A legal group fighting to free innocent prisoners avoided closure. Now it's hoping to grow

Support comes from Mosby Building Arts. Sometimes the smaller home projects make the biggest difference. Mosby creates custom spaces that help you love your home even more. For projects big and small, visit callmosby.com. This is St. Louis on the air from St. Louis Public Radio. I'm Elaine Cha. Hundreds of people in prison who say they are innocent rely on the work of a single nonprofit called the Midwest Innocence Project. But earlier this summer, the organization announced that it was on the brink of closure. The group has always had its supporters. And when it put out a call for more support, donations flowed in. That call ultimately brought in $400,000 and the existence of the Midwest Innocence Project is no longer at risk. Here now to share that story and where the group and its many clients go from here, I'm joined by executive director Tahir at Water. Tahir, welcome. Thank you. And also here with us is Rachel Wester. She's the legal director of the Midwest Innocence Project. Welcome to you as well. Thanks, happy to be here. So last month, St. Louis Public Radio and other outlets were reporting that the Midwest Innocence Project was considering closure. And that is not the case anymore. So what changed to hear? Well, you know, to give people context, we're talking about a charitable nonprofit. And we are currently, we've got 21 active cases, you know, investigation, litigation. different stages. So when we talk about can we maintain, we have to make sure that we're still here for our clients. We have an ethical obligation. And so we have to make sure that we're constantly being vigilant about how much runway do we have, how far out can we go as an organization so that Rachel and her team can give the best legal care possible. I am very happy to sit here with you today and Rachel and say that because of the way the community came together, not only have we raised the 400,000, we're almost to our $500,000 goal, which is what we were trying to raise by the end of the year, and we've almost raised that in just under six weeks. So, Rachel, for you, as Tahir is describing the number of cases, I think it would help to understand what it takes to win someone's freedom. And you've been doing this work since... You got at law school, right? Yes, I started at the Medbust Citizens Project as a staff attorney way back in January of 2015. So I have been there 11 and a half years. And as to her side, we have around 21 active cases right now in investigation and litigation across, we cover a five-state area. And the thing that folks might not know is how long it takes to work on these cases.

the amount of resources and time and money that are required in order to move these cases forward at the time when cases come to the Midwest Innocence Project. It might have already been 10, 15, 20 years since the conviction has occurred. And so we have the job of going through tons of records of sort of redoing the investigation, going out into the field, talking with witnesses, working with experts, maybe doing DNA testing if that's possible in a case. And then we have to say, okay, do we have enough to go back into court? And then the litigation process itself takes years and years. The post-conviction structure is difficult, almost impossible. some instances and we face fierce opposition. And so it takes the average across the country for an exoneration. It takes between seven and ten years for an exoneration to ultimately take place. So to hear that kind of work, you know, does your group work with a single person over all that time then? Oh, with our clients. Yes. So as Rachel is saying, we're talking about potentially years of investigative work. We're talking about potentially years of litigation, not to mention the screening that where we have applications coming in. We have over 900 people. on our collective waiting lists across the five states we serve. And so as we're trying to move them through that pipeline, yes, it can take years to just to make sure that we have the facts straight. And then it can be very difficult just getting into court. so that they can truly have their day in it. So evaluation, I mean, how are you evaluating whether you take one of those 900 cases off the waiting list and actually move it forward? Well, and I won't step on Rachel's toes here because she's been leading this work for almost 12 years. But what I will say is we have an application process. It's really important for people to understand that every single person that we work with, they have an innocence claim. So these are people who we believe are innocent. They have been wrongfully convicted. These are not people who are guilty and there's a technicality. These are all, these are 900 people who have an innocence claim. And so Rachel and her team, what they're doing is they're looking at applications or then there's screening where we're looking for what we call hallmarks to understand are there some aspects of this case that we think not only bear out that they are innocent, but that we can actually. but we have a legal pathway to potentially overturning that conviction. Yeah.

Yeah, as to hear I mentioned Hallmark. Some of the things that we look for when we assess a case are these indicators of wrongful conviction that we can see if we look at all the exonerations that have happened across the country since we started keeping track in the 1980s. And those are things like eyewitness misidentification, flawed forensic science, false confessions, state misconduct, incentivized witnesses. We want to see in a case file if some of those things pop up and appear. And that would be a red flag. that there might be something more here and we need to take a deeper look. With the money that you have received, you were talking about having a runway. Yes. Along that runway, there are folks who need to be paid for the work that they're doing. Absolutely. And the loss of funding that you were looking at, this has to do with federal grants, right? In some ways, yes. The good news is we're not alone, the bad news is we're not alone. I think across the nonprofit sector, across the economy of our country, what we saw with this disruption or interruption, pause, full out cancellation of some federal funding is it really did pull the rug out from a lot of organizations like our own who've come to rely on it. And so what we have to do is... This money helps us build a bridge towards a 2027 that isn't reliant on federal funding. But to get there, it's been very difficult. I mean, we had to make some really painful decisions. We laid off 25% of our staff in February. And when you think about the work we do, 900 people on our waiting list, 21 active cases across five states, listeners are probably thinking that we've got a staff of 100 or so. There were 12 of us. And so now there are eight of us doing this work. And so it requires a lot of heavy lifting by a small amount of people. And it's not just our paid staff. We have a ton of legal partners that make this work possible. But to your point, this work can't be done for free. We don't charge our clients anything, but we have to make sure that we take care of our staff because they're doing really hard work every day. That hard work, the name of the organization is the Missouri. Innocence Project. Midwest Innocence Project. But the Missouri part. Yes. Missouri has a particular way of, you know, treating. innocence and who can use innocence as a legal argument. Rachel, tell us a little bit about that. Sure. I mean, we face difficulty, as I mentioned in all five of our states, but to your point, Elaine, Missouri is a little bit different. We had a client by the name of Rodney Lincoln. Rodney is from St. Louis. He was released. His sentence was commuted in 2018. So ultimately, he was released, although not exonerated. But during the litigation of his case, Ultimately, the Missouri Court of Appeals said that if, like Rodney, you have been sentenced to life in prison by a term of years but have not been sentenced to death, that you cannot bring an innocence claim in Missouri's state, habeas, state post-conviction structure. That was different than what we thought was the case before, but that's where we are today. And so we have tons of clients in Missouri, tons of applications where folks have been sentenced to life in prison or some very long term of years.

we are stuck in some ways, or we have a very, very hard path forward because of that law. How different is Missouri from other states and in the way that they treat innocence, Tahir? I'm sorry to sigh right into the microphone when I say that, but I think you'll understand what I mean when Rachel and I answer this question. In some ways, we've described this five-state region that we're in as hostile. Every state brings with it its own set of processes and... the way they approach it, different jurisdiction counties. So we're, Missouri's not alone in what can be a very antagonistic approach to innocence work. In the state of Missouri, it's, um, It's very frustrating because every single case that we've brought before the state of Missouri has been challenged, no matter how compelling the evidence is, even when we had the case where a St. Louis prosecutor said, yes, this should not have happened. They still fought it. We have people who've actually been freed and they're still trying to fight it. So Missouri is not alone. We definitely have... a hard path in all the states, in Arkansas, in Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, they do bring with them their own difficulties. Missouri, however, and it hurts me to say it's my home state. is somewhat unique in the description that Rachel just gave you. And I'll just add that Missouri is the only state in the country that makes a distinction about innocence claims between death penalty cases and non-death penalty cases. So as to hear said, it's difficult everywhere. Post-conviction is hard no matter what state you're in. But Missouri is the only state that makes that specific consideration. Do either of you know why? There are, unfortunately, people who believe in finality over truth, over what we would consider justice. Our clients have told us that we should refer to this as the criminal legal system, not the criminal justice system, because criminal justice system is where we want to get it to. There are people who just have this tradition and they say, well, once a decision has been made, once a verdict's been rendered, that's it. And no matter what kind of bias, corruption, whatever we've, those hallmarks Rachel spoke to, people would rather just leave someone in prison than truly say, let's make sure that they're getting their fair day in court.

We're speaking today with Tahir Atwater. He's the executive director of the Midwest Innocence Project and Rachel Wester. She is over legal direction at Midwest Innocence Project. Now, Tahir, you mentioned earlier actions of prosecutors in place like St. Louis and finality. And we spoke with someone that you all have worked with, Christopher Dunn. And Christopher Dunn was released in 2024 in July. And a few months later, I had a chance to interview him about his experience. And I asked him about what he first noticed about the world around him outside prison. For the last past 15 years, I sat in Licking Correctional Center. There was no trees around us. There was a hot, stealth wind that you could feel. There's a diesel plant next door to it. There's another place that's next door that burns wood. And the ground itself is hot. So when I got out and I got a chance to feel the wind on my face, Listen to the birds seeing the barks or the dogs in the alleys. That was new. That was like my touch of reality returning back to me. And I was thinking to myself the other day, I don't ever want to know what it's like to not experience those sounds or those smells again in life. I don't. And that was Christopher Dunn. After 34 years in prison, he was released on July 30th, 2024. And he spoke with us a few months after he was released. To hear, you talked about justice. You talked about truth. What is your reaction? I mean, how does it feel to hear what Chris said there? It is infuriating. It's frustrating. We are challenged as a society, as a world, to figure out sometimes what seems to be unsolvable problems. This is a problem that we can solve. We've done the research. We do the policy. We know what leads to wrongful convictions. We need our states to be partners in this work. And let's be clear, this is not a political issue. This cuts across red state, blue state, everything in between. This is about... How can states, how can the legal system partner with our organization, innocence organizations, and clinics all around this country to prevent what happened to Chris? Because it's still happening. We have, again, 900 people. We estimate roughly 4% of everyone in prison right now are wrongfully convicted. So in our five state region, that's 4,000 people that are having that experience that Chris just described for you. It's still going on. Yes. Rachel. What is it like working on Christopher Dunn's case? I mean, can you share something about its status now and what Missouri is trying to do? Yes, certainly. So I've been working on Chris's case for years now. It was good to hear his voice. And...

Being with Chris in July of 2024 when he was released is truly one of the most joyful moments of my career. But as you said, Elaine, we are still fighting on Chris's behalf. And that's because after his release, the Missouri Attorney General's office appealed. His exoneration. And so we've been litigating that throughout the court system. Currently, the case is pending in the Missouri Supreme Court. But we have believed in Chris's innocence from the beginning. We still do. And we're going to continue to do whatever we can to represent him and to fight on his behalf. In Chris Dunn's case, 34 years, let's talk about compensation for that time and all that was experienced. Your clients spend decades in prison for crimes they did not commit, but they have to live and support themselves. Does that mean that they need to file a separate lawsuit, or is there some other pathway available? Rachel? Sure, it depends. So all five of our states where we work have different compensation statutes. Sometimes there are qualifications for those compensation statutes. Missouri's law up until recently, for example, used to be that you had to have DNA evidence involved in your exoneration in order to get compensation. And so there are all kinds of nuances involved. But oftentimes our clients are facing a situation where they are hoping to get compensation from the state, but that might not be guaranteed. And so they also need to think about. Is there a civil suit to be filed here as well? And those civil suits can take years and years and years too. So in the meantime, clients are waiting and trying to support themselves, often without very many resources to do so. Tire, you had mentioned earlier the loss of federal funds. Will the Midwest Innocence Project have to get by with those funds in the future? And what is it that those grants did support when they existed? So, again, this is a question that I think the nonprofit community has to answer. We're certainly... This campaign raising this nearly $500,000 is not the end for us. We're keeping our foot in the gas. We're going to continue raising money throughout this year because we need to build that kind of sustainable income in revenue so that we don't rely on federal grants. We'll certainly apply for them in the future, but we can no longer build that into our budget as we once did. I think we are.

we are well on our way to doing that. And so that call to action for the community isn't for, I don't want anyone to hear this and think, well, they're close. We still need that help. We still need that support because that's what allows us to go into 2027. It's what allows Rachel and the rest of our rock star staff to do really hard work. And the work is hard enough. I don't want our staff worrying about. the finances around the work. I want to worry about that myself. But it's been really heartening to see our board and our community really come together. And I think with partners like yourself, this has been a great reminder to not just Missouri residents, but people all over just how important our work is. Christopher Dunnest said it, Kevin Strickland, who's been 43 years in prison, has said this, that Missouri, I'm sorry, now I'm saying it, the Midwest Innocence Project. was his last recourse. He said, if it wasn't for us, he would still be in prison. So the fact that we don't charge our clients, the fact that they are receiving hundreds of thousands of dollars of legal work for free because we do believe that, in a sense, is enough. And Rachel and her teamwork every day to make that a reality. In our last minute or so, Rachel, the Midwest Innocence Project has 900 or so cases on its wait list. What would it take to make a real dent in that? Yeah, it's an overwhelming number of cases and people at the heart of those cases, right? That's at the center of everything we do at the Midwest Innocence Project. In order to continue to make a debt in those cases, we have to have... a full staff and that requires funding. As Tahir said, we're a staff of eight right now and that's, we really need more people than that. So we need resources. We need money. We need volunteers. We need staff people. We need legal partners in order to continue to do the work. Tahir Outwater is the executive director of the Midwest Innocence Project. Rachel Wester is its legal director. Thank you both for joining us today. Thank you. Thanks, Elaine.

This episode was produced by Danny Wissentowski. Audio engineering and podcast design by Aaron Doer. Our executive producer is Alex Hoyer. St. Louis on the air is a production of St. Louis Public Radio. Understanding starts here. Do you find yourself regularly listening to episodes of St. Louis on the air? Suggest us to a friend you think might enjoy our conversations. And leave us a review and rating on Apple Podcasts on the App Store. It's the simplest way to help people discover our show. Thank you. St. Louis Public Radio is a member-supported service of the University of Missouri, St. Louis.