The Innocence Project Northwest first entered the public eye when it helped obtain the release of several individuals convicted in the Wenatchee sex ring cases. Since the project’s inception in 1997, volunteer students, professors and attorneys have successfully challenged the convictions of 12 wrongfully convicted people in Washington.
Following the Wenatchee successes, IPNW’s founder and director, Jacqueline McMurtrie, secured funding and approval to create a clinic at the University of Washington School of Law. Beginning in fall of 2002, the Innocence Project Northwest Clinic began offering students training in investigating and litigating claims of innocence on behalf of prisoners serving long sentences for serious crimes. The clinic builds upon the successes of the IPNW and provides students with a background in case investigation and in post-conviction law practice in state and federal court.
The clinic represents indigent people in Washington who are serving long prison terms, who claim their innocence and who no longer have a right to court-appointed counsel. IPNW takes cases that involve a variety of serious felonies such as assault, murder and sexual abuse. Each month, more than 50 new requests for assistance are received from inmates. However, due to limited resources, the clinic restricts its representation to individuals convicted within Washington.
In preparing to represent clients who seek review of their convictions, clinic students spend time covering topics such as coerced confessions, the suggestibility of child witnesses, eyewitness identification and how one determines which identifications are made in good faith, but might be wrong. All this helps students understand the importance of what can be done at the front end of a case to ensure the integrity of evidence.
Students in the IPNW Clinic have briefed and argued cases in Superior Court, the Washington Court of Appeals and Supreme Court, the District Courts of Eastern and Western Washington and the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.
McMurtrie has been impressed over the years by the work of IPNW Clinic students. “I am so grateful for the dedication my students put into these cases,” she said, “and they do it knowing they may never get to see someone walk out of prison or experience a victory during the year they are here.”
Most recently, the IPNW Clinic won the first new trial in Washington based on newly discovered DNA evidence. The Court of Appeals (Division III) granted the personal restraint petition of Ted Bradford and reversed his 1996 rape and burglary convictions on the basis of post-conviction DNA evidence.1
Bradford’s case was one of the first cases taken on by the newly formed IPNW Clinic and McMurtrie and her students have advocated on Bradford’s behalf for more than five years. Bradford’s case is the twelfth success for the IPNW, including the release of 10 people wrongfully convicted in the high-profile Wenatchee sex cases and a “post-Wenatchee” victory obtaining the release of an individual convicted of first-degree assault in Grant County.
McMurtrie is an associate professor at the U.W. School of Law who just recently received tenure. She teaches evidence and previously directed the school’s Criminal Law Clinic and taught criminal law. Before joining the law school faculty in 1989, she worked as a staff attorney and supervising attorney for the Seattle-King County Public Defender Association.
Even after 10 years, the IPNW Clinic continues to make its mark in Washington as a leading advocate for the wrongly convicted. Last month, McMurtrie and the IPNW Clinic won a motion for post-conviction DNA testing in Clark County. Also, the Washington Supreme Court accepted review in the case of Alexander Nam Riofta, who was denied post-conviction DNA testing of a hat worn by the perpetrator of a shooting for which Riofta was convicted.2 In August, the clinic won another motion for post-conviction DNA testing in a Yakima County case. The clinic also has worked with prosecutors’ offices to obtain agreed motions for post-conviction DNA testing in several other cases.
The IPNW is celebrating its 10th anniversary on October 11 with a special screening of “The Trials of Darryl Hunt” at 7:00 p.m. at the Varsity Theater. Hunt, and his attorneys Mark Rabil and Ben Dowling-Sendor, will be in attendance to discuss Hunt’s 19-year struggle for freedom. The 2007 HBO documentary follows Hunt’s case from the brutal murder of Deborah Sykes in Winston-Salem, N.C., in 1984, to 2004, when Hunt won his freedom. Immediately following the film, there will be an after-party at the Burke Museum. Tickets are available at http://www.law.washington.edu/Clinics/IPNW.html.
As McMurtrie explained, “Few injustices compare to that of convicting an innocent person of a crime. Students in the Innocence Project Northwest Clinic provide a voice to the wrongly convicted by investigating and litigating claims of innocence on behalf of inmates who would have no other access to justice.”
And, in the words of IPNW Clinic graduate Lila Silverstein (’06): “My clinic clients reminded me that justice is always worth fighting for no matter how long the odds.”
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Sharon Perlin is the director of outreach for the Clinical Law Program at the University of Washington School of Law.
1 See Personal Restraint Petition of Ted Louis Bradford, No. 24448-2, August 14, 2007, at http://www.courts.wa.gov/opinions/index.cfm?fa=opinions.showOpinion&filename=244482MAJ; see also 2007 Wash. App. LEXIS 2438.
2 See State v. Riofta, 134 Wn. App. 669 (2006). Riofta was convicted of first-degree assault after a young man wearing a white hat fired several shots in an apparent retaliatory attack on the brother of the State’s key witness in the July 1998 Trang Dai Café murders in Tacoma. The shooter left the white hat behind when he fled the scene.
