Irish Innocence Project: Meet the people who try to right miscarriages of justice
It’s the stuff of Hollywood. An innocent man — it’s nearly always a man — incarcerated for a crime he didn’t commit.
The criminal justice system has cast him as a perpetrator, but in fact he’s a victim. And now, friendless outside the walls of the prison where he rots, he has little hope of proving his innocence, of highlighting how a grievous wrong has been perpetrated on an innocent man. Who you gonna call?
The Innocence Project should be the first port of call for such an individual. The project goes where others either can’t or won’t, delving back into cases of individuals who believe they have been convicted for a crime they didn’t commit. It is here that the criminal justice system is put on trial to check whether it has functioned properly in applying the law without fear or favour.
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The Irish Innocence Project works out of a small room, tucked away on the second floor of the Arthur Griffith building in Dublin’s Griffith College. Therein, the project’s director and manager beaver away under mountains of files, separating the wheat from the chaff, tracking back over cases that have been filed away with a conviction.
Currently, the project has 28 cases on its books, each of which are being pursued on the basis that somebody was imprisoned for a crime they did not commit.
“Some people might say how can this happen, how can an innocent person end up being put into prison. The truth is, it can happen very easily,” says Anne Driscoll, project manager of the Irish Innocence Project at Griffith College. “It’s tragic, because we’re talking about people having their lives upended and destroyed on the basis of a false conviction.”
The project, established in 2009, achieved its first exoneration earlier this year with the announcement of a posthumous pardon for Harry Gleeson, who was convicted of a murder in February 1941 and hanged two months later in Mountjoy Prison.
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The Gleeson case was unusual in that it was historic. It was also one that was dealt with speedily once it was brought to the project. By then, a group of local people in Tipperary had long formed the Harry Gleeson Justice group, and had done a great deal of the spade work.
The project’s input ultimately led to the appointment of a senior counsel, who recommended to the Minister for Justice that a posthumous pardon be granted.
READ MORE: Harry Gleeson a patsy for locals with a secret
Driscoll, an American who landed in Dublin on a Fulbright scholarship in 2013, and has stayed on, says quick resolutions are not the norm.
“One case I was working on in the USA has been going on for nearly 20 years, involving a man who has been in prison since 1994 for a murder we believe he didn’t commit,” she says.
Ok, so we’ve all seen the movies. The American justice system is notorious for the manner in which it deals with some minorities, but could things be as bad here? Absolutely, according to the director of the Irish Innocence Project, David Langwallner.
“The level of corruption here would be equivalent to some of the worst states [in the USA], in places like New Orleans and Detroit,” he says. “Some of that is down to the lack of competence in the gardaí. There is also in the USA a sense of corporate civic responsibility that is missing here.”
Langwallner says that international statistics point to between 4% and 10% of prisoners being innocent of the crime for which they were convicted. He says there’s every reason to believe these statistics are applicable to this jurisdiction.
Langwallner practiced as a barrister both here and in the UK, and he is the Dean of Law at Griffith College. He is straight out of central casting for a particular type of barrister, emitting an air that veers between jolly pomposity and eccentricity, all tempered by a passion to advocate for those who have been wronged by the might of the state apparatus.
“At times, the gardaí do not operate as an investigative force,” he says. “They sometimes start from a result and then look for a quick convenient short-cut solution. They think a certain way, cleverly, which is not a correct thought process.”
Notably, despite his lack of confidence in the Irish system, he retains a positive collegiate opinion of legal representation on this side of the Atlantic. “Our lawyers are better here,” he says. “But there is a problem here with lawyers double- and triple-booking cases.
“Barry Scheck [founder of the original Innocence Project, who also served on OJ Simpson’s legal team] says that you should do one case and bring that to conclusion, but here they do four of five cases at once for economic reasons.”
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Langwallner set up the Irish Innocence Project in 2009. He had suggested to some of the powers in the college that human rights should be inculcated in the students.
“They said I should start up an innocence project and I said what was that. I went home and researched it for five hours, did up a proposal and presented it to them.” He got the nod.
The project is modelled on the original, which was set up in New York in 1992 by Scheck and others. Since then, more than 300 people have been exonerated in the US, including 18 who served time on death row. The average prison term served before exoneration was 14 years. There are now 68 innocence projects around the world, 55 of which are in the US. The Irish operation came under the Innocence Network when it met the criteria the year after it was established.
The project draws its compliment of 21 students from Griffith College, Trinity, and DCU. All but three of these are law students, the remainder coming from journalism faculties. Driscoll, a trained journalist, brought a new, vital dimension to the work.
“When I applied to teach law students how to investigate and interview, David became convinced it made sense to expand the work to journalism students,” she says.
“There are two different approaches to the same goal. Law is about process and linear thinking. In journalism, there is no process.”
Cases are brought to the project’s attention a number of different ways, but there is one golden rule. The applicant must show that he or she is innocent of the crime. Issues around the trial process or other aspects are not countenanced. The project is concerned solely with the innocent.
“We might get a letter from somebody in prison, a phone call from family member, or a lawyer referring a case,” Driscoll says. “We ask the person to fill out a questionnaire.
“Primarily they have to say there are factually innocent of the crime.”
DNA evidence is prominent in proving innocence, but faulty science, particularly poor identification and false confessions, also feature. A quarter of the instances of exoneration in the US on the basis of DNA also included a false confession.
“People who are young, and have low intelligence could often be maltreated,” Driscoll says. “If you’re held in an interrogation room for 12 hours, people sometimes reason in their head that they will do anything to get out of there, telling themselves that they know they didn’t do it and it couldn’t possibly be proved otherwise.”
Not all comers are welcomed with open arms. The project rejects anything that does not reek of innocence. One recent rejection involved a case of spousal murder in which the project was furnished with 13 files, which the applicant claimed pointed towards a wrongful conviction. After a desktop review, the project determined it was not for them.
Particular types of crime crop up repeatedly.
“We get a great amount of sex violence cases, largely on false allegations, and we get a significantly higher incidence of cases against non- nationals,” Longwallner says, although he does accept that only a small number of allegations of sexual violence get as far as a court hearing in the first place.
Driscoll sees some similarities with patterns in the US, where the biggest issue is convictions against minorities.
“There is an over representation in the USA of minorities and here it’s people like Travellers and non-nationals,” she says. “Police, wherever they operate, seem to go after the vulnerable. That’s their mindset.”
History has shown in this country that innocent people have been wrongly convicted, and a number of cases here do point to false confessions in particular. To that end, an outfit such as the Innocence Project is a vital tool in a democracy, burrowing retrospectively into the intestines of the criminal justice system, where mistakes, oversights and malpractice can lurk.
To raise awareness of its work, the project is hosting a two-day conference and film festival — Wrongful Conviction, Human Rights, and Student Learning Experience — in Griffith College on June 26 and 27. The event will include guests Barry Scheck, the Guildford Four solicitor Gareth Peirse, and Mary McAleese.
Miscarriages of justice in Ireland ...
Marton Conmey
On July 29, 2014, the Court of Criminal Appeal ruled that Martin Conmey had been the victim of a miscarriage of justice.
Conmey was convicted in 1972 of the manslaughter of 19-year-old Una Lynskey and served three years in jail.
What followed was a fight for justice that went on for 40 years.
Una’s murder in October 1971 shocked the nation and resulted in a major investigation in which the gardaí were under serious pressure to get a result.
Very soon, the focus came on three local youths, including Conmey, who were part of the close-knit community in the area around Ratoath, Co Meath.
One of the three, Martin Kerrigan, was kidnapped soon after by friends and relatives of the Lynskey family, and met a violent death in the Dublin mountains. Two men were convicted of Martin’s manslaughter.
The third man whom the gardaí had fingered, Dick Donnolly, had his conviction overturned on appeal, but Conmey served his sentence and fought for justice to be served for 40 years.
The only evidence against him was entirely circumstantial, apart from a confession, which he said had been elicited under duress. He was questioned by the Murder Squad, which later in the ‘70s went on to be known as the “heavy gang”. The court of appeal found that witness statements obtained by the gardaí were also unreliable.
Michael Feichin Hannon
In April 2009, the Court of Criminal Appeal ruled that Galway man Michael Feichin Hannon had been the victim of a miscarriage of justice.
Ten years previously, Mr Hannon had been convicted of sexually assaulting and assaulting Una Hardester in January 1997, who had made the allegation against him. He was convicted, branded a sex abuser, and given a four-year suspended sentence.
In 2006, Ms Hardester admitted that she had lied in her allegation. Ruling on the case, Judge Adrian Hardiman said that it was an “alarming and disturbing” case where an entirely innocent man had been convicted by a jury and in which the appeal court had been unimpressed by “the wickedness and gravity of what was done” to Mr Hannon.
The families of both the wrongly convicted man and Ms Hardester had been in some dispute at the time the allegation was made in 1997.
Her father had been convicted of assaulting Mr Hannon’s father a few weeks before the alleged assault.
Then, in 2006, when she was living in the US, Ms Hardester had come forward “after she found God” and admitted that she had made the false allegation.
She admitted that she had done wrong and got away with it, while Mr Hannon had paid a very heavy price.
Despite the findings, it was never made clear how Mr Hannon could have been convicted and have that conviction confirmed by the appeal court.
Frank Short
Frank Short was a publican in Donegal in 1995 when he was framed by gardaí on a charge of allowing drugs to be sold on his premises. He was imprisoned in Mountjoy for three years and, a court later heard, the impact on his life and that of his family was devastating.
In 2007, the case was deemed a miscarriage of justice and Mr Shortt awarded €4.4m. Judge Adrian Hardiman was coruscating in describing what an innocent man had suffered.
“This is a most serious, tragic and alarming case,” said Mr Justice Hardiman. “It has been before the courts now, in one form or another, for nearly 14 years. Mr Francis Shortt was framed by gardaí on drug offences in 1995, and given a three-year sentence. His life was almost totally ruined and he was reduced to a state of despair.
“At that nadir of his fortunes, he found the strength to reject an offer of early release, on the condition that he dropped his appeal and thereby acknowledged his guilt: The Court has heard no explanation of how, why, and on whose authority this offer came to be made to him. He lost his first appeal.
“After a long struggle, conducted by dedicated legal advisers, the prosecution quite suddenly, and without any substantive explanation, consented to his conviction being quashed, in November 2000, some years after his release.
After another interval of years, in July 2002, he succeeded, after a long hearing, in having the conviction declared a miscarriage of justice: his application for this declaration was opposed with perjured evidence by gardaí.”
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