“When you say no appeals are ongoing, you mean no direct appeals?”
“Yeah, exactly. The convicted person has to have exhausted their direct appeals and then we’l look at post-conviction motions addressing issues like new DNA evidence, or prosecutorial misconduct, or ineffective assistance of counsel, to name a few. I mean, it isn’t possible for the Project to get involved prior to conviction or the number of applications we get would just skyrocket.”
“Got it,” Hannah said.
“Our first job is to go through the applications and cut out everything that fails to meet those conditions. That takes time, but it’s fairly straightforward. The next step is the hard part. We have to make a recommendation about which cases deserve further consideration.” Rachel put her hand to her chest. “We, the students, have to make an assessment about the likelihood of being able to prove innocence, what legal remedies are available, and”—here Rachel paused for effect—“our current caseload. It’s an enormous responsibility.”
“Caseload is a constraint?”
“We have a backlog of eight hundred applicants right now.”
Rachel grimaced. She gestured around the room. “Most of us are running at least four cases at a time, investigating, trying to build up the file to the point where we can get something going. There are finite resources and a lot of need.”
“I see,” Hannah said. She put her hand on her mouse. “I thought . . . I suppose I just assumed that most of the Project’s time would be taken up with death row cases.”
Rachel shot her a look, gave a tight little laugh. “Death row cases get al the headlines,” she said. “But they’re only part of the work we do here.”
“Of course,” Hannah said. There was an awkward moment of silence and Hannah wondered if Rachel had ever worked a death row case. Probably not. That might be the reason for the spikiness.
She should move on, to avoid provoking the other girl, but she needed to know how things worked.
“But students do get to work on death row cases from time to time? The Dandridge case, for example. I’d imagine that’s going to suck up a lot of resources. When does it go to trial?” Hannah worried briefly if she was being too obvious, but she figured anyone volunteering for the Project would know about and be interested in Michael Dandridge. His case had been widely reported in left-leaning newspapers, not just the Vanity Fair profile where she had first read about it. The Vanity Fair article had been published before charges had been refiled against Dandridge, but there’d been other reporting since.
“Preliminary hearing for the Dandridge case is next week,”
Rachel said shortly. “And Professor Parekh’s keeping the team pretty tight. There are three spots for student assistants and they’re al taken.” She turned back to Hannah’s computer. “Let’s get started,”
she said.
Rachel showed Hannah where to access the applications that came in through the website. How to open a digital file and save the application. “The next step is to write to the inmate and request a copy of their appel ant’s opening brief. Ideal y we get that digital y, but a lot of the time it stil comes in on paper. We have to scan the original paper brief into the system and return the brief to the inmate with this letter.” Rachel pointed to a template letter sitting in the workflow. “This just basical y tel s them that we’re assessing their case and we’l get back to them as soon as possible. And it asks them not to contact us until we get in touch, unless absolutely necessary.” Rachel rol ed her eyes. “We stil get phone cal s, of course, but Marianne deals with most of those.”
“Right,” Hannah said.
“So then you need to analyze the brief, and you need to write an evaluation for every application, including analysis of the facts, history of the case, evidence col ected, and whether or not there’s a possibility of DNA or other forensic evidence that might prove innocence. Let’s look at a few examples.”
The next hour passed very quickly. The process was fascinating, though it was a little shocking, the degree to which students here were doing such pivotal work, making recommendations that could end an inmate’s hopes for freedom. But as Rachel worked through some examples, it became clear that many applications failed to fulfil the basic criteria. And as the afternoon wore on and Rachel insisted on explaining in laborious detail the logic of her analysis on her cases, Hannah began to question Rachel’s judgment. Some of the cases that Rachel had worked on seemed to be so lacking in any kind of potential that they surely weren’t worth the time she had given them. She wrote voluminous, repetitive notes on every application, regardless of their merits, and rejected al of them. When Rachel opened the sixth file, and launched into yet another detailed explanation as to how and why she had approached the file in a particular way, Hannah interrupted.