For more than 10 years the California Innocence Project has fought to free innocent men behind prison walls, and it’s had some notable success.
The project is housed at the campus of the California Western School of Law in San Diego, where the organization held a reception and gala was attended by three of its successes and Justin Brooks and Jan Stiglitz, co-directors of the program.
The three exonerees are Timothy Atkins, Adam Riojas and John Stoll, who served time at San Quentin.
Stoll was convicted of 17 counts of child molestation and sentenced to 40 years. He revealed that his 20 years of imprisonment spent for crimes he did not commit were both scary and painful.
“It’s a mixture of emotions,” Stoll said. “I had never been in trouble or ever been arrested for anything and then there I was in San Quentin State Prison.” Stoll, 66, was convicted in Kern County. He is one of eight men California’s innocence project has vindicated.
Thousands of letters are read yearly from inmates family members and friends.
With 12 law students, Brooks and the “DNA dozen” sift through mountains of paper work until they find a letter that falls within their standards. That standard is believing in an inmate’s innocence. Then they set about methodically proving “actual innocence.”
Riojas was imprisoned for 13 years for second-degree murder, a crime that carries 15 years to life. Riojas, too, was exonerated through DNA.
Atkins, another DNA exoneree stated, “Every day, it eats at your heart. You’re there and you know you didn’t do it.” He was convicted in Los Angeles County and served 20 years of a 32 years-to-life sentence for first-degree murder and armed robbery.
San Diego County District Attorney Bonnie Dumanis said, “They do an important job, and I respect them for the work they do. The maturing science of forensics often compels second looks.”
“Bonnie will sit down with us, but everyone else, they fight with us for everything,” stated Brooks.
Dumanis credits the Innocence Project’s team for its focused efforts. “We don’t always agree, but at least we sit down and take a look at cases and evaluate them. Prosecutors and police are not eager to reopen cases.”
She added, “We may have evidence that has been preserved, but wasn’t useful in the past because the science hadn’t been developed. But is useful now, and can help in those cases when someone has insisted they were innocent.”
District Attorney Steve Cooley of Los Angeles County said, “It’s very commendable. But let’s have a reality check. Creating new theories or doubt about a case, the evidence is tainted – somebody else did it, doesn’t mean that they are necessarily innocent. It means the evidence changed, and sometimes changes occur after the key witnesses are dead, or their criminal associates are now deceased.”
He denied prosecutors or police deliberately resist relooking at cases. However, Brooks and Jan Stiglitz, his co-director and a Cal Western professor, remain frustrated with what they view as an absence of following-through after exoneration.
“The DAs very rarely give public notice when the wrongly convicted are found to be innocent or look for the guilty person,” Stiglitz said. Only a scant number of cases pursued by the Innocence Project involved DNA “In some older cases, the biological evidence has been destroyed,” said Jeff Chin, the Innocence Project’s assistant director. “Our staff looks for other pieces of evidence.”
