Professor Will Hellerstein (second row, left) and Former Professor Daniel Medwed (second row, right) with their dedicated students.

The mission of the “Second Look Program” is daunting: to free innocent prisoners whose appellate remedies have run their course. The clinic’s mandate is to review the cases of New York State prisoners who assert their innocence and whose cases do not require the use of DNA testing. The clinic fills a desperate need, since there are no other programs in New York City that focus exclusively on non-DNA innocence cases. It has already received over 600 requests for help. These cases, which generally involve erroneous eyewitness identification, false confessions, ineffective counsel, and police and prosecutorial misconduct, are believed to be the hardest to “crack,” because generally they do not turn on scientific proof but on newly discovered evidence secured through extensive legwork.

Professors William E. Hellerstein and Marjorie M. Smith instruct and serve as mentors to the students in this program. Under faculty supervision, ten students work in teams of two evaluating the innocence claims. Specifically, each team is assigned to a case that the clinic is actively investigating, and each student also screens requests for assistance by inmates. The screening process may involve legal research, conducting field investigations – speaking to investigators, former witnesses, and jury members, reviewing appellate briefs and trial transcripts (which may mean reading through thousands of pages), editing briefs, and writing memoranda summarizing the salient points of the case. After a claim has been thoroughly reviewed, the students make a recommendation as to whether the case should receive the full representation by the clinic.

In the bi-weekly seminars, students learn the substantive and procedural law concerning post-conviction remedies, and receive instruction about the specific investigative and lawyering skills required for pursuing innocence claims to successful resolution. The professors also cover ethical and tactical issues. Equally important are the weekly meetings between Hellerstein and the student teams in which the progress of the cases is discussed.

An early victory for the clinic was in the case of Robert F., convicted of murder in the second degree, and incarcerated since 1985 pursuant to a 15 year to life sentence. Second Look investigated his case, proved that his assertion of innocence was genuine, and made an application to the New York State Parole Board for his immediate release. The Parole Board released Robert F. and the clinic is continuing to work to overturn the conviction.

The most recent victory, in October 2004, was the reversal of the 17-year-old murder conviction of David Wong, 41, an immigrant from China, by a unanimous decision of the New York State Appellate Court. In 1987, Wong was serving a prison sentence for another crime when he was convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced to 25 years to life in the stabbing death of an inmate. Two separate investigations, including one by the Second Look Clinic, turned up new evidence in the case, including the recantation of trial testimony and statements of witnesses who identified another inmate as the perpetrator. Professors Hellerstein and Daniel Medwed, along with students Ledra Horowitz ’04 and Jonathan Stelzner ’03, presented the new evidence at an evidentiary hearing, but the Clinton County Court in Plattsburgh rejected it and denied the motion to set aside Wong’s conviction. An appeal resulted in the reversal.

The Second Look Program has attracted notice for its work. The New York Community Trust, the Polsky Foundation, and the Guggenheim Foundation have each made several grants to the program. The funding is used to offset expenses for private investigators and other experts, and travel costs to interview prisoners and witnesses.

The Second Look Program currently is investigating four murder cases and appealing a robbery case in the New York Court of Appeals. All the cases raise serious questions about the guilt of the defendants. With roughly 70,000 prisoners in New York’s correctional system, there is no shortage of cases to review. Hellerstein reminds his students... “there is much work to be done in the pursuit of justice.”

Read more about the reversal of the Wong murder conviction.