Nine months after he was exonerated in Houston, Ronnie Taylor is building a new life. He lives in Atlanta and is married to his longtime girlfriend, Jeanette Brown, who waited for him while he served 14 years behind bars. He owns his own lawn care business.

(He) says that "everything's going lovely, man," and only when you press him will he tell you about his medical problems, his lack of health insurance, his debt and the trouble he has on job and credit and rental applications explaining 14 missing years of his life.

An article in the Houston Press this week catches up with Taylor and looks back at the long, hard years he spent in prison, waiting for a chance to prove his innocence. The article also examines the state of criminal justice in Houston and statewide in Texas, and finds that reforms haven’t moved fast enough to prevent future injustice like Taylor’s.

Texas has experienced 34 DNA exonerations - more than any other state - and "these compounding exonerations," as State Senator Rodney Ellis says, "are clear and convincing evidence that our criminal justice system is broken." Time after time, Ellis has pushed reforms to prevent the conviction of innocent people, but most of these proposals have been defeated, mostly on the grounds that they're unnecessary. Ellis is baffled. Only in criminal justice, he says, do "you get a knee-jerk reaction that the system is just fine and improvements aren't needed. At times, it seems there's more of an effort in trying to ignore mistakes than any real effort to address them."

Read the full story here. (Houston Press, 10/09/08)

Watch a video interview with Ronnie Taylor here.

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As the deadline nears for Michigan lawmakers to renew a DNA access bill, there is speculation about when - or whether - the State Senate will act to extend the rights of prisoners to apply for DNA testing that can prove their innocence.

Donna McKneelen, the co-director of the Innocence Project at Cooley Law School in Lansing, says enacting the testing law is necessary to protect the rights of defendants, and public safety.

"Unless the state Senate makes this bill a priority," she says, "innocent people will remain in prison while the actual perpetrators of crime remain at large."

Read an update here. (Detroit Metro Times, 10/08/08)

Read coverage of the issue in the Grand Rapids Media Mouse blog.

Innocence Project supporters in Michigan are speaking up to their Senators this week, urging them to extend the law. If you live in Michigan, send your email now.

If you live outside of Michigan, send the campaign to friends in the state.

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Robert Caulley has been in prison since 1997 for the murder of his parents - a crime he says he didn’t commit. He was the first to report the crime, calling police to tell them he found his parents bludgeoned to death in their Grove City, Ohio, home. But three years after the crime, police focused on Caulley as a suspect. Although he repeatedly asked for an attorney, he was interrogated for 12 hours, and allegedly made a statement admitting guilt. He says that statement was coerced and he is innocent.

Now new DNA test results in the case could prove that he’s right. DNA from an unknown person has been found on a gun found in the house, which also had blood from Caulley’s father on it. Caulley’s attorneys are seeking to run the new unknown profile in a federal database and also test it against two possible alternate suspects.
Caulley said watching another Columbus man freed in August (Robert McClendon) after DNA proved him innocent put his own "uphill battle" in perspective.

"It does give me hope, because you see things do change and get corrected," Caulley, 43, said in an interview yesterday at the North Central Correctional Institution.

Read the full story here. (Columbus Dispatch, 10/04/08)

Also in Ohio, authorities are planning to run in the database a DNA profile from a 1990 rape case in which Brian Piszczek was wrongfully convicted. Piszczek spent three years in prison before DNA testing proved his innocence, but it wasn’t until recently that a Columbus Dispatch investigation again sparked interest in checking the database for the real perpetrator in the case. In nearly 40 percent of wrongful convictions overturned by DNA, the evidence also leads to the identity of the real perpetrator.

Today marks the 14th anniversary of Piszczek's exoneration. Read more about his case here. (Columbus Dispatch, 10/05/08)

Read about dozens of other possible wrongful convictions in the Dispatch’s five-part series “Test of Convictions“.

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With five weeks left in the Michigan State Senate’s legislative session, the deadline for lawmakers to extend a critical DNA access law is fast approaching. For months, the Senate Judiciary Committee has stalled progress of a bill to extend the state’s DNA access law, which allows prisoners to apply for DNA testing to prove their innocence and expires on January 1, 2009. If the committee doesn’t send the bill to the full Senate soon, prisoners in Michigan could lose their last chance at proving their innocence.

In an article in today’s Detroit News, Michigan exoneree Ken Wyniemko calls for lawmakers to extend the right to DNA testing because there are more innocent people behind bars in the state.

"Time is running out," said Wyniemko of Rochester Hills, who is among four people in Michigan freed from prison with the help of DNA. "Nobody else should have to go through what I went through, and what the others went through."

Read the full article here.

Innocence Project supporters across Michigan this week are sending letters to the Senate Committee on the Judiciary.

Do you live in Michigan? Send your letter today.

Have friends or family in Michigan? Forward them info on this campaign so they can protect justice in their state.

Yesterday’s blog post on this issue included a video interview with Wyniemko about the pending legislation.

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Law students are receiving hands-on experience this year in a new innocence clinic at the University of Virginia School of Law. The Innocence Project and more than 40 other organizations worldwide form the Innocence Network, an affiliation of organizations dedicated to providing pro bono legal and investigative services to individuals seeking to overturn wrongful convictions. With the addition of the UVA Innocence Project in June, the network became one project stronger.

And the new project at UVA will accept cases in which defendants are seeking to prove their innocence by means other than DNA. Only 5 to 10 percent of criminal convictions do not involve biological evidence, and there are certainly innocent people in Virginia’s prisons whose cases cannot be resolved by DNA testing. Law students at UVA will investigate these cases to determine if there is evidence of innocence that can overturn a conviction on appeal.

Led by Deirdre Enright, a 1992 Law School graduate and experienced capital post-conviction lawyer, the clinic includes 12 students each year and will soon employ a full-time investigator to help collect evidence for appeals.

“This is sort of the dream class if you’re a law student because it involves great issues for research that are topical - DNA, new techniques in DNA, new testing, eyewitness ID, jailhouse informants, poor lawyering, poor prosecuting -it’s all these great cutting-edge issues,” Enright said.

“The Innocence Project at UVA School of Law will bring critical expertise and resources to investigating wrongful conviction cases,” Innocence Project Co-Director Peter Neufeld said. “We know that innocent people are convicted and spend years or decades in prison in Virginia, and this clinic will help exonerate more of them.”

Read more here. (UVA press release, 09/30/08)

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Michigan is one of 43 states with a law allowing inmates to seek post-conviction DNA testing if there is potential to prove their innocence, but that could change if state lawmakers don’t act in the next six weeks. The state’s DNA access law is set to expire on January 1, 2009, if lawmakers don’t act by the end of the legislative session. The measure, which also requires that evidence be preserved after prisoners are convicted, passed the House of Representatives, but it is stalled in the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Marla Mitchell-Cichon, the co-director of the Cooley Law School Innocence Project in Lansing, Michigan, wrote in today’s Detroit News that it is critical that lawmakers protect justice by passing this law.

Lawmakers have an obligation to Michiganians to extend a law that promotes justice and is cost-effective. The time to act is now — before an innocent person loses his or her chance for freedom. Justice demands it.

Read the full story here. (Detroit News, 10/2/08)

Watch a video of exoneree Ken Wyniemko explaining why he believes all innocent men and women should be able to prove their innocence, as he did in 2003.

What you can do:

Innocence Project supporters in Michigan are sending emails today to members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, urging them to move the legislation to the full Senate. Do you have friends in Michigan? Tell them about the campaign here.

If you live outside of Michigan, please sign our petition for DNA access today.

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