SAN DIEGO —
For years, the California Innocence Project was the trusted place for people convicted of crimes looking for help to prove they didn’t do it.
The San Diego team was a powerhouse with national recognition, and its founders were fathers in the field of exoneration. They walked a few dozen innocent people out of prison, and one case inspired a major motion picture.
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So it was surprising late last year when California Western School of Law, which long hosted the project, put the clinic on pause. It was temporary, the school said. But the group was disbanded, the attorneys went elsewhere and the national Innocence Project leadership decided the program could no longer use the branded name.
What happened behind the scenes leading to the demise of the vaunted local program remains a question. But as a result, there now there are two new exoneration organizations in the region.
Amy Kimpel, director of the Criminal Defense clinic at University of Alabama School of Law
(Courtesy of University of Alabama School of Law)
Both are startups, but both have experienced attorneys on staff. One is made up of Innocence Project staffers who had been at Cal Western. The other is out of Los Angeles, an organization that Cal Western brought in for the interim to fill the hole created when the school paused the original project.
Then there’s the pending arrival of a third voice, the new boss, an experienced defense attorney and law professor returning to San Diego to take over the clinic at Cal Western.
How it will all shake out as the groups start their work is hazy. Will they compete for clients? For funding?
“No matter how many innocence projects exist in California, I think that there are unfortunately so many innocent people that are wrongfully convicted that there could never really be enough attorneys and enough projects to handle this kind of work,” said attorney Megan Baca, who runs California Innocence Advocates, which is now working with Cal Western, at least in the interim.
California Innocence Project was a leader in exoneration work, freeing 40 people since its founding at Cal Western in 1999. Its most high-profile exoneration was Brian Banks, a former high school football star falsely accused of rape. His story later became a movie, with actor Greg Kinnear playing Justin Brooks, who co-founded the California Innocence Project with professor Jan Stigliz.
Brooks stepped down from his long-held leadership last spring and joined the faculty at the University of San Diego’s School of Law, where he leads programs aimed at training law students, professors and lawyers in Latin America — Mexico in particular. Earlier this month, Mexico honored Brooks with the Ohtli Award, the country’s highest recognition to those who “have opened pathways to Mexicans abroad,” according to a news release from the Consulate of Mexico in San Diego.
Brain Banks, left, stands with Justin Brooks during the red carpet premiere of “Brian Banks,” hosted by the California Innocence Project. The event was at the Museum of Photographic Arts in Balboa Park in San Diego on Aug. 3, 2019.
(Hayne Palmour IV / The San Diego Union-Tribune)
Brooks’ unexpected departure was just the first change. Within months, the interim director, Alissa Bjerkhoel, left to take an appointment as a superior court judge in Northern California.
Co-founder Stiglitz stepped away from the project’s daily work a few years ago but later created a foundation to raise money for the organization. That foundation morphed last year to become its own standalone exoneration group, now named The Innocence Center, based in San Diego.
The director of The Innocence Center is Mike Semanchik, who started as an intern at the California Innocence Project and later rose to become managing attorney. Semanchik left the California Innocence Project last year to run Stiglitz’s new group.
The remaining attorneys eventually ended up joining Stiglitz’s group, too. They, like Semanchik, had all gotten their start at the original innocence clinic.
The attorneys brought with them, with the approval of the clients, most of the roughly four dozen cases they were working on at Cal Western, all in various stages of litigation or review, Semanchik said. In addition, many of the prospective clients who had applied for assistance at the California Innocence Project indicated they wanted to work with The Innocence Center.
The Innocence Center is using AI technology that can scan through files hundreds of pages thick and produce a summary of the cases that people are asking them to take. There’s also an outside firm working pro bono to review potential cases.
What they don’t have is a direct pipeline to students. At Cal Western, the California Innocence Project was a clinic, a place where students worked on the cases for class credit. Semanchik says his group intends to have students join the mix, maybe from multiple law schools.
Cal Western is reshaping its program and is bringing in Amy Kimpel, a professor with a decade of defense clinic work with University of Alabama’s law school. Kimpel — who spent nearly seven years as a federal public defense attorney in San Diego — will start her new job over the summer.
Kimpel, who is still in Alabama, pointed to the “wonderful work” of the California Innocence Project. “To be able to continue in the work that they have been doing was a really exciting opportunity,” she said.
Earlier this month, Cal Western — which initially said the exoneration clinic would be on hiatus until Kimpel started July 1 — announced that the work had resumed. It had teamed up with a Los Angeles organization, the California Innocence Advocates, in the meantime, with Baca as the program’s interim director and managing attorney. The school said it would collaborate with Baca’s group to provide “ongoing volunteer training opportunities” for Cal Western students.
Baca said that when she learned California Innocence Project attorneys were leaving, she reached out to Cal Western to ask about cases that might need attorneys to step in. That led to the decision for her group and the school to work together, at least as a bridge until Kimpel arrives.
Megan Baca, founder of California Innocence Advocates
(Courtesy Megan Baca)
“We’re thrilled,” Baca said. “As a new organization being able to work with an entity that’s already established is fantastic because we can just continue doing the work that we’re passionate about.”
Baca said she plans to teach a class at Cal Western this summer and to start working with several students. What does that look like when Kimpel also takes over this summer? Up for discussion. The school spokesperson said earlier this month that once Kimpel starts, Kimpel and Baca “will work together to ensure a smooth transition. We have not yet decided what an ongoing partnership might look like but at this point all options are on the table.”
Baca is hopeful about working together. She worked for other exoneration projects, including on staff at Loyola Project for the Innocent, and she said she has long loved the work: “This is why I went to law school.”
She said her group has three attorneys to dedicate to the program and has student interns and volunteers lined up. Baca said she has reviewed about five case files so far, with several more in the queue.
Cal Western also announced that while the “clinic’s purpose will remain unchanged,” it will get a new name in the coming months, one that “will reflect California Western’s commitment to innocence and post-conviction work.”
For her part, Kimpel said she has a lot of work to do in Alabama, overseeing about 50 cases and supervising students there, and she said she is staying sharply focused on that until she leaves in a few months. There, she is the director of the Criminal Defense Clinic, which represents low-income people and handles a wider berth of criminal defense work — primarily misdemeanors at the trial level, but also some post-conviction relief, including compassionate and medical releases.
She said she wants to build on what Brooks created and also talk with leaders of other clinics. She said she will be “very intentional” about how she crafts the program.
“Like all good clinical programs, we are going to be focused on providing excellent representation for our clients and also an excellent pedagogical experience for our law students,” she said.
Kimpel said she is committed to the clients and the teaching the clinic provides to students, knowing that many of them “go on to do criminal defense, public defender work, other social justice work or other legal services work.”
“Frankly,” she said, “there aren’t enough lawyers doing this work. We need to continue to train people to do this work and to do this work well.”
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