Courses

    Wrongful Convictions is an experiential course designed to combine an academic seminar with actual investigations of prisoner’s claims concerning innocence. The course will be conducted in conjunction with the Mid-Atlantic Innocence Project, a non-profit organization dedicated to correcting and preventing wrongful convictions in the District of Columbia, Maryland, and Virginia. The seminar portion of the course will provide an understanding of the various ways innocent people are convicted and discuss remedies for exoneration. The seminar discussions will systematically prepare students to undertake the investigations necessary to assess prisoners' claims of factual innocence.

This is a four credit course. Two credits will be awarded for the two-hour weekly seminar in the Fall, one credit for 5 hours per week of field work on Innocence Project "cases" in the fall semester, and one credit for 5 hours per week of field work on "cases" in the Spring semester. Although there are no formal classes in the Spring, team members will meet with the faculty weekly about their cases. Students will act as intake investigators to determine whether representation of a prisoner’s claim of innocence should be undertaken. The work entails understanding core legal concepts relating to criminal trials, reading transcripts, performing legal analysis, and investigating cases in order to determine whether an inmate has a claim worth pursuing. Although the investigations are as varied as the cases, they can generally be placed into two categories; (1) cases involving searches for DNA evidence, and (2) cases involving non-biological evidence. In all of the cases, students, supervised by the faculty and MAIP staff and volunteers, will work with the prisoner, former attorneys, courts, and police departments, to create complete files. Once the file is complete, students will read the documents and work with their supervisors to determine an investigative strategy. In DNA cases, students contact (and sometimes visit) courthouses, police departments, labs, and hospitals to determine whether any testable physical evidence remains in files or warehouses from cases that are often decades old. In non-DNA cases, student will interview eyewitnesses, alibi witnesses, co-defendants, and, in some cases, alternative suspects, and perform other necessary investigation. If the student investigations are successful, the cases are assigned to attorneys who enter an appearance on behalf of the inmate. Ideally, the students who worked on the case will remain involved with it once it is assigned to an attorney, thus preserving continuity and providing students with an even fuller experience.

The seminar portion of the course will be graded based on reaction papers submitted weekly. The field work will graded as well. There is no final exam. Grading for all credits will occur at the end of the Spring Semester.

The course will be limited to twelve students working in groups of three. All students are welcome to apply. Selection preference will be given to students who were members of the Innocence club in a prior year. The classes will be taught by Professor Wallace Mlyniec and Adjunct Professor Shawn Armbrust, Director of MAIP.