The following article on the new Indiana Innocence Project was first published by Mirror Indy on August 28, 2024.
The new Indiana Innocence Project is taking applications for clients.
Fran Watson wants you to know the Indiana Innocence Project is open for business.
The organization doesn’t yet have a headquarters (Watson said it will likely be based in Indianapolis with strong ties to Bloomington), and its application to become a nonprofit is still pending.
Even so, the organization is already taking applications for cases where individuals have been wrongfully convicted in Indiana. With initial funding from the Herbert Simon Family Foundation, the Indiana group will be a standalone nonprofit that will apply for membership in the Innocence Network, a nationwide coalition of organizations with similar missions.
As a member of the network, the Indiana Innocence Project would gain access to additional support and resources, including funding for clients after their exoneration. Indiana currently has one group that is part of the network, the Notre Dame Law School’s Exoneration Justice Clinic.
It’s somewhat of a homecoming for Watson. The Indiana Innocence Project will build on her decades-long career as the director of IU McKinney law school’s Wrongful Conviction Clinic, which was a founding member of the Innocence Network. Watson retired from the law school in 2022.
Mirror Indy caught up with Watson to talk about her work. This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
‘The criminal justice system is broken’
Why is it important that this work continues? Why is it important that the Indiana Innocence Project exists?
We’re only going to fix the errors in the criminal justice system when we care about the guilty as well as the innocent. The criminal justice system is broken, and it can be unprincipled, unfair, it can actually be based on lies.
And further, the government players can hide the truth from the innocent. So this is a real problem in our culture. One of the things that the innocence work has exposed is the reality of the variables behind wrongful conviction, such as witness (misidentification), police misconduct, false science.
The DNA cases led the way in this work. Without DNA, no one would ever believe public defender people like me who said they’re innocent. Then DNA comes along, and the math is the math, and the numbers are the numbers, and they don’t lie, you have the wrong man in prison, and you lied to put them there.
Us, the public, allows the government to do this over and over and over every day. That’s why you need organizations that are willing to say that, and raise money and then dig in deep, because the cases take a long time.
What’s leading to exonerations at this point?
If you put five people in a room and you, with their agreement, prick their finger, and they all go to drop a blood in a pile, and you mix that pile up, well, you would know all five people are in that mixture. But up until recently, science had no way of pulling the individuals out of the pile.
Now, if you’re a victim of a rape case, and when there’s biological material and they have the victim’s profile, they take the victim’s profile out and the one profile that’s left is the bad guy. But if there’s more than one profile left, in the past, it was impossible to separate the mixture reliably, and we can do that now.
So the advancing technology is allowing us to have more precise DNA analysis. What about when you don’t have DNA?
So one of my recent clients, I think the last client to be exonerated was a man named Leon Benson, and it was a murder case out of Marion County, in conjunction with the conviction integrity unit in a clinic out of San Francisco. There was no DNA that cleared him. In fact, the witness maintained her identification. Mr. Benson was cleared by exposure of Brady information, which is evidence that the Constitution requires you give to the defendant because it’s exculpatory.
And the police didn’t turn over evidence that pointed to another (person). So to get to that point takes a lot of legwork, a lot of time. To build relationships with witnesses, to get to truth, sometimes takes more than one or two visits. Truths are hard to get to if the science won’t unveil them.
How to get involved in the project
For Marion County residents, if they want to get involved, if they have a family member who they think is eligible for exoneration, what should they know about this organization?
So we have a website, indianainnocenceproject.org. There’s a form on there you can fill out to request assistance, and there’s a form on there you can fill out to volunteer. There’s a place you can send your questions. We’ve already started a volunteer list.
Before we opened for business, part of our research project was to collect data about requests for assistance and try to create an efficient, fair system of case selection that gets to the innocent as soon as possible.
You know, they don’t need to spend 15 years to be identified and another 10 to get out. If you could identify them up front and get them out in 10, you saved them 15 years, and you might even find the real bad guy quicker.
So we spent a lot of time building brainstorming, meeting with the stakeholders, so we could design an intake system from day one that has a structure that’s efficient and fair.
Innocence work takes time and persistence
I know exoneration is a lengthy process, but could you explain some of the emotions of going through this with your clients?
There’s a process, and I’ve explained it to clients and their families before as sort of a rip current. If you try to get in too early, once you file the petition, you’ll just drown. It’s a long process to file a post-conviction petition and succeed with convincing a judge that you’re the wrong person and that you’re entitled to exoneration.
So that’s trauma for everybody, and a lawyer with any degree of compassion is going to feel that. It’s hard, and it hurts you.
In the case of Mr. (Darryl) Pinkins, at one point, I think we counted them, 12 to 15 losses, and everybody suffers. (Pinkins was convicted in Indiana of rape, deviate sexual conduct and robbery in 1991. He was exonerated based on DNA evidence in 2016.) And then, you know, you set your shoulders up, get your head up, get back in it. Try some more.
And you have to just realize there are so many more people in prison that have lost these cases than have won them. And I could give you my losses of people who were super, super innocent, I believe to my soul, and have not been successful yet.
So we celebrate the victories, because that’s uplifting, and they should be celebrated. But there’s plenty of work out there to do.
Featured image: Vernon T. Bateman posing at the opening event for the Indiana Innocence Project. Credit: Indianapolis Liberation Center
