By Stacey Evans
Boxes of evidence and court documents reveal more of the story. Physical evidence never tested. Ineffective counsel who failed to provide even the basics of representation, including not submitting evidence into discovery. Murder weapons never examined for fingerprints. A mother convicted of murdering her daughter asking why the police officer who was stalking her prior to the murder was never investigated. DNA testing that, years later, doesn’t match.
The documents paint a picture of a system that is failing many. Reading through them as an extern with the Georgia Innocence Project (GIP) has been an eye-opening experience, Jones said.
But among the desolation, she finds some inspiration.
“In some of these letters, the inmates cite case law better than law students,” Jones said. “They are educating themselves, and working hard to prove their innocence. It makes me think I should work harder.”
That inspiration is a lifeline during her sometimes draining work with GIP, which dedicates countless hours to helping the underserved and wrongly convicted.
“When you look at how many cases have been exonerated with DNA evidence—335 in the United States and six in Georgia—it seems like such a small number, but these cases are so hard to find and litigate, which makes this an extremely significant number,” said Aimee Maxwell (J.D. ’87), GIP's executive director, who has worked with the externs as a practitioner in residence at the College of Law. “Getting one human being out of prison is an enormous impact to that person. But helping to make the criminal justice system better for everyone, by pointing out the problems and hopefully finding solutions to them, is the broader impact of this work.”
Maxwell and her externs spent two weeks working on campus and answering questions from students about GIP, its current and past cases and even the popular Netflix documentary series, “Making a Murderer.”
An overburdened system
For many people, it’s shocking to see how things can go wrong in the criminal justice system, Maxwell said of the series, which—along with the podcast “Serial”—has exposed how difficult it can be to find all the information necessary for a trial.
“The devil is in the details, but how do you track all those details down?” she said. “The biggest lesson we learn having this insider access is how complicated any criminal case is and how much time it takes to fully investigate the case. It’s so frightening to think there are public defenders in every courtroom in this country with 50 people on a trial calendar. There is no way they can investigate each case fully.”
Once a person is convicted of a crime, reopening the case takes “superhuman” effort, Maxwell said. And finding the actual documents and evidence from cases that happened years, sometimes decades, ago is an even slower process.
GIP’s quickest exoneration was 18 months, and some of their cases have dragged on for 13 years.
“The criminal justice system is designed for finality,” Maxwell said. “Once you’re convicted, that’s it. People want to solve a case and move on, and we are forcing them to look backwards.”
The best remedy to that problem is to make sure people don’t get wrongfully convicted in the first place, Maxwell said, but public defenders don’t have the same resources as the state.
“That needs to be remedied,” Maxwell said. “If you bring a criminal charge against someone, you need to make sure the people who are representing them have the resources they need.”
Persistence and perseverance essential
Although it’s a maddening process, some cases are so compelling in their innocence, it’s impossible to let them go, Maxwell said.
One case that still haunts her is that of a man convicted of murder in 2001 who’s serving life without parole. All the physical evidence tested before his trial—fingerprints, shoe prints and clothing—were negative matches. A ski mask found in the victim’s car, which the gunman drove away in after the murder, was never tested.
The GIP filed a motion to test the mask in 2011. The result? It bore only one biological sample, a match to a man who worked with the victim, and who was later convicted of another homicide and armed robbery. So GIP filed a motion for a hearing, and later, an application for discretionary appeal with the Supreme Court of Georgia. Both were denied.
Every few years the organization goes back through the process again, hoping to find new evidence or the needed documents stuck in the back of a filing cabinet.
“It does happen,” Maxwell said. “I had a death penalty case from 1981 that even at trial they said the evidence was gone. Last summer our externs found it in the district attorney’s office—it really wasn’t missing.”
The GIP sent the items—an envelope containing a bathrobe belt and necktie the victim was bound and gagged with—in for DNA testing. They expect the results this summer.
‘An opportunity to do something incredible’
Externship opportunities with GIP are available every semester. In addition to learning the importance of building a good client relationship, Maxwell said she hopes externs learn the importance of fully investigating a case and how they should (and shouldn’t) conduct themselves as attorneys.
“It doesn’t matter what type of law you practice, you have to be the one that knows the most about your case,” she said. “And we make a lot of assumptions about cases. ‘Making a Murderer’ and ‘Serial’ have shown us there is always something else to be found.”
GIP receives around 500 letters per year, and works on about 200 cases at any given time, Maxwell said.
“I chose to extern for the Georgia Innocence Project because there are a lot of opportunities to do your own research and help move a case forward,” Jones said. “Even an extern has the opportunity to do something incredible with a case.”
PHOTOGRAPHY: STEVEN THACKSTON