After 15 months of work, the Michigan Innocence Clinic at the University won its first case in July. The work of 12 Law School students and two clinic directors overturned a 2001 decision that caused Deshawn and Marvin Reed to be jailed for a shooting that they did not commit.

The Reeds’ case is the first completed by the clinic since its creation in January 2009. According to David Moran, co-director of the Innocence Clinic and a clinical professor of law, students and faculty at the Law School have been working on the case since spring 2008 — before the clinic was established — in anticipation of the creation of the clinic. The case was transferred to the University from the Northwestern University Center for Wrongful Convictions after the idea of the clinic was initiated.

Moran said the Innocence Clinic works exclusively with cases that do not have supporting DNA evidence and operates in conjunction with a clinic at the Thomas M. Cooley Law School in Lansing that focuses on cases with biological evidence.

The clinic receives letters from individuals in jail who believe they have been wrongfully convicted in a state or federal court in Michigan. Moran said applicants must fill out a 19-page questionnaire regarding their charges, who the initial lawyers were and their side of the story, among other details.

From there, two readers affiliated with the clinic independently look over the questionnaires and learn more about the inmates and their cases. Each reviewer then writes a memo explaining whether or not there is a plausible chance that the inmate is completely innocent and whether or not the clinic could change the outcome of the case.

This type of conclusion would require new evidence that has yet to be presented in front of a judge.

Moran said only about 10 to 15 percent of memos prompt further investigation of a case.

“Students talk to witnesses and look at all of the evidence and answer the same two questions: Do we believe that they are innocent, and is there something we can do it about it?” Moran said.

Since the clinic’s official establishment earlier this year, it has taken on eight cases, including the Reed case and the recent Swain case, involving Lorinda Swain, who was convicted in 2002 for allegedly having oral sex with her adopted son between January 1993 and December 1996. The Innocence Clinic won the Swain case in July, but the decision is currently being appealed by the prosecution.

Law School alum Zoe Levine has worked on the Reed case since 2008. For Levine, participating with the Innocence Clinic allowed her to have a real-life courtroom experience, where she delivered the final closing statement to the judge and jury.

“This experience has strengthened my interest in criminal law,” Levine said. “I got a chance to get into a courtroom and argue in front of a judge.”

Though the Innocence Clinic may still lose some cases, Moran said the students should win most of them.

“We take such compelling cases with overwhelming evidence that someone else did it,” Moran said. “In some cases we can even say exactly who.”

Levine said she was confident that the evidence was convincing enough to win the Reed case.

“We suffered a lot of setbacks, but we were able to get all of the evidence in front of the judge,” she said.

Levine said that one setback was in dealing with the prosecution’s main witness, Shannon Gholston, the victim of the shooting. Gholston was shot in the back of the head while driving, paralyzing him and causing him to become dependent on family members. As a result, Levine said Gholston was "virtually impossible to reach."

Because Gholston was shot from behind, he never saw the shooter. At the most recent hearing, he testified that he did not see the Reeds shoot him.