Budget cuts put Innocence Project in jeopardy

By Troy Simpson

The Northern California Innocence Project (NCIP), a Santa Clara legal clinic dedicated to finding new evidence to free wrongfully convicted inmates, may not exist this time next year.

Law Professor Kathleen Ridolfi transformed the legal defense clinic into the NCIP in 2001 when Penal Code 1405, legislation providing for post-conviction DNA testing, passed. As a result of state funding, the NCIP is able to provide its services free of charge to inmates, but upcoming budget cuts may have drastic effects on the program.

"The state is in terrible trouble, so I don't know whether or not we will be funded," said Ridolfi. "We should be funded. In the scheme of things, we are bargain for the state. We handle cases from across California with what is relatively an inexpensive budget."

Since January of 2001, the clinic has opened and investigated 1,075 cases, two of which resulted in the release of previously convicted inmates. Ridolfi said that two successful cases out of 1,075 opened cases is a success because of the complexity of each situation.

"These are complex cases involving serious charges," said Ridolfi. "They're post-conviction, which means that they are after trial and after appeal, so they are procedurally complex. They're also a wonderful opportunity for students to go back and look at an entire case from beginning to end and to really study it and understand what about the system works and what about the system doesn't work."

In terms of cost, Ridolfi said that the $400,000 yearly budget shared between the clinic and its satellite program at Golden Gate University will end up saving the state money in the long run.

"We're already a bargain because if you take the amount of money it would cost the state of California to keep [the two previously convicted inmates] incarcerated for the rest of their lives, it would cost more than what they paid us for the whole year," said Ridolfi.

Legal Nurse Consultant Mary Likins said that although some guilty inmates attempt to obtain free legal support from the NCIP and many researched cases do not result in the release of possibly innocent inmates, the importance of representing wrongfully convicted citizens outweighs the drawbacks.

"There are 164,000 inmates in California right now," said Likins. "We know that wrongful conditions happen, but we don't know how often they happen. People make estimates about the error rate and that a very, very low estimate would be 1 percent. So if 1 percent of those 164,000 inmates are actually innocent, there are 1,600 guys in prison for something that they didn't do. The problems that cause these wrongful convictions are still there and there's nothing in place to make that number go down [except for] projects like this."

Ridolfi said that the fact that there are so many wrongfully convicted inmates in prison implies serious problems with the legal process, but that the NCIP helps to examine those problems clearly.

"The system is very much broken," said Ridolfi. "Those of us that work in it know it, but before the DNA exoneration's and before the innocence movement took hold, there was really no convincing other people that what we saw was true. Now you can't argue with it. It's forcing change in the system."

Fourth-year law student Beth Voorhees said that research done on cases brought to the NCIP have revealed that many factors that result in wrongful convictions include profiling techniques, faulty eyewitness identification, junk science and numerous other systematic errors.

"We must have a program like the NCIP to invest time and resources into looking at these cases more closely," said Voorhees.

The NCIP offers law students like Voorhees an opportunity to help research cases and make that research available to one of the five practicing lawyers in the clinic.

Second-year law student John Lough said that outside of assisting the lawyers in the NCIP, law students also get the opportunity to apply theories learned in the classroom to the real world.

"This is where students learn the law in a real-life environment," said Lough. "This is not a simulation. This is real people. When doing a law clinic like the Innocence Project, talking to people about this case, about this inmate, about this person who may have been wrongfully convicted, you start getting a feeling for people."

Although experiences with the NCIP can expose law students to the humanistic side of law, Senior Maureen Pettibone said that it also shows students to the imperfections of the justice system.

"When flawed procedures are used, flawed results will occur," said Pettibone. "That is why I think the Innocence Project is important."

Pettibone said that researching cases not particularly grounded in DNA testing can be the most difficult to prove, regardless of innocence. Pettibone is currently researching one case of this sort and said that any chance of exoneration for the inmate in question will require painstaking gathering of statements and reanalysis of evidence.

"Although I believe that the young man is innocent," Pettibone says, "I still worry that at the end of the day, there won't be a thing I can do for him. And that bothers me."

In addition to finding the causes of wrongful convictions and giving valuable experience to law students, Likins said that the NCIP is also active in responding to problems in the legal system. For example, Likins said that because of actions taken by the NCIP, Santa Clara County police now use individual photographs of suspects in witness identification procedures, as opposed to presenting witnesses with one large sheet of photographs from which to compare suspects.

"When you have them all [on one sheet of paper], the tendency is to choose the person that looks most like the person that you saw," said Likins. "If you [see each photograph individually], you're judging each one individually [and] the error rates drops like a stone. So through efforts that we've made here, Santa Clara County has switched to sequential identifications."