NEWS

June 30, 2008
Legal group in Iowa aims to review convictions

The odds of a judge overturning a murder conviction in Iowa are minute, but a handful of lawyers are out to change that.

The lawyers have created the state's first innocence project to investigate alleged cases of wrongful conviction. The all-volunteer effort promises to increase the chances that more Iowa inmates will be exonerated for crimes they didn't commit, national experts say.
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"There's no question that we have more of these cases now - there have been more than 1,300 documented exonerations in the U.S. going back to the 1800s," said Rob Warden, who heads one of the country's most successful innocence projects at Northwestern University. "Before we had modern science, they were rare. Now with DNA evidence and more innocence projects, they are much more common."

One case in Iowa that doesn't involve DNA but has the potential for a first-degree murder conviction being overturned is that of David Flores. Des Moines police admitted in court this month that they did not give Flores' lawyers a 1996 FBI report in which another man was named a suspect in the shooting death of bank executive Phyllis Davis.

Flores has served 12 years in prison. He is expected to have a hearing next month at which Polk County District Judge Don Nickerson will be asked to decide whether Flores' conviction should be vacated because the evidence that was withheld could have changed the outcome of his trial.

At least 38 university-based innocence projects exist across the country. Some of them, such as in California, Illinois, Ohio, New York and Wisconsin, have had a great deal of success, Warden said.

The availability of DNA testing has made a big difference: Last month, Warden's innocence project in Illinois helped win the freedom of a Chicago man who served nearly 14 years in prison for the sexual assault of a 15-year-old girl. Newly acquired DNA evidence proved 41-year-old Dean Cage did not attack the girl as she walked to school in 1994. The victim had identified Cage as her attacker.

Some 216 such exonerations have taken place in the United States since 1989.

The last Iowa prisoner to have a life sentence for murder overturned after his appeals were exhausted was Terry Harrington. Harrington served 26 years at the Iowa State Penitentiary after being convicted for the 1977 shotgun slaying of retired Council Bluffs police officer John Schweer.

Mary Kennedy, the Waterloo defense lawyer arguing Flores' appeal, worked nine years on Harrington's case. Harrington was freed in 2003. Like Cage in Illinois, Harrington never stopped insisting that he did not commit the crime. But he was not freed until Kennedy and another woman took up his cause and uncovered new evidence that pointed to another suspect.

Just two other people have been freed in Iowa since the 1990s after appeals have been exhausted in hearings for a post-conviction review, according to the Iowa attorney general's office. A third person was freed but was tried again and convicted.

Experts say people who are wrongfully convicted are uniformly poor and disproportionately a minority. One recent study by the Innocence Project in New York, the nation's first program founded in 1992, showed at least 156 of 216 people exonerated through DNA testing were African-American, Latino or Asian American.

Many of the cases also fall apart when scrutinized for unreliable or limited science, faulty eyewitness accounts, false confessions, poor defense work and unreliable testimony from informants, experts say.

The nonprofit Innocence Project of Iowa began last year out of a discussion among lawyers at Drake University who wanted to start their own program. Years ago, the University of Iowa's law school provided legal assistance to Iowa prison inmates, but it never had a program focused exclusively on exonerating people believed to be wrongfully convicted.

Brian Farrell, a Cedar Rapids attorney who specializes in appeals and post-conviction cases, said the group could not find a home or funding at the state's two big law schools at the U of I or Drake, but both schools nonetheless liked the idea of getting students involved.

"The motivation goes back to our belief that one of the worst things that can happen in society is for an innocent person to be deprived of liberty," said Farrell, who is on the group's board of directors. "Even if it happens once, that's too much."

Mark Gruwell, program coordinator for the paralegal-legal studies program at Iowa Lakes Community College, said about a dozen of his students have been reviewing correspondence from inmates, which the organization has been soliciting since last fall.

Those students submit analyses and reports, which are forwarded to a committee in Des Moines. That committee decides whether to reject a case or look into it more. From there, law and journalism students at the U of I will assist pro-bono defense lawyers with cases worth pursuing.

The project has identified two cases to pursue thus far.

Drake law students also are expected to get involved in the future.

"This is an excellent way to not only provide an excellent community service, but to provide hands-on skills for students working with real cases," Gruwell said.

Farrell said the project's only financial support is from the Iowa Public Defender's Association, but it hopes to develop other sources of funding.

The group also plans to advocate for policy changes to limit the potential for wrongful conviction, he said. Last year, members of the group worked on a bill in the state Legislature that would have required police interrogations recorded by audio and/or video.

The bill failed, but Farrell said he and others hope to work out disagreements between different legal groups to pass a similar measure next year.

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