Cardozo Professors Make Headlines Across the Country

Scheck and Nuefeld Publish Book on DNA Evidence; Boies Earns Professor of the Year

Professors at Yeshiva University's Cardozo School of Law, Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld are again making headlines across the country thanks to their Innocence Project, which uses DNA evidence in proving the innocence of convicted criminals. They join their colleague David Boies, an adjunct professor at Cardozo, who was recently named professor of the year by the National Law Journal.

Once part of O.J. Simpson's defense team, Scheck and Neufeld have made a crusade of exonerating the wrongly convicted; and no longer are Scheck and Neufeld defenders of the rich, rather the protectors of less fortunate. Through the Innocence Project, a program founded by Scheck and Neufeld in 1992 to lend support to the mostly poor and forgotten in prisons across the country, they use DNA evidence to overturn convictions. The Innocence Project, which is staffed largely by law students, currently is handling more than 200 cases, with many of its clients on death row or serving life terms.

Yeshiva University bestowed the honor of Academic Program of the Year for the Innocence Project at the 75th Annual Hanukkah Dinner and Convocation in December. Last June, Professors Scheck and Neufeld convened a meeting of nineteen lawyers, including representatives of ten law schools, who came to Cardozo to learn how to start their own clinics and create curricula on wrongful convictions, creating the Innocence Network. "The goal of the Innocence Network is to transform what goes on in American legal education," said Scheck.

Calling him "the Michael Jordon of the courtroom", the National Law Journal named David Boies the NLJ lawyer of the year. He was selected for his successful representation of the United States Government in U.S. vs. Microsoft Corporporation and for his work on several other antitrust cases this year. It was in these cases that he showed off his "singular gifts - a steel trap mind, a laser sharp memory, a head for chess and a skill with words- to raise the level of the game for all involved," coined the Journal. In its 1999 year-end issue, the weekly newspaper also mentioned death penalty reformers Scheck and Neufeld.

"It is remarkable that all three lawyers honored are associated with Cardozo," said Dean Paul R. Verkuil. "It makes clear what we have long known-the intellectual climate at Cardozo is led by exciting and challenging faculty who insure that our students are getting the finest legal education available.'

Neufeld and Scheck met 20 years ago and teamed up to combine social activism with forensic science. Interestingly, when DNA testing was in its infancy, they attacked the science as unreliable-a tack used in the Simpson defense. But through the Innocence Project, they now embrace DNA as a vital tool for freeing wrongly convicted prisoners.

The project, which has made headlines since its inception, has been mimicked in law schools around the country. It has gained notoriety once again with the recent exoneration of Clyde Charles, a man who spent close to twenty years in jail for a crime the DNA evidence proved he did not commit.

Scheck and Neufeld have set out to rectify the apparent pathology within the justice system that has led to these wrongful convictions in the first place. As outlined in their book "Actual Innocence" (Doubleday) co-authored by New York Daily News columnist Dwyer, Scheck and Neufeld explain that since 1976, Illinois has executed twelve people while freeing thirteen from death row as innocent.

In the last decade, DNA tests have provided stone-cold proof that sixty-nine people were sent to prison or death row in North America for crimes they did not commit. According to the book, the number has been rising at a rate of more than one a month. To Scheck and Neufeld, what matters most is not how the wrongly convicted got out of jail, but how they got in. "How do you prevent another innocent man or woman from paying the ultimate penalty for a crime he or she did not commit?" asked Illinois Governor George Ryan, a Republican and death-penalty supporter. "Today I cannot answer that question."