Last updated: September 2006
Let justice be done...

A new television series, ‘The Innocence Project’, follows a team of ambitious law students fighting for justice where they believe miscarriages of justice lie uncorrected. The series has parallels with real-life ‘innocence projects’ in America and in this country, but how far does fiction meet fact?
JONATHAN KENNEDY investigates…

This autumn ‘The Innocence Project’ will hit our screens on BBC One, and is the latest series to come from producer Paul Abbott, whose earlier successes include ‘The Girl in the Café’ and ‘To The Ends Of The Earth’, and follows the fortunes of a group of law students hand-picked by Professor Jon Ford, played by Lloyd Owen from BBC’s ‘Monarch of the Glen’. The students take on cases pro bono (a Latin legal term meaning ‘for the good’) that nobody else wants to know about; cases that people have forgotten or have given up on. Talented and with an infectious enthusiasm, Professor Ford’s team is made up of fresh-faced nineteen-year-olds who choose to make a difference while still going through the serious business of growing up, Their job is part investigator, part lawyer - and all before they’re out of full time education. Sounds like great TV. But how much of this fiction is fact?

The first real-life ‘innocence project’ sprang up in America in 1992. Law students at Yeshiva University in New York began to re-examine old and forgotten cases with the aim of exonerating wrongfully convicted individuals through post-conviction DNA evidence. Most of their clients were poor and without the means to access the often expensive justice system in the United States and the Yeshiva project offers them free advice on their cases and since 1992 it has grown to become much more than a ‘court of last resort’. Yeshiva now helps to organise a larger Innocence Network of law schools, journalism schools and public defender offices across America that assists those in prison in trying to prove their innocence. The project points to mistaken eyewitness accounts, corrupt scientists, overzealous police and prosecutors, inept defense counsel, poverty and racial discrimination as common causes for wrongful conviction, causes that may be as common in America as they are here. In the first 130 convictions that Yeshiva overturned, 101 were a result of mistaken identity, and to date 183 people have been exonerated.
The project then spread across to the UK, with the establishment of the Innocence Network UK at the University of Bristol School of Law in 2004. Its aims are to raise public awareness of wrongful convictions as a continuing cause for concern, despite the creation of the Criminal Cases Review Commission, to facilitate research that identifies the causes of wrongful convictions in the interests of effecting legal reform to reduce the occurrence of wrongful convictions, and to encourage the establishment of Innocence Projects within universities in the UK. “Our system of justice is not about the objective truth of a suspect or defendant’s guilt or innocence. Adversarial justice is a contest, regulated by principles of due process; compliance with the rules and procedures of the legal system. During the legal process, errors can be made, and forms of malpractice occur, with the result that some guilty offenders will be acquitted and some innocent people will be wrongly convicted,” explains the network’s website.

“The Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC), the body set up in the wake of notorious cases such as the Guildford Four and the Birmingham Six, was not designed to rectify the errors of the system and ensure that the innocent overturn their wrongful convictions…A particular problem then is that even if the CCRC have evidence that indicates that an applicant is innocent, but this evidence was available at the original trial, the case may not be referred to the Court of Appeal…Against this background, the Innocence Network UK (INUK) is a university-based initiative that derives from the observation that academic research on the causes of wrongful convictions is an essential part of realising corrective reform of the criminal justice system.”

Peter Wolfenden, a law graduate from Manchester University and now starting bar school, was involved with Manchester’s pro bono legal advice centre as an undergraduate and says he’s impressed with the new BBC series. “I got to spend part of a day on the set and I was really surprised at the way it had been set up. I spoke to one of the actresses and told her that it was just like a room that I could sit down and work in, it was quite realistic… As an undergraduate, when you realise that your advice could have a material bearing on someone’s life instead of just answering an abstract academic problem, it drives home what you aim to do in practice in your career.”

Has he seen any success stories in his work so far? “There are a few cases in the pipeline. We deal with a variety of cases. There was recently an unfair dismissal case which involved quite substantial damages, and the centre is currently working on appeals against convictions for attempted murder, one of which could be heard before the Court of Appeal next year.”

And with another innocence project under way at Cardiff University’s School of Law and interest in INUK programmes at Aberystwyth, Nottingham Law School, Reading and Warwick it would seem the message of righting legal wrongs may take hold at law schools across the country, and just not confined to the televisual comforts of our living rooms.
innocencenetwork.org.uk