newport News, Virginia.  Police and prosecutors claimed that Mr. Boyce, a young man with no criminal history, stabbed Mr. Askew repeatedly, killing him and then robbing him.  There was no physical evidence or eyewitness testimony that linked Mr. Boyce to this crime.  Mr. Boyce has maintained his innocence since his initial arrest.

Mr. Boyce was convicted largely based on the testimony of a jailhouse informant Herman Preston Elkins, a self-confessed mentally ill repeat offender.  In 2004, Mr. Elkins called Mr. Boyce’s counsel and recanted his trial testimony against Mr. Boyce.  He claimed he was coerced by the Newport News Police prior to Mr. Boyce’s trial.  Also in 2004, DNA evidence positively excluded Mr. Boyce from the physical evidence found at the crime scene.

MAIP attorneys and investigators have been working on Mr. Boyce’s case with lawyers from Howrey LLP and Hunton & Williams LLP since 2005, when they filed a petition for writ of habeas corpus in response to Mr. Elkins’ unsolicited phone call.  The petition has not yet been decided but is expected to move forward with the recent appointment of a new judge - Norfolk Circuit Court Judge John R. Doyle III.

In addition to asserting his innocence, Mr. Boyce’s team contends that the police and prosecutors violated the Constitution by withholding potentially crucial evidence from his counsel prior to trial, including: 1) Mr. Elkins’ history of mental illness and long-standing relationship with the police department, 2) a memo showing that another person had confessed to the crime, 3) reports that exclude Mr. Boyce’s fingerprints from those found at the crime scene, and 4) a photograph of Mr. Boyce taken the day of the murder that contradicts an alleged identification of the murderer.

Mr. Boyce’s team believes that this withheld evidence would have changed the outcome of Mr. Boyce’s trial.  Mr. Boyce’s attorneys are hopeful that the judge will find that the prosecution had a duty to turn over this evidence prior to trial, grant the petition for habeas corpus and order a new trial for Mr. Boyce after 19 years in prison.          

Click here to read a story in the Newport News Daily Press about the Boyce case.   

Click here to learn more about how "snitch" testimony can lead to wrongful convictions.

For three years, undergraduate journalism students at the Medill Innocence Project uncovered overwhelming evidence indicating that a Chicago man who has been in prison for murder for 28 years is completely innocent of the crime.  Instead of focusing on Anthony McKinney’s innocence, the Cook County, IL. Prosecutor’s office has instead turned its attention on the student investigators, issuing subpoenas that include demands for the class syllabus and student grades.

Nine different teams of investigators worked on McKinney’s case from 2003 to 2006.  At the end of their investigation, the students concluded that the then-18-year-old resident of the Harvey area of Chicago could not have been involved in the 1978 murder of security guard Donald Lundahl. Among their findings was a confession from a man who was present when his cousin shot and killed Lundahl, confirming that McKinney was not there.  In addition, the students were able to prove McKinney’s alibi and disprove the statements of two eyewitnesses who now claim they only identified McKinney after being beaten by police officers and could not have been present to see the crime occur.

David Protess, the Director of the Medill Innocence Project, directed the McKinney case to attorneys at the Center for Wrongful Convictions.  Protess’ students have conducted investigations that have led to eleven exonerations and both MAIP Executive Director Shawn Armbrust and Program Assistant Daniel Satin previously worked for the Medill Innocence Project (though not on the McKinney case.)

In November, the Center for Wrongful Conviction attorneys filed a request for a new trial based on the evidence the students had uncovered.  In June, the prosecutors subpoenaed students’ investigative memos, internal e-mails and notes from witness interviews, along with their grades and class syllabi.  

Barry Scheck, Co-director of the Innocence Project, said he has never seen prosecutors demand student grades from any of the other members in the nearly two decade history of the Innocence Network

“Every time the government starts attacking the messenger as opposed to the message, it can have a chilling effect,” Scheck said.

Attorneys from Northwestern say that the subpoena breaks federal laws regarding privacy for students and for journalists.

"I don't think it's any of the state's business to know the state of mind of my students," Protess said. "Prosecutors should be more concerned with the wrongful conviction of Anthony McKinney than with my students' grades."

While Protess and the attorneys involved continue to fight for McKinney’s freedom and the right of the students to maintain their privacy, MAIP hopes the prosecutors will focus on the overwhelming evidence of McKinney’s innocence instead of trying to question the intentions of the students involved.           

Click here to read more about the McKinney case.

Click here to read coverage of the Medill Innocence Project’s fight to maintain its privacy in the Chicago Tribune and the New York Times.

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After spending more than 11 harsh years in prison for a crime they did not commit, Joseph J. Dick, Jr., Derek E. Tice, and Danial J. Williams, became free men in early August thanks in large part to the legal work of two members of MAIP’s Board of Directors.

On August 6, 2009, Governor Timothy M. Kaine of Virginia granted conditional pardons to the Navy veterans known as the “Norfolk Four” but fell short of granting them absolute pardons based on innocence. Gov. Kaine denied the clemency request of Eric C. Wilson, the fourth member of the group, who was released in 2005 after serving 8 ½ years in prison.Just over a month later, Tice received even more complete relief when a federal judge granted his petition for habeas corpus, setting the stage for his conviction to be officially vacated."

While we are glad that Joe, Derek and Danial will finally be coming home to their families," said Tice’s attorney Desmond Hogan, "we are gravely disappointed that Governor Kaine has disregarded the overwhelming evidence of innocence, which proves only one man was responsible for this tragic crime."

Teams of lawyers at three national law firms have been representing Williams, Tice and Dick, who were serving sentences of life without the possibility of parole, on a pro bono basis for the past five years. The law firm teams were led by two MAIP Board Members, Donald Salzman of Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom, and Hogan of Hogan & Hartson, representing Williams and Tice, respectively and by George Kendall, who at the time was working at Holland & Knight on behalf of Dick.

On September 14, US District Judge Richard Williams vacated Tice’s conviction on the grounds of ineffective assistance of counsel. In his ruling, Judge Williams agreed with Tice’s attorneys that if Tice’s trial attorney had moved to suppress his confession, which the court found was obtained despite Tice’s invocation of his right to silence, “there is a reasonable probability that Tice would not have been convicted," and “the prosecution’s case against Tice [is] awash in doubt, Williams wrote. Under the term of the conditional pardon, the convictions still stand for Williams and Dick.

The four Navy men were wrongfully convicted based on false confessions extracted after they were subjected to high-pressure interrogation tactics, including threats of the death penalty and questionable use of lie detector tests.  The details in the men’s confessions did not match the crime scene, the other confessions, or the confession of the real killer.

All of the DNA and forensic evidence in the Norfolk Four case pointed to one man, Omar Ballard, and only his confession matched the physical evidence. Ballard is now serving a life sentence for the crime and has sworn under oath that he committed the crime by himself.

With Tice, Dick and Williams on their way home, their families took immediate steps to help them reintegrate into their communities. The men have been meeting with social workers and job counselors to help them make the adjustment, but they have a tough road ahead of them because convictions remain on their record for a crime they did not commit.

"Though we are overjoyed to finally have our sons back, we are saddened that Governor Kaine failed to recognize their actual innocence," said Larry Tice. "Our sons lost more than a decade of their lives. We must make sure that a tragedy like this one never strikes another family.”

Because false confessions are such a common cause of wrongful convictions, MAIP advocates for reforms that can reduce the risk of such confessions.  These reforms include legislation mandating the electronic recording of interrogations in their entirety and training for police officers on proper interrogation tactics.

“This case – and the frequency of false confessions in criminal cases – shows that common sense reforms like the videotaping of interrogations are needed to protect the innocent and our communities,” said MAIP Executive Director Shawn Armbrust. “We must work to ensure that no other innocent people suffer as the Norfolk Four did.”

Anthony Gray had spent seven years in prison for a rape and murder he did not commit before finally being released in February 1999. 

In 1991, 38-year-old Linda Mae Pellicano was found stabbed and raped in her Chesapeake Beach, MD home.  Anthony Gray was arrested, and authorities told him that two other men who had been arrested had implicated him, in order to make him confess.  Gray, who has a below-average IQ, did confess, and eventually pleaded guilty to first degree murder and first degree rape, believing that it would allow him to avoid the death penalty.  He was sentenced to two concurrent life sentences, while the other two men were not found guilty.

Five years later, in 1997, police arrested a man named Anthony Fleming for breaking and entering.  Hoping for a plea deal in that case, Fleming talked to police about details of the Pellicano murder that were never publicized, which aroused suspicion that he had been involved. DNA testing of the semen from the crime scene confirmed a match with Fleming, who then pled guilty to the 1991 rape and murder.  He was sentenced to life in prison.

After Fleming was arrested, Calvert County State's Attorney Robert Riddle, who had long expressed doubts about Gray’s innocence, spent fifteen months making sure that Gray could not have been an accomplice. Anthony Gray remained in prison during this time until February 8, 1999, when he walked out of the Calvert County, Md. courthouse a free man.

Like most exonerees, Gray has sought out compensation from the government, but according to a Maryland statute, the Board of Public Works cannot award any money unless the wrongfully convicted person first receives a pardon from the governor.  Gray has not yet been pardoned, so he has yet to receive compensation for his eight years spent in prison.

On November 7, 2002, Bernard Webster became the first person to be exonerated under a new Maryland DNA law, after spending twenty years in prison for a break-in and rape he did not commit.

In July 1982, a 47-year-old schoolteacher came home to her Towson apartment in the middle of the afternoon.  She heard a rustling in her closet, and when she walked into her bedroom, a black man jumped out and attacked her.  The victim told the jury that the man put what he said was a gun to her back, covered her head with a bathrobe, forced her onto the bed, and raped her.

Bernard Webster, who was nineteen at the time, became a suspect because the Baltimore County police had arrested him months earlier for stealing a purse.  Other residents of the victim’s apartment complex then picked him out of a photo lineup as a man they’d seen around the complex that day.  The victim picked him out of a photo lineup as the man who attacked her.  Though the defense presented two witnesses who told the jury that they’d seen Webster playing basketball that day, miles away from the crime scene, and despite questionable forensics declaring that Webster’s blood matched the blood found on the bedspread (this contradicted an earlier report), Webster was found guilty in 1983 and sentenced to thirty years in prison.

From prison, Webster continued contacting the Maryland public defender office, but there was little the attorneys could do for him until the advent of DNA testing.  Finally, in 2000, the office took on his case to help him prove his innocence, and in 2001, Webster filed his own petition for DNA testing.  That year, a new law was enacted in Maryland, allowing judges to order DNA testing for people serving sentences for rape or murder when testing could prove their innocence.  Though the Baltimore County state’s attorney’s office asked the court to deny the motion, Judge Christian Kahl allowed the testing to go forward.

Testing was performed on three slides found at the hospital where the victim was treated twenty years prior.  The results excluded Webster as the contributor of the spermatozoa, and in November 2002, his sentence was vacated.  Bernard Webster was 40 years old when he left prison, becoming the 3rd person in Maryland and the 115th nationwide to have his conviction overturned by DNA evidence.

After exoneration, Webster was awarded $900,000 in compensation – $45,000 for each year he wrongfully spent in prison.

In 1987, Guy "Gordy" Marsh was released from prison after serving 14 years in prison for a murder he did not commit and was set up for by a detective.

On June 28th, 1971, Charles Erdman was murdered inside a Glen Burnie, Maryland 7-Eleven on Crain Highway after attempting to stop a robbery that was in progress by two masked men. The main witness against Marsh at trial was Linda Packech, a heroin addict with a lengthy criminal record. She claimed to have seen Marsh come out of the 7-Eleven and raise his mask. Her testimony was the primary evidence used to convict Marsh. He was sentenced to life-plus-ten years in prison.

In 1987 though, Packech admitted that she had lied during the trial. She eventually told both a reporter and the prosecutor that she had been pressured to identify Marsh by a Anne Arundel County police detective who was convinced he was guilty, but was unable to find any evidence implicating Marsh after an 18-month investigation. In actuality, Packech was in jail on shoplifting charges at the time of the crime and could not have been present at the murder scene. Marsh’s original conviction was overturned and prosecutor’s decided not to retry him, making him a free man. Packech was eventually convicted of perjury for her testimony during Marsh’s trial.  

In 2005, Marsh (along with several other exonerees) attended the Mid-Atlantic Innocence Project’s National Innocence Network Conference, where experts and advocates convened to discuss recent developments in the fight to exonerate the wrongfully convicted.

Because technically, prosecutors never acknowledged Marsh's absolute innocence, he has been unable to receive a full pardon and has thus been ineligible for compensation, despite the misconduct that went into his wrongful conviction. Marsh has spent much of the past twenty years as a truck driver in Maryland.

Thanks in large part to the work of the Innocence Project of Texas, a Dallas man was pardoned by Texas Gov. Rick Perry Wednesday, nearly thirty years after he was wrongfully accused of of raping and killing his girlfriend.

James Lee Woodard was originally released from prison in April 2008 after a DNA-retesting program run by the new Dallas District Attorney cleared him of the 1980 murder of  Beverly Ann Jones. He had spent 27 years behind bars for a crime he consistently denied doing. DNA testing was unavailable at the time of the crime. On Wednesday, the Governor officially cleared his name.

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