James Bain’s 35-year nightmare began as so many wrongful convictions do—with an eyewitness identification gone awry. On March 4, 1974, someone snatched a sleeping 9-year-old from a home in Lake Wales, Fla., raping the boy in a nearby field. When the child returned, he could offer only a sketchy illustration of his attacker. He was a young man with bushy sideburns and facial hair. But that was enough for the boy’s uncle, who thought he recognized Bain in the details.
With police pressing for a confirmation, the boy identified Bain as his attacker—a claim that would later trump defense testimony that Bain’s blood type ruled him out as the rapist. In August 1974, Bain, just 19, was sentenced to life in prison. And in prison Bain likely would have died. But in the spring of 2009, his case caught the attention of the Florida affiliate of the Innocence Network, an international collaboration of pro bono legal and investigative organizations dedicated to righting wrongful convictions.
The Innocence Project of Florida had no idea if Bain was innocent, says Seth Miller, its executive director. They believed only that he had the right to a test that would add certainty to the verdict. With the project’s attorneys behind him, Bain’s years-long quest for DNA testing was granted. In October 2009, a lab examined sperm from the victim’s underwear. By December, results were in. Bain was not the rapist. Thirty-five years of wrongful imprisonment were about to end, thanks to a test that took two months to process.
On Dec. 17, 2009, Bain walked out of court a free man with a singular title—the person who had served more prison time than anyone yet exonerated by DNA testing. Otherwise, Bain’s story was alarmingly common. Since the first DNA exoneration in 1989, more than 250 people convicted in the United States have been cleared by DNA tests, a number that has risen faster as technology has improved. In 2009 alone, there were 22 DNA-based exonerations. “People are sort of enamored with the Bain case,” Miller says. “But I don’t know that his case is remarkable in any other way other than the length of incarceration.”
AN ADAPTABLE MODEL
Exonerations like Bain’s have made the Innocence Network a media darling. Books, films, and TV shows have covered its dramatic work, making wrongful convictions one of the most talked-about criminal justice issues of our time. But less attention has been paid to the network’s organizational style, which has enabled it to grow rapidly and flexibly. Over the past decade, the Innocence Network has multiplied from eight projects to a collection of nearly 60 projects spanning three continents.
The Innocence Network stands out as one of the most successful examples of the affiliate model of nonprofit growth. Most nonprofits follow the branch model, which concentrates control at a central headquarters. The less popular affiliate model favors decentralization, uniting loosely bound groups under a common cause. Some network members are 501(c)(3) organizations. Some are located within public defenders offices or private law firms. Most are part of law schools. Some take only cases with DNA evidence; a few take only those without it. Most pursue cases through legal services, though a couple approach them as investigative journalists.
“This model allows each project to adapt its service delivery method to the resources and needs of each local community,” says Keith Findley, president of the network and a law professor at the University of Wisconsin.
The network’s affiliate approach is less the result of well-honed strategy than of happenstance in the organization’s earliest beginnings, Findley says. In 1992, Manhattan defense attorneys Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld founded the first Innocence Project at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in New York, tapping into the energies of students eager to help at a law clinic focused on using science to free the convicted.
At the time, forensic DNA was still a fledgling idea. But the men saw its unparalleled power not only to undo injustice in individual cases, but also to expose systemic conviction problems. Their hunch was right. A year after the Innocence Project’s start, Kirk Bloodsworth, a Maryland man convicted of raping and murdering a 9-year-old girl, became the first death row inmate exonerated by DNA fingerprinting. DNA not only freed Bloodsworth, it later established the real murderer, a man Bloodsworth had come to know in prison.
As awareness of DNA’s power to expose wrongful convictions expanded, Scheck and Neufeld recognized they couldn’t take on cases across the country and began assisting others to form similar groups. In 2000, eight of the groups—including the Innocence Project in New York and two successful projects at Northwestern University—formed the Innocence Network, a collaboration of like-minded organizations that could lean on each other for assistance and know-how across professional and geographic lines.
Membership since then has exploded. The network celebrated its 10th anniversary in April with groups in practically every state along with Canada, Great Britain, Australia, and New Zealand. The growth has stemmed in part from Scheck and Neufeld’s Johnny Appleseed approach, in which they encouraged professors, public defenders, and students to get involved. Theresa Newman, a clinical professor of law at Duke University and former president of the network, says the North Carolina effort began after Scheck and Neufeld lectured before law students who then rallied professors to the cause.
In other instances, new laws and increasing demand for DNA testing practically forced the creation of a local Innocence Project. The Florida project that helped exonerate Bain, for example, started in 2003 with guidance from New York to handle an onslaught of petitions to meet a state-mandated deadline for post-conviction DNA testing. Still, network members are only loosely tied. It wasn’t until 2005 that the network created a board of directors, whose 18 members meet twice a year, mainly to discuss ongoing cases, review new members, and plan an annual conference, says Maddy deLone, executive director of the Innocence Project in New York. No group is legally bound to another.
Yet there’s no doubt the groups help each other. The network serves as a way to pool resources, connections, and expertise. Professors share lesson plans. Attorneys tracking down witnesses may ask for recommendations for investigators. And in crunch times, the network can offer backup support. Jeff Chinn, assistant director of the California Innocence Project in San Diego, recalls when Innocence Project New Orleans sent an emergency request for help meeting a filing deadline with the Louisiana Supreme Court. The California project relayed the call to two San Diego appellate lawyers, who jumped in. “I can’t imagine doing this work in the relative darkness of our home states without communication with each other,” says Newman.
Although collaborative, each network member is responsible for raising its own money. Law schools, with their institutional support and tradition of legal clinics, have made natural homes for Innocence Projects. But other models also have thrived. The New Orleans project, an unaffiliated nonprofit, has freed 15 prisoners, one of the best records in the network. Yet deLone says that starting such independent groups can be financially tough.
“If you can start a project at a law school with the support of the administration, you are halfway there,” she says. “If you are constantly raising your operating budget, it’s putting a burden on yourself before you open a letter from the first client.”
Ultimately, new applicants must satisfy the network’s board of directors that they have the necessary resources. If a university wants to start a project, for example, there has to be faculty support that will outlast the interest of any one group of students. New members also must reach agreements with existing projects in their region to determine how they will divvy up cases. Applicants receive provisional membership at first; then, after 18 months, the board can vote on a project’s permanent status.
A COLLECTIVE VOICE
The network’s board also puts its combined heft into filing “friend of the court” or amicus briefs, using a collective voice to ask judges to consider issues in a case’s background, such as the fallibility of confessions. Perhaps the network’s greatest impact has been to identify errors before they become courtroom evidence. Eyewitness identification, for example, is particularly problematic. Bain went to jail for three decades because of an eyewitness mistake. Bloodsworth almost died because of it. According to the Innocence Network, erroneous eyewitness identifications contributed to more than 75 percent of convictions later overturned by DNA evidence.
Led by the Innocence Project in New York, the network uses these data to push for reforms, such as blind administrations of police lineups, in which the officer in charge is unaware of the suspect’s identity and therefore can’t accidentally steer results. Since 2000, network members have helped convince legislators in New Jersey, Ohio, North Carolina, Maryland, West Virginia, Wisconsin, and Georgia to implement changes in eyewitness policies.
As important, the network’s lobbying efforts—and its track record of success—have pushed states to pass laws granting access to post-conviction DNA testing. In 2000, only two states had such laws, according to Eric Ferrero, director of communications for the Innocence Project in New York. In 2010, 45 states and Washington, D.C., have such statutes.
The ideal, though, would be to go out of business one day, says Findley. But improvements in technology mean there will always be cases where DNA can be tested when once it couldn’t. There will always be cases where the defense didn’t think to look for DNA in trial. And there will always be mistakes that have nothing to do with DNA. “As much as we’d like to work ourselves out of a job and have a perfect system, it’s a human system and humans make mistakes,” Findley says. “Those mistakes will continue.”
Sam Scott is a San Francisco-based freelance journalist. He was formerly a reporter for the New York Times Regional Media Group. Jessie Speer is an attorney and freelance writer based in Tucson, Ariz.
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