“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.
“Thank you so much, Rachel,” she said. “I’m sorry for taking up so much of your time this morning. If it’s okay with you, I’d like to give it a shot, and then I can put together some questions to ask you later.”
“Oh. Wel . Fine, if you’re sure,” Rachel said. She turned back to her own desk, clearly a little taken aback and not altogether happy about Hannah’s sudden bid for independence. But after a single reproachful glance, she took Hannah at her word and left her alone.
Thanks to Rachel’s careful instruction, Hannah found she could navigate the system easily. She waited until she was sure that Rachel was ful y engaged in her own work, and then she clicked through various options to see if there were restrictions on the files she could access. There weren’t. Once you were in the system you essential y had free rein. Okay. It was too soon to do any real digging. It was possible that her movements through the system could be flagged, and she didn’t want to set off any alarm bel s this soon. Right now, she needed to do something to get noticed for the right reasons. She couldn’t afford to be a Rachel Mears, languishing unseen off to the side. She needed to be right in the heart of the action.
She would start by checking out some case reviews prepared by other students. Hannah had a theory that the style and substance of the approach to reviewing inmate applications differed dramatical y depending on which student reviewed them. Some reviews, like Rachel’s, were verbose, going into unnecessary detail and circular arguments about why a file shouldn’t be carried forward. It struck Hannah as completely redundant, particularly in cases where it was clear, for example, that the inmate hadn’t claimed factual innocence in his previous defense. Many of the students wrote as if they were completing an assignment—reciting basic case law that would surely be known to the attorney they were briefing and including an irrelevant back story, as if to prove they had read the entire file.