Innocent until proven guilty is a concept many of people are familiar with. Unfortunately mistakes are made all the time and people are sentenced to decades or even life in prison for crimes they didn’t commit.
“Fact: innocent people go to prison,” said Lauren McLane, a professor in the UW College of Law and director of the Defender Aid Clinic this last summer.
Andrew Johnson, one such person, spoke at UW this week about his journey from wrongful imprisonment to being released. He ended up serving a total of 24 years in prison after being falsely accused of crimes in 1989.
Johnson reached out to the Rocky Mountain Innocence Center (RMIC), a nonprofit that works to correct and prevent wrongful convictions in the region, asking them for help in 2001. He had been charged and convicted for sexaul assault and burglary. A few months after receiving his letter, the organization took on Johnson’s case.
“We only take cases where the defendant is wholly innocent,” said Jennifer Springer, the current managing attorney for RMIC. “We don’t take cases that try to prove consent, self defense or if there’s any sign that they are guilty, we close the case and move on.”
To qualify for exoneration a person must be imprisoned for a crime they did not commit. The process of being exonerated usually begins when inmates write and send out letters asking advocacy groups to help them introduce new evidence like DNA testing or bring forth evidence that may have been withheld during trial.
“There are a number of reasons why people end up wrongfully imprisoned,” McLane said in Monday’s presentation. “The big three we see are false accusations, misidentification by eyewitnesses and official misconduct.”
RMIC worked with various groups to get legislation passed in Wyoming to allow for the submission of new DNA evidence in cases to prove innocence. Johnson was eventually proven innocent after the DNA testing. Students are allowed to work for credit on cases alongside attorneys at RMIC; some UW College of Law students helped research and find information for Johnson’s case between 2001 and 2013.
Following Johnson’s release, Wyoming implemented additional laws for those seeking exoneration, making it one of five states with Actual Innocence laws, which allow people to attempt to prove their innocence without DNA testing.
To date, 2,266 people across the United States have been exonerated. Groups like RMIC, dedicated to correcting wrongful convictions, exist around the country. The national organization The Innocence Project originally started in New York and has now spread across the country and the world, operating in over 46 states and a handful of countries that practice common law.
Some states look to compensate exonerees for the decades they’ve lost, but Wyoming currently does not have any systems or laws in place to do so.
RMIC and other organizations look to reform practices and pass legislation to help exonerees and prevent them from being prosecuted in the first place.
