Latest news with #InnocenceProject
Boston Globe
14-05-2025
- Science
- Boston Globe
SJC supports judicial inquiry into ShotSpotter reliability, technology used to track gunshots in cities
'We note that, although it was not requested in the instant case, a Daubert-Lanigan hearing should be allowed if so requested to further inform the court regarding retrospective forensic use of ShotSpotter technology,' Justice Scott L. Kafker wrote for the unanimous court. Advertisement He added, 'we are not aware that any Massachusetts court has undertaken a Daubert-Lanigan hearing regarding the retrospective forensic use of ShotSpotter technology." In the 1990s, the US Supreme Court and the SJC set a five-part test now known as Daubert-Lanigan before new science can be used in trials. They include peer review, support for the tech in the scientific community and testing to confirm its accuracy, The Committee for Public Counsel Services, the state's public defender agency, supports the SJC's call for scrutinizing ShotSpotter systems. The 'underlying methodology, the proprietary nature of its algorithms, and the lack of independent scientific validation raise serious questions about its accuracy and reliability — especially when used to retrospectively determine the timing, location, or even the existence of gunfire,'' CPCS spokesman Robert McGovern wrote. Advertisement ShotSpotter has been deployed by Boston police - and other Massachusetts police agencies - as part of its technological response to gun violence, and is used in real time to dispatch officers to active crime scenes and in court to support shooting and homicide prosecutions. But critics, including the New England Innocence Project and the national Innocence Project, contend the company has not undergone the rigorous judicial inquiry long required of new science - like was done for DNA testing - before it was used in criminal cases. 'Flawed forensic science is one of the leading causes of wrongful convictions.' Mitha Nandagopalan, staff attorney for the national Innocence Project wrote in an e-mail to the Globe. 'It's past time Massachusetts courts examine whether ShotSpotter is reliable.' A 2024 study by researchers at Northeastern University found ShotSpotter does get police to active crime scenes faster and for improved evidence collection. ShotSpotter was questioned in the first degree murder appeal of Lee M. Rios convicted for the March 24, 2015, shooting of Kenneth Lopez multiple times in Springfield. During his Hampden Superior Court trial, a ShotSpotter employee testified the geolocation system can mistake loud sounds for gunshots. In the Rios trial, ShotSpotter mistakenly identified a location 300 yards from where Lopez was actually killed, and only by manually reviewing the data was the error corrected, the SJC said. In his appeal, Rios argued the flawed ShotSpotter report undermined his defense and justified granting him a new trial, among other grounds. Advertisement The SJC, however, disagreed. 'There was overwhelming evidence of the defendant's guilt entirely separate from the ShotSpotter evidence,'' Kafker wrote for the court. If the Daubert-Lanigan finds the ShotSpotter unreliable, the use as a forensic tool could be severely restricted in criminal cases, attorneys said. The Globe requested comment from Hampden District Attorney Anthony D. Gulluni's office, which prosecuted Rios. John R. Ellement can be reached at
Yahoo
02-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Medicaid work requirements, Indiana-Illinois boundary commission signed into law
Gov. Mike Braun signs a pair of executive orders dealing with unemployment insurance in his Statehouse office on Thursday, Feb. 27, 2025. (Leslie Bonilla Muñiz/Indiana Capital Chronicle) Gov. Mike Braun signed a whopping 56 bills into law Friday, including measures setting contentious work requirements for certain Medicaid recipients and evaluating the addition of secessionist Illinois counties to Indiana. Twenty of the bills came from the Senate, led by Senate Enrolled Act 2 — which would require enrollees under the Healthy Indiana Plan to either work or volunteer for 20 hours a week or risk losing their benefits. The proposal includes over a dozen exemptions and must also get the stamp of approval from the federal government before being enacted, however. Other Senate ideas include a handful of health bills — one reforming prior authorization requirements and a wide-ranging omnibus package — along with public safety and energy matters. One adopts a new set of eyewitness identification procedures — a move celebrated by exonerees wrongly convicted of crimes partly due to mistaken eyewitness identification. CONTACT US The Innocence Project reports that over a third of wrongful convictions stem from such errors, including Indiana's Leon Benson. Benson spent over 24 years imprisoned for a murder he didn't commit. A small modular nuclear reactor pilot program will also move forward, part of a package of bills drafted with the intention of bringing the technology to Indiana. Among the 36 House-originated bills signed Friday were three chamber GOP priorities. House Enrolled Act 1005 continues incentivizing housing construction while House Enrolled Act 1006 creates a prosecutor review board to scrutinize so-called 'noncompliant' prosecutors. The final priority measure, House Enrolled Act 1008, establishes a commission to study Hoosier absorption of secessionist Illinois counties — though such a move would also require Prairie State consent and federal approval. Other House bills set to become law following Braun's signature include an Indiana National Guard enlistment boost, a 'Medicaid diversion program,' and new pediatric cancer research grants. Additionally, a transportation infrastructure funding revamp will change how communities fund roads, bridges and more. It eases barriers to tolling and changes up the popular Community Crossings Matching Grant Program. The measure will also increase the speed limit on Interstate 465. To see the full list of newly signed bills, visit the governor's 2025 Bill Watch page. SUBSCRIBE: GET THE MORNING HEADLINES DELIVERED TO YOUR INBOX
The Independent
28-04-2025
- The Independent
Louisiana death row conviction overturned as man's lawyers cite faulty forensic analysis
A Louisiana man who has spent nearly three decades on death row has had his conviction overturned by a district judge following a review of forensic analysis that the inmate's legal team argued was based on 'junk science.' Jimmie Duncan was originally convicted of first-degree murder in 1998 after being accused by prosecutors of raping and drowning his girlfriend's toddler in a bathtub. Prosecutors relied on bite mark analysis and an autopsy performed by two experts — later linked to wrongful convictions — whom Duncan's legal team described as discredited 'charlatans.' Duncan has long maintained his innocence. Fourth Judicial District Court Judge Alvin Sharp threw out Duncan's first-degree murder conviction in a ruling issued last week — first reported by Verite News. The judge heard expert testimony that the bite mark analysis was 'not scientifically defensible' and that death appeared to be the result of 'accidental drowning.' The judge also received evidence that a jailhouse informant had recanted his testimony and that Duncan received ineffective counsel during his trial. Ouachita Parish District Attorney Robert Tew can choose to appeal, seek a retrial with new evidence and testimony or accept the ruling, leading to Duncan's release. Tew declined to comment, and a representative from his office said prosecutors are 'assessing options in this case." Duncan's legal team declined to comment, but wrote in court filings that 'this case has all the hallmarks of wrongful conviction.' Why is bite mark analysis considered a 'junk science'? Dozens of people have been wrongfully convicted, arrested or charged based on faulty bite mark evidence, according to the Innocence Project, a nonprofit focused on exonerating wrongful convictions. Mississippi-based forensic dentist Michael West and pathologist Steven Hayne examined the body of Duncan's girlfriend's daughter, Haley Oliveaux. Duncan's legal team stated in court filings that the pair's analysis has in the past been linked to at least 10 wrongful convictions, calling it 'unreliable.' A video recording of the examination shows West 'forcibly pushing a mold of Mr. Duncan's teeth into the child's body — creating the bite marks' later used to convict him, a court-filing from Duncan's legal team stated. A state-appointed expert, unaware of this method, testified during trial that the bite marks on the body matched Duncan's. Dr. Adam Freeman, an expert forensic dentist called by Duncan's legal team to testify at a hearing last September, said the assumptions underlying bite mark analysis are 'no longer valid' and are the product of 'junk science', court filings show. Hayne told jurors during the murder trial that Duncan anally raped and forcibly drowned Oliveaux. But expert witnesses called by Duncan's legal team argued that advances in forensic science show that the rashes and injuries on Oliveaux were not caused by abuse. They pointed out that a sexual assault testing kit also came back negative and no blood was found. Expert witnesses at September's hearing also criticized Hayne's analysis as 'sloppy' and 'inadequate." While Hayne once performed the majority of the autopsies in Mississippi, his work has been repeatedly attacked in court as being error-ridden and unscientific. Hayne died in 2020, ProPublica reported. West did not return calls to phone numbers affiliated with him. He has previously said that DNA testing has made bite mark analysis obsolete, but has defended his testimony in other cases that led to overturned convictions in murder cases. Louisiana Legislature debates restricting post-conviction relief Louisiana lawmakers are currently considering a bill to overhaul the state's post-conviction relief process, a legal avenue Duncan used to bring new evidence before a judge after all appeals were exhausted. The proposed bill would shorten the timeline for prisoners seeking post-conviction relief. They would have to file a petition within one year after the 'judgment of conviction and sentence has become final,' based on the bill's language. Attorney General Liz Murrill declined to comment on Duncan's case. She testified in a committee hearing last week that under the current system there are too many delays, and as a result, victims' families may wait decades for justice to be served. Murrill said the post-conviction process has allowed 'endless and repetitive' appeals to continue to be filed, especially in capital punishment cases: 'We are still trying to get victims justice and get their family members justice." Those opposed to the bill fear that it could increase the odds that innocent people will have to serve out sentences or be executed for crimes they did not commit. Since 1989, at least 11 people sentenced to death in Louisiana have been exonerated, according to the National Exoneration Registry, a database tracking wrongful convictions. 'The state of Louisiana is reckless with the lives of human beings,' said Samantha Kennedy, executive director of the advocacy group Promise of Justice Initiative. 'The state's ever-worsening track record for death convictions reveals its tremendous incompetence, indifference, and even malice.' There are 55 people on death row in Louisiana. After a 15-year hiatus, Louisiana carried out its first execution in March. ___ Brook is a corps member for The Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues. Follow Brook on the social platform X at @jack_brook96.
Yahoo
17-04-2025
- Yahoo
Why a Mass. man is still in prison after his murder conviction was overturned
Five days after a judge overturned his wrongful murder conviction, Edward Wright remains locked up at the Massachusetts Correctional Institution in Norfolk — just as he has been for the last 40 years. Despite evidence that was hidden by prosecutors for decades and new DNA tests that point to Wright's innocence, the 63-year-old man is not yet free, and the Hampden County District Attorney's Office is still fighting to keep him behind bars. 'He's just the most incredible human being,' Wright's wife of 15 years, Mimi Olivier, said outside the John J. Moakley Courthouse in Boston on Thursday. 'I'm anxious and scared, but I have a lot of faith in the Innocence Project and in Eddie,' Olivier said. The first thing her husband wants to do when he's released is go fishing — and the second is eat a 'big, juicy hamburger.' Olivier, 59, stood in the spring morning air next to members of the New England Innocence Project, Wright's legal team and some inmates exonerated with the help of the Innocence Project as they discussed the next steps in Wright's case. A blown-up picture of Wright was in Olivier's hands. Words at the top read, 'The fight continues.' Wright was convicted at the age of 22 on April 11, 1985 for the stabbing death of his friend Penny Anderson in her Springfield apartment the year before. Until Hampden Superior Court Judge Jeremy Bucci finally overturned Wright's conviction on April 11, district and federal courts had denied all five of his previous motions — filed between 1986 and 2012 — that showed evidence of his innocence. That included a 2008 ruling where a Boston federal judge found Wright to have 'actual innocence' after hearing testimony that Allen Smalls, the victim's former boyfriend who died in 2021, had confessed to her killing twice. Nigel Tamton, a member of Wright's legal team, told reporters on Thursday the denials were because a key piece of evidence about the case was hidden from Wright and his legal team for nearly four decades: a Springfield Police Department report. 'Before all the evidence was collected from the crime scene and while Mr. Wright was in police custody, somebody broke in to Miss Anderson's apartment,' Tamton said. 'The police wrote a report about the break-in and put that report in the police file connected with the murder investigation. But then, they stopped,' he said. 'They never investigated the break-in further, and even though this break-in contaminated the crime scene, the prosecution did not give the report that proved the break-in happened to Mr. Wright until 2021 — 36 years later, even though he was entitled to it, asked for it decades earlier, before his trial," Tamton. Wright's legal team contended the perpetrator of the break-in was Smalls, whom they also said threatened Anderson the night she was murdered and sold a knife the day after her death. They also pointed out all three Black men in the jury pool were excluded, leaving only one Black woman on the otherwise all-white jury. Although the judge overturned his murder conviction on Friday, Wright is not yet exonerated. Instead, his court case is essentially reset, and he still faces his original charges, with more legal proceedings to come. Hampden County District Attorney Anthony D. Gulluni issued a statement pushing back against the ruling. 'We strongly disagree with this decision and we have filed a notice of appeal and intend to argue this matter, once again, to defend the integrity of the conviction,' Gulluni said. He called the killing of Anderson a 'senseless and tragic act of violence,' and said Wright had received a 'fair trial.' 'We stand by the integrity of the original prosecution and the many judicial reviews that this case has already received over the past four decades,' Gulluni said. Wright's legal team has requested a hearing to seek Wright's release from prison, but did not have a date scheduled as of Thursday morning, said Radha Natarajan, executive director of the New England Innocence Project. The team will also monitor the district attorney's appeal, Natarajan said. If the courts agree to hear the appeal, it could take up to another two years for litigation to finish — but if not, it would be the prosecution's decision whether it would retry the case against Wright. 'In a recent hearing, the prosecutor said that Mr. Wright's case is not re-triable. We agree that it is not re-triable, but more importantly, we believe it should not be retried, because Mr. Wright is innocent,' Natarajan said. 'Enough is enough, and it is time to end this injustice,' Natarajan said. Several of the exonerated men who stood with the New England Innocence Project members on Thursday knew Wright in prison — including Jabir Pope, a 72-year-old man exonerated in 2021. At the end of the conference, Pope posed for pictures with his fellow former inmates and asked Olivier to send them to him. He still communicates often with Wright through Olivier, he said, though he hasn't seen Wright since his own release. Pope and Wright would often have conversations about fighting their wrongful convictions, Pope said. During his time in prison, Wright has helped many other inmates in their legal proceedings as he dealt with his own. It was a way for them to cope and 'lean on one another,' Pope said, as the lifetimes of their families and loved ones' passed both men by. 'We would have those kind of conversations, because the only alternative were to lay out and die,' Pope said. 'It's one of the things that kept us alive.' Man with extensive criminal history charged with stabbing in New Bedford Person in critical condition after being shot in head in Chelsea Ex-Harvard morgue manager to plead guilty in stolen body parts case Maryland man accused of coercing Mass. teen to travel for commercial sex ICE arrests Brazilian woman charged with raping child on Cape Cod
The Guardian
03-04-2025
- The Guardian
‘We thought we could change the world': how an idealistic fight against miscarriages of justice turned sour
The press conference began at 2.30pm on 2 September 2004 at the Wills Memorial Building, the grand neo-gothic home to the University of Bristol's School of Law. Michael Naughton, a charismatic, fast-talking lecturer in sociology and criminal law, addressed the assembled media. If what he was attempting sounded radical, it was only a reflection of an increasingly dire situation, Naughton told a BBC reporter. There was no way of sugarcoating it, he said. The criminal justice system was failing the rising number of people who were claiming they had been wrongfully convicted, and who remained stuck in prison without any hope of exoneration. Naughton was launching the Bristol University Innocence Project to address this crisis. The premise was clear enough. Idealistic law students, under academic supervision and with pro bono legal support, would investigate potential miscarriages of justice, with the goal of preparing cases for appeal. Though the concept was well established in the US and Australia, nothing so bold had ever been attempted in the UK. But Michael Naughton was no ordinary academic. Born in early 1960s Lancashire to working-class Irish parents, conflict was an essential part of his upbringing. Being a Naughton man came with certain non-negotiables, including: always buy your round, and never back down from a fight. Having left school at 16, Naughton had embarked on a mechanical engineering apprenticeship. In his mid-20s, he enrolled at night school, taking A-levels in maths and sociology. An accident at work in his early 30s ended his engineering career, and forced him back to his books. He enrolled to study sociology as a mature student at the University of Bristol, and he became interested in miscarriages of justice. The deeper he delved, the more chilling his findings. He went on to do a PhD, in which he argued that wrongful convictions were not rare aberrations but the all-too-common products of a dysfunctional system. In Naughton's view, the much-vaunted Criminal Cases Review Commission – an independent public body set up in the late 1990s to review miscarriages of justice in England, Wales and Northern Ireland – was already proving a dismal failure. From the vantage point of 2025, Naughton's project looks prescient. In recent years, after the Post Office Horizon scandal and the wrongful conviction of Andrew Malkinson, there has been a resurgence of public interest in miscarriages of justice across the UK, and the CCRC has come under intense scrutiny for its errors in both cases. Last summer, an independent review blasted the CCRC for a 'catalogue of failures'. For Michael Naughton, the workings of the criminal justice system were personal: growing up, he had friends and family members who had spent time in and out of trouble with the law. At the Innocence Project launch in 2004, moving testimony came from victims of miscarriages of justice, including Michael O'Brien, one of the three men wrongly imprisoned for the 1987 killing of Cardiff shop owner Phillip Saunders. They spoke of long wasted years in prison, followed by the immense task of rebuilding shattered lives. 'You're left to fend for yourself,' said O'Brien. 'I am one of the lucky few who managed to get a journalist to investigate my case.' Naughton spoke about the need to build bridges between campaigners and victims, politicians and legal professionals. He assured the room he was no naive middle-class do-gooder. 'I do not think that all those prisoners who say they are innocent are necessarily innocent,' he said. 'But there is nothing in the system to address this massive problem.' He told the BBC that £65m a year was being spent imprisoning people who had been wrongfully convicted. To bring about change would require sincerity and commitment. It would need leaders who combined these qualities with a flair for publicity, as well as the requisite combativeness. It seemed it would require, in short, figures very much like Dr Michael Naughton. The Bristol Innocence Project's first recruit was Gabe Harley, then Tan, who had arrived to study law in the UK from Singapore in 2004, aged 19. For a conscientious student with a keen interest in social justice, coming across Michael Naughton was transformational. During her relatively sheltered, middle-class upbringing, Harley had never thought to question Britain's reputation as a world leader when it came to criminal justice. It was shocking – and invigorating – to hear her new lecturer rail against the iniquities of the British legal system. Joining the Innocence Project seemed like a way to help right these wrongs. 'They didn't judge me as a 19-year-old student,' Harley had thought at the time. 'They wanted to inspire people. It sparked something [in] me.' Naughton explained that an innocence project could be a useful way of examining the law and holding it to account. Alongside education and research, the project's main function would be to investigate active cases. To qualify for inclusion, prisoners needed to show there were doubts about the facts of their case, and would need at least three years remaining on their sentences, to allow students enough time to examine the evidence. Applications would only be accepted by those who did not have legal representation. The innocence project would be a last resort. Naughton had looked to the US for inspiration. The first innocence project was established at Benjamin Cardozo Law School at Yeshiva University, New York, in 1992, and had quickly chalked up a number of successful appeals, many based on DNA tests. The idea spread, and by the turn of the millennium, there were 10 projects that began to meet annually in Chicago. In early 2004, the Innocence Network was founded, with an initial 21 university projects across the US signing up by the end of the year. If such a model could work there, then why not in the UK, Naughton wondered. The idea of students working on active casework was not entirely unprecedented in the UK. In 1997, students from Northumbria University had taken on the case of a man called Alex Allan who had been found guilty of robbery, which he denied. After seven years of painstaking work, his conviction was quashed in 2001. But what Naughton was planning was bigger, and more ambitious. Perhaps the greatest challenge faced by the Bristol Innocence Project was how to navigate the Criminal Cases Review Commission, the world's first statutory, state-funded body investigating potential wrongful convictions. It had been conceived as a radical solution to a crisis of public confidence in the criminal justice system, after a number of convictions connected to IRA bombings were found to be unsafe. The CCRC would refer a case back to the court of appeal only if it had identified new evidence which could lead to the real possibility of the conviction being overturned or the sentence reduced. No one was as outspoken on the problems with the CCRC as Michael Naughton. It was not the panacea that had been promised, he said. In fact, its creation had done harm by rendering wrongful convictions invisible in the eyes of the public. In the mid-2000s, the number of cases the CCRC referred back to the appeal courts was less than 40 in every thousand applications. (The imperative to bring fresh evidence presented applicants with a fiendishly high bar to clear.) In Naughton's view, the new body had no power of its own, and was little more than the 'lapdog' of the court of appeal. The CCRC's remit was 'too narrow', Naughton told the Guardian in June 2005. '[It] should be simply about getting innocent people out of jail.' Shortly after opening its doors, the Bristol Innocence Project was inundated with more than 150 applications, and Naughton's office – the project's HQ and nerve centre – was swiftly buried in stacks of casework and correspondence. Many involved prisoners serving lengthy sentences for murder and other serious acts of violence. 'We were receiving tons of these letters,' Gabe Harley recalled. 'We had to design a filtering system to narrow cases down.' Some of the applications seemed ludicrous. One correspondent admitted to stabbing a man in the groin, but argued that the fact he was drunk at the time meant he had been wrongfully convicted. Others were worth taking seriously. About 40 of these cases were assessed by an experienced local criminal defence lawyer, who advised that several merited further investigation. 'We really hoped that we would highlight these injustices that the CCRC and court of appeal were not prepared to [investigate] or overturn,' said Naughton when we spoke recently. 'And that would lead to widespread support for reform of the system, to make it better. We truly believed that.' Naughton's project initially received positive coverage in the press, but its place at Bristol University was precarious. As a sociologist operating in the occasionally stuffy confines of a law school, Naughton considered himself an outsider, partly because of his working-class roots. As he saw it, his colleagues sometimes mistook his plain speaking for abrasiveness. What was commonly understood on a factory floor did not always translate to faculty meetings. Early on, a senior colleague had objected to Naughton's appointment, on the grounds that someone who wasn't a lawyer should not be part of a law school. 'I said that's OK, I wouldn't hold it against him. He said it wasn't personal,' Naughton told me. After the initial press coverage, the university had offered him a room to operate from, though this would be the limit of their support. They would not be giving the project any money or further assistance. 'I said I hadn't asked for any assistance,' recalled Naughton. While navigating the choppy waters of faculty politics, the fledgling Bristol project was inspiring similar undertakings across the country. By the end of 2005, innocence projects had been inaugurated at universities from London to Leeds, all under the banner of Naughton's Innocence Network UK (INUK). In 2007, the investigative journalist Dr Eamonn O'Neill opened Scotland's first innocence project in Glasgow, which would investigate cases with the goal of sending them to the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission (SCCRC). The concept of clinical legal education – having law students sharpen their skills working with real clients – had become fashionable. What better introduction to criminal law, its proponents argued, than working with potential victims of miscarriages of justice? As well as working on its own caseload, Bristol would serve as a distribution centre for the growing network, sifting through applications from prisoners and assigning them to individual projects around the country. Students were certainly not given softball cases. At the Cardiff University Innocence Project, founded in 2005, students immediately began working on several cases of murder and serious assault. The project was set up by Prof Julie Price, a qualified solicitor and head of the university's pro bono unit. 'I went to Bristol at [Naughton's] invitation and looked through some of the files,' recalled Price. 'I came away with four of five murder cases. I got back to Cardiff and thought, 'Shit I have some serious cases here … what the bloody hell do I do with them?' [But] we were young and full of energy [and] thought we could change the world, the group of us together.' Prof Claire McGourlay co-founded the Sheffield University Innocence Project in late 2007. A few months earlier, she had travelled to Bristol for an Innocence Network event to examine the CCRC's first 10 years, which doubled as the launch of Naughton's book Rethinking Miscarriages of Justice. The atmosphere was electric. 'I went back to [Sheffield] and said: 'Right, this is what I want to do.' The amount of students that came forward was incredible.' At the Cardiff University Innocence Project, students under the guidance of Julie Price and Dennis Eady – a highly respected miscarriage of justice campaigner and lecturer in the law school – were making serious progress. Among the cases they were investigating was that of 18-year-old Dwaine George, who in 2002 had been found guilty of shooting another teenager dead in Manchester. Significant doubts had been raised over the quality of the forensic evidence used at trial. George's first appeal failed, and his case was picked up by students at Cardiff in 2006. Sarah Magill, who became student team leader on the George case, had arrived at the law school in 2007 aged 22, having already spent several years working as a paralegal. 'I got stuck into it quite quickly. We were pursuing new evidence around the gunshot residue,' she said. By 2009, George's case was one of six that the Cardiff team had developed to the point where they could be sent to the CCRC for review. The various projects worked on their own cases, but Michael Naughton's influence was everywhere. Not everyone was enamoured of his communication style. Even those who liked him recognised that he was divisive. 'You're Marmite, aren't you,' Naughton remembers Price telling him. 'People are either going to really like you, or they're going to take against you.' Dark mutterings soon began about INUK's apparent lack of tolerance for internal debate. For some, the network's strict focus on establishing factual innocence presented its own difficulties. For practitioners used to running traditional university legal clinics, the constraints of the law required a more pragmatic approach. If the goal was to chalk up overturned convictions, then sometimes it made sense to focus not on proving the client's innocence but to show how their convictions were unsafe in law. 'They [were] teaching students to be lawyers, not to challenge the law,' said Naughton. 'I'm about truth and you can't have justice without truth. [People] often don't like my brand of radicalism.' Naughton's vision was clear, but it was also uncompromising. Members of the Innocence Network were discouraged from attending events hosted by the CCRC. For Naughton, the priority was casework, not what he saw as cosying up to the establishment. Groups were also troubled by Naughton's intolerance of the slightest deviations from the party line. One veteran defence lawyer complained to a journalist that the tone of INUK debate brought to mind 'the bad old days' of leftwing infighting, distracting from the real problems they wanted to address. When I spoke to Claire McGourlay – current head of the Manchester University Innocence Project – she did not mince her words. 'I don't think it was anti-democratic,' she said. 'It was autocratic.' Others believed that innocence projects were giving students a distorted understanding of the legal profession. 'They need to realise that they can't always work for cases they find sympathetic,' Hannah Quirk, then a law lecturer at the University of Manchester, told the Independent in 2006. More fundamentally, people wondered whether the projects could even get results. An inexperienced student workforce, devoting themselves to cases that had already failed at appeal, did not look like a recipe for success. 'We're here to get a really good understanding of ancient legal principles,' said the president of the Cambridge University Law Society. In other words: activism should always be second place to traditional legal education. These reservations did not stop an INUK-affiliated innocence project opening at the university by the end of the decade. What the students lacked in experience they made up for in energy and idealism, of the kind that overstretched and underpaid criminal defence lawyers often found hard to muster. In 2011, students at Bristol began working with an ex-prisoner named William Beck, who had been jailed for six years aged 20 for his part in a violent 1981 bank robbery in the Scottish town of Livingstone. Despite the SSCRC twice refusing to send his case back to appeal, Beck had not given up hope of clearing his name, despite having long ago left prison. Two Bristol postgraduate students were assigned Beck's case almost immediately after joining the innocence project. In September 2012, the SCCRC announced it would refer the case back to the appeal court in Edinburgh, thanks to the Bristol students' work. 'To get that validation for our arguments felt great,' one of the students, Ryan Jendoubi, recalled. To some, it began to seem as if a successful exoneration by an INUK project was not merely imminent, but inevitable. If there was one case that encapsulated the idealism and energy of Naughton's Bristol Innocence Project – and its painful failures – it was that of Simon Hall. In April 2007, the Bristol project featured on the final episode of Rough Justice, a long-running BBC documentary series. The episode shadowed five students as they probed the case of 29-year-old Simon Hall, convicted of murdering Joan Albert, a 79-year-old friend of his mother, in her home near Ipswich in December 2001. Hall, jailed for life in February 2003, had protested his innocence from the moment of his arrest. In the programme, the students, including Gabe Harley, visit Hall's small Suffolk home town to meet his elderly parents. They also interview Hall – a pallid, quietly confident figure – in prison. Forensic experts commissioned by the project consider the clothing fibre evidence relied upon by the prosecution. A distinguished criminal defence barrister offers his professional view. 'Simon's case is really peculiar because there is no particular reason to suspect he is guilty of this offence,' Keir Starmer says. The fibre evidence, continues the future prime minister, is the one link holding the conviction together. 'It's a very odd case. It's circumstantial: break that central piece of evidence, and [it] falls apart.' In October 2009, thanks to the work of the Bristol Innocence Project, the CCRC referred the case back to the court of appeal. The CCRC accepted fresh expert opinion, commissioned by Naughton's team, showing that the clothing fibre evidence could have been misinterpreted. It was also argued that the prosecution's statistical evidence was misleading. Naughton and Harley were cautiously optimistic. Michael Mansfield – one of the best known defence lawyers in the country, who had acted for some of the Birmingham Six – signed on to represent Hall at the court of appeal. Hall's case became a minor cause celebre. By the early 2010s, a number of MPs were voicing their concern at the evidence underpinning his conviction. Meanwhile, the campaign for Hall's exoneration had developed plot twists worthy of a soap opera. A website, Justice 4 Simon, had been set up by a woman named Stephanie Bon, who was instrumental in drumming up early media support. She was then ousted by another Stephanie, a former colleague of Hall's, who married him in prison. Stephanie Hall was relentless in pressuring the CCRC for answers. When the appeal was finally heard over three days in December 2010, Michael Naughton was confident Hall would get a retrial. But in January 2011, Simon Hall's appeal was dismissed. 'We have no reason,' the judges wrote, 'to doubt the safety of the jury's verdict.' Despite his public displays of confidence at the time, Naughton says he was not entirely surprised by the court's decision. 'There were so many ups and downs,' he told me. At first, Hall's supporters were undaunted. His wife spoke publicly about the prospect of a further appeal. Private Eye continued to publish articles on the case. According to Gabe Harley, the setback did not sap the Bristol group's momentum. 'You think it's a pro bono thing to come and do alongside your studies, and it's impossible to leave at your door.' They kept going. Meanwhile, the wider university innocence movement was still growing. The coalition government was slashing legal aid budgets, leaving many people without representation. Students and academics were stepping in to fill the gap, and the number of INUK-affiliated innocence projects had climbed to 36 by 2013. Projects were now active from Plymouth to Durham, Lancaster to Bangor, North Wales. One was even inaugurated at the London office of White & Case, one of the world's most prestigious law firms. Yet Naughton was becoming increasingly disillusioned. 'We were obviously making mistakes, but trying our best. After [almost] 10 years you realise you had certain hopes and they were not actually being realised,' Naughton told me recently. Many innocence projects at other universities were not as collaborative as he had hoped. They 'only wanted to work together when it benefited them', he said. Personal tensions that had simmered from the earliest days of the movement were reaching boiling point. In 2012, a symposium hosted by INUK called for the urgent reform of the CCRC. The event featured high-profile journalists, academics and victims of wrongful conviction; the CCRC was not invited. Some asked if it was really helpful to attack a body that the innocence projects needed to keep onside if they were going to have any part in reforming it. In the buildup to the symposium, INUK had published a dossier of 44 cases of allegedly innocent prisoners who had been refused a referral back to the court of appeal. But at another conference later the same year, the CCRC's then legal adviser pointed out that they had received just 17 applications from a total of five INUK projects. For some members, INUK's lack of internal democracy was increasingly troubling. '[The network] doesn't actually exist,' one anonymous project director told a later academic researcher. 'It's nothing other than Michael.' Several projects, including Cardiff, Portsmouth, Winchester and Sheffield Hallam, left the fold to continue independently in the early 2010s. One former innocence project leader told me about a memorably disastrous event hosted in London, in the summer of 2013. One of the panel, the distinguished lawyer and academic Prof Michael Zander, a central figure in the initial formation of the CCRC, served as a lightning rod for the crowd's ire. 'All hell was breaking loose, with people shouting at this old professor,' the former innocence project head told me. At the break Michael [Naughton] seemed completely unfazed by the whole thing and seemed to think that it was all going well. Others, like me, felt the atmosphere was febrile and rackety.' Naughton believed that if his plain talking upset people, that was their problem. One afternoon, he recalled, he had answered the phone in his office. The man on the other end of the line asked if he was speaking to the head of the Innocence Network. He was calling on behalf of his head of department at a well-respected English law school, who were keen to start their own innocence project. What is an innocence project, Naughton had asked in response. The caller was perplexed. Couldn't Naughton tell him that? 'I told the bloke not to ring me up unless he knew what it was. The guy said he'd never call back if that's how I was going to talk to him. So I said: 'Goodbye then.'' In April 2013 came another setback: William Beck's appeal was rejected by the court of criminal appeal in Edinburgh. 'It was frustrating, of course,' recalled Ryan Jendoubi. He said the barrister had taken a different line, ignoring the students' argument. That August, the Bristol project suffered a more serious blow. After years claiming he had been the victim of a miscarriage of justice, Simon Hall suddenly confessed to the murder of Joan Albert. The media coverage ranged from quietly appalled to gleeful. The Daily Mail wrote excoriatingly about the naivety of Hall's 'hoodwinked' supporters. Albert's family welcomed the news in a public statement, outlining how painful they'd found the 12 years of relentless publicity. Students and lawyers who had worked tirelessly on Hall's case were left asking what had made him change his plea. But the question would remain unanswered. In February 2014, Simon Hall was found dead in his cell in Wayland prison, Norfolk. He had taken his own life. By the middle of 2014, the atmosphere at INUK meetings had become ugly. Claire McGourlay of the Manchester Innocence Project remembers a training event in Bristol, with the heads of several of the leading projects in attendance. Matters got off to a bad start when Naughton would not allow her co-director into the room, saying that only one representative would be permitted. The mood blackened as the project directors took turns to plead with Naughton to delegate some of the running of the network's day-to-day affairs. 'It was horrendous. You could feel the atmosphere,' McGourlay told me. 'There was an American speaker over and we weren't invited for dinner that evening. And that was it, I never spoke to Michael again.' Naughton agrees that the event drifted into acrimony, but told me that he had simply 'lost faith' in the many of the remaining projects by this time. That summer, Naughton called time on Innocence Network UK. After a decade of ceaseless work, he had had enough. The punishing 100-hour weeks had strained relations with his own family, and leadership of the increasingly unwieldy INUK had begun to feel like an impossible burden. Funding and burnout had also become persistent issues, he said. Several member universities were simply not pulling their weight, he added at the time, instead using their projects as 'recruiting tools' to attract students, without contributing meaningfully to casework. 'They were handing second year students cases and telling them to get on with it,' Naughton told me when we spoke last year. 'When they should be the ones leading the case.' Simon Hall's name was nowhere to be found in the official communication about INUK's disbandment, but his case may have been the final straw. Gabe Harley is cautious with her recollections of its unravelling. The Hall case 'was a traumatic event for everyone concerned,' she said. 'I don't think we were prepared for all of that.' After the end of INUK, Michael Naughton's health collapsed. 'I call it a breakthrough rather than a breakdown. My brain was fine but my body packed in,' he told me. 'The doctor said I was like a central heating [system] that should be running six radiators, but it was running 12. He said I was on the verge of a heart attack and a stroke.' Many university innocence projects closed over the following months and years. Today, around five official innocence projects remain in the UK, spread across Cardiff, London and Manchester. The intervening years have witnessed some limited successes. In December 2014, following work by the Cardiff project, the court of appeal overturned Dwaine George's 2002 murder conviction. Four years later, another Cardiff client was exonerated. Gareth Jones, a Welshman with complex learning difficulties, had been convicted for a serious sexual assault in the late 2000s. In 2018, the court of appeal quashed his conviction. In both cases, appeal judges praised the diligence and persistence of the Cardiff Innocence Project. Sarah Magill, the student leader on George's case, is now a criminal barrister at a chambers in Manchester. She remembers getting news of his exoneration as she prepared for a case in Preston crown court. 'I was delighted and overwhelmed,' she said. 'And sad, at the scale of the loss experienced by him and the victim's family.' George's story, like so many at the harshest end of the criminal justice system, is not straightforward. In March 2022, George – now going by Ibraheem Abdullah after his conversion to Islam while in prison – was jailed for 12 years for his part in a £1.2m cocaine smuggling plot. The CCRC continues to attract criticism. This January, the commission's chair, Helen Pitcher, stood down following 18 months of intense pressure after Andrew Malkinson's conviction was overturned. Pitcher told the Times she had been made a scapegoat. There is no doubt that the CCRC is a hollowed out institution. Between 2004 and 2023, its annual budget was cut by a third, despite its caseload doubling over the same period. The current backlog of cases sits at well over 1,000. Yet the CCRC's travails are just one part of an increasingly broken system. According to the Law Society, the number of duty solicitors – the representation given to those otherwise unable to afford it – has declined by a quarter since 2017 after catastrophic cuts to legal aid. The amount of people defending themselves in court has trebled over the past decade. Concerns have also been raised about the reliability of privatised forensic science labs across the country. In this dire climate, the need for effective support for potential victims of wrongful conviction are as acute as they have ever been. And so, perhaps unsurprisingly, new innocence projects are being launched. Tejal Roma-Williams, co-director of the new City Law School Innocence Project, joined the university in 2023 after a 12-year stint as both criminal defence solicitor and a senior prosecutor for the Crown Prosecution Service. Being well aware of the projects' complex history, she is keen to focus on achievable goals. When I met with the first intake of City students last year, they were working on just two cases. 'There shouldn't be a reliance on charities and universities when it comes to this kind of work,' Roma-Williams said, 'but while we deal with those bigger problems, at least [we] can help.' In 2016, the CCRC's then chair, Richard Foster, expressed his views on the value of university innocence work. 'If you think that you have a terminal illness, would you rather have your case considered by medical students in the bar on Friday night – or would you rather send it to a consultant oncologist?' But when I approached the CCRC with an interview request last year, the response was blandly conciliatory: 'Our purpose is to find, investigate and refer to the appeal courts potential miscarriages of justice. We welcome support from anyone that can help us to do this.' Measured in terms of overturned convictions, it is difficult to argue that the UK's university innocence projects have been anything other than a failure, particularly compared to their US equivalents. In 2021, the US National Registry for Exonerations recorded 2,708 convictions overturned since the start of the innocence projects. The Northeastern University legal scholar Daniel S Medwed has written that their success represents the 'civil rights movement of the 21st century'. Few would make that claim for their British counterparts. But the well-funded US projects do not have to contend with the UK's straitjacketed appeal system, or scramble around finding experts and lawyers willing, or able, to work for nothing. Yet success could be measured in other ways. For many of those who claim to have been wrongly convicted, innocence projects are still the only available means of legal support. When Cardiff surveyed 20 of their former clients, the overwhelming majority gave positive feedback even though the project had failed to overturn their convictions. 'They said we listened, that we tried our best. That we saw their point of view and approached with open minds,' said Eady, director of the Cardiff project. 'We have had quite moving letters saying 'you saved my life' and things like that.' Last December, Louise Hewitt, Professor of Law at the University of Greenwich and director of the London Innocence Project, introduced me to one of their current clients, a man in his 30s currently serving a life sentence for murder, having been convicted under the controversial joint enterprise law in the mid-2000s. After working on his CCRC application for several years, both he and Hewitt were quietly confident it was almost ready to send. On the phone from prison, he said: 'Louise knows I'm not someone to bank on anything. [But] when you see their enthusiasm and hard work … it's given me hope that there is a chance of a favourable decision.' Today, Michael Naughton no longer devotes his time to active casework. He is still heavily involved in teaching and research at Bristol, and receives dozens of messages every month from people claiming to be the victims of wrongful conviction. The passing years have not exactly mellowed him, but he has had time to reflect. 'I'm not a good leader,' he told me. 'I don't want to be a leader. I'm not very good at massaging people's egos.' In 2022, Naughton founded Empowering the Innocent, a research project focused on raising awareness about miscarriages of justice and their causes. Its website, CCRC Watch, carries articles examining the organisation's failings, with contributions from the wrongfully convicted and their advocates. There were still more than enough concerning cases to keep him busy. 'We might be crap at it. There might not be many people reading it, but I can't control that. We can only do what we can do.' Doubt is not a luxury Naughton permits himself. He believes in his calling just as strongly as he did back in the earliest days of the Bristol University Innocence Project. 'I don't care if I get any success. It's faith that drives me. I know what I'm doing is a just cause. And I'm not going to stop, because I know that it's the right thing to do.' Listen to our podcasts here and sign up to the long read weekly email here.
