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Law Students Actively Involved in Northwestern's Center on Wrongful Convictions

published June 27, 2005

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( 12 votes, average: 4.8 out of 5)
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After just a few weeks at the center, Nicole LeFrancois, who will be a second-year Yale Law student in the fall, is traveling to Michigan to interview witnesses and test alibi evidence in an effort to help a center client. LeFrancois is glad to be getting involved and values "having contact with real people whose lives depend on what we do."

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The Michigan client, who has been in prison for 15 years, was convicted of a murder-arson after her husband died in a fire that destroyed their home, says Jane Raley, the center's Senior Staff Attorney and Assistant Clinical Professor at Northwestern Law.

The center's staff members think the convicted woman is innocent and that the fire was an accident. "Arson cases are the happening thing right now," says Raley. Arson science, she explains, like DNA-identification science, has expanded greatly in the past few years. Advances have allowed more accurate identification of causes of fires. These techniques can be used in old arson cases to reevaluate whether the conclusion of arson was accurate in the first place.

While in Michigan, LeFrancois, along with others from the center, will be re-interviewing witnesses and checking the client's alibi. The client had said she was far from her home when the fire started, during a snowstorm. LeFrancois and her colleagues will check driving times between their client's location and her home, estimating how long it would have taken in the snow. "It's an interesting case," says Raley.

LeFrancois was an undergraduate at the University of Chicago when then-Governor of Illinois George Ryan commuted the sentences of all 157 Illinois death-row inmates. The Center on Wrongful Convictions was instrumental in freeing several wrongly convicted people at that point, and its work was cited in the Governor's January 11, 2003, speech announcing the mass clemency. LeFrancois remembered the speech and its result, as well as the center. "I really admired their work," says LeFrancois.

Governor Ryan's actions also inspired Michael Tarleton not only to work at the center, but also to go to law school in the first place. Tarleton will be a third-year student at Northwestern Law in the fall and intends to become a public defender. He is against the death penalty, "and I'm generally concerned about the way people are treated by our justice system," he says. This summer, Tarleton is working with the Georgia Public Defender Standards Council.

Last summer, with the Center, Tarleton worked on the Darnell Williams case, in which a man on death row in Indiana was set to die within weeks, while his convicted codefendant had his death sentence changed to life in prison after testing with a very low IQ.

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Tarleton did research on disparities in sentencing between defendants. It "felt good to be a part of it," says Tarleton. He also worked in Indiana with others from the Center, talking with former jurors, as well as investigators who had been at the murder scene. "It's odd," says Tarleton, who is very interested in forensics, "but I was having a lot of fun."

Tarleton was also "pessimistic," he says, "I was surprised when we won; happy, but surprised." When the Williams case was resolved in early July, Tarleton and the other Center workers went to work on other cases. Tarleton worked at the Center for three semesters in a row, including last summer, and he says, space allowing, "Hopefully, I can come back."

Monica Hunt is also going into her third year at Northwestern Law. This summer, she is working at a Washington, DC, law firm. Last summer at the Center, working on the Darnell Williams case for one month was "an extraordinary experience," Hunt says. She helped to draft the memo to the governor of Indiana. "I had no idea how much we were contributing until it was over," Hunt says of the student involvement in the case. "We learned a lot with the guidance of the lawyers there," she says.

One of Hunt's tasks for the Williams case was going to meet the victims' families to inform them that the Center was working to change Williams's death sentence. It was "not a pleasant experience," she says; the family was very angry at first and did not want to talk with her and her colleague. It was important to visit the victim's family, says Hunt, because "they'd been neglected by the system as well." The family had not been previously informed that Williams' sentencing was being challenged.

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In her work at the center, Hunt saw that "we don't just represent the defendant, but also decency." In law school, the law can seem like a completely adversarial process, says Hunt. Instead, says Hunt, lawyers should be stewards of the system and the people on both sides. Lawyers should "make sure everyone in the process is cared for," she says, especially in criminal law. "Our job is not to win; it's to make amends the best we can."

published June 27, 2005

( 12 votes, average: 4.8 out of 5)
What do you think about this article? Rate it using the stars above and let us know what you think in the comments below.