By Thomas Lowenstein
New Orleans, LA, USA
When
I began work as an investigator at Innocence Project New Orleans in 2008, the
first thing they showed me was the file cabinet full of requests for help –
three thousand applications, give or take, from men and women in prison in
Louisiana and Mississippi. It was from this vast pool that the project selected
the inmates they would try to help – inmates who were not only factually
innocent, but also had a chance to win an appeal. They didn’t have the time or
resources to work on cases in which the defendant was at the crime scene but
didn’t pull the trigger, or rape cases in which the dispute came down to he
said/she said, or even cases in which they knew the defendant was innocent but
also knew that, legally, there was nothing else to be done – every avenue of
appeal had been exhausted, every issue raised.
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| Thomas Lowenstein |
The
screening process for taking cases started with that filing cabinet. Interns read
each application for help, wrote brief assessments of the issues involved and identified
reasons to think the inmate might actually be innocent and possible issues that
might be raised on appeal. The cases were then researched by lawyers and, if a
case was worth fighting, the defendant was put in “the queue” – cases waiting
for an investigator or attorney to have enough time to take it on. Even then
IPNO didn’t sign on to represent a defendant; they would investigate the case
for a year or more and then, if they thought they could help the defendant,
sign on to actually represent the inmate.
Out
of the 3,000 requests for help, IPNO could work about 25 cases at a time and
the “queue” was usually about ten cases long. In other words, if your case was on the IPNO “queue”, it meant
that you were very likely factually innocent and that something grossly unfair
had happened at your trial. And even then you had two or three years to wait
before IPNO could begin to investigate your case in depth.
After
I’d been working at IPNO a while I thought, Why
not get some journalism students to work on some of those cases, the ones IPNO might
never get to but were deserving of a look?
Fortunately,
Journalism Professor Jay Shelledy at the Manship School of Mass Communication
at LSU, was also interested in the idea; his students were already a
researching old, unsolved Civil Rights-era murders, and he welcomed the idea of
having some of them work on a potential innocence case.
Our
first collaboration proved how effective the model could be. Greg Bright, a
Louisiana exoneree, who’d spent 27½ years in prison for a crime he hadn’t
committed, had been out for several years but had never received his
compensation payment from the State. Greg came to LSU to speak to Professor
Shelledy’s class about his situation and one of the class members, Jake Clapp,
wrote a piece about Greg’s battle for his compensation that ended up running on
the front-page of the New Orleans
Times-Picayune. Within a couple of weeks, Greg had gotten not only his
money, but his first-ever apology from a member of the penal system that had
put him away unjustly for so long. And Clapp’s article provided important
context for a bill in the legislature that increased compensation for wrongfully
convicted inmates – a bill that became
law that spring.
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| Greg Bright |
When
I left IPNO a year or two later, I taught a class on criminal justice for Bard Early
College New Orleans, working with high school students to understand the
justice system that played such a huge role in the life of their city, as well
as in many of their own lives. After working with the Bard students, I decided that
I wanted the New Orleans Journalism Project (NOJP) to have two areas of focus: training
advanced-level journalism students in how to write about criminal justice
issues, and also teaching younger students about the history of the criminal justice
system here in the deep South, about how the media covers it, and how they can
learn to tell their own stories and the stories that matter most to their own
communities.
There was no journalism project like
this anywhere in the South, a region that could use one because the criminal
justice system here is in great need of scrutiny. Layoffs in the area’s media have
cut criminal justice coverage at the same time that higher-education budget
cuts eliminated a number of journalism classes. Too often, on issues like
criminal justice reform or education reform, New Orleans is used by national pundits
as an example of how this reform works or fails, or as evidence of the
soundness of one concept over another. This trend, along with the cutting of
newsroom budgets, means more people from out of town are writing about how New
Orleans works, which makes it more important than ever that the people actually
living in this system tell the stories that matter most to them and their
communities.
The New Orleans Journalism Project was
founded to help address this situation by educating students about how our
system works and by training young
journalists to do the kind in-depth, community-based storytelling that can help
people understand how our system affects the lives of those caught in it, as
well as the overall life of our city and region. The goal of the NOJP is to
create stories in various formats – written word, podcast, photo journalism,
videos – that will add to the community’s understanding of its criminal justice
system and therefore to the various reform efforts that are underway to improve
that system. And, in so doing, we will help train a new generation of thinkers
and storytellers to tell the stories that matter most to the people of New Orleans.
We
look forward to hearing your ideas for collaboration, for class work and for
stories that need to be told.
Links:
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Thomas
Lowenstein is the Founder and Director of the New Orleans Journalism Project
and the author of two books.