After ringing the bell, today’s meeting started with singing our National Anthem accompanied by Tom Strode.
Becky Pazkowski provided our inspirational comments today, quoting from a poem by Emerson about the true meaning of success and how that translates into what defines our club and what we do in Rotary.
Rick Ingram lead the group in singing an old Scottish song, ‘Bonny Banks ‘o Loch Lomond.
President Mark offered our Announcements today including 1) Dues are due now!, 2) we have one guest today- our guest speaker David Moran, 3) thank you to all the helpers for today’s meeting. Mark Foster read this week’s birthdays and anniversaries.
Other announcements included John Sepp reminding us of Rotarian Steve Pierce in the lead role of ‘The Only Man in Town’ playing this weekend. There are only a few tickets remaining, contact Barb Eichmuller for more details.
Today we were introduced to three of four new members present at today’s meeting:
Caroline Andrews, whose parents are members and upon her recent return to Ann Arbor, has joined our club; Sam Kottamasu – a retired radiologist from Saginaw who has relocated to Saline to be near family, former member in Saginaw and is a 5x Paul Harris Fellow; and Mary Sutton – moved to Ann Arbor from Huntington Woods to be near family, she’s a social worker and former probation officer.
Collyer Smith reminded us of the upcoming Day of Service on June 10. This event joins together multiple clubs/districts and will include many Rotary VIPs including out–going RI President, Jennifer Jones. More details on our website.
Today’s speaker was introduced by Dennis Powers. David Moran founded the Michigan Innocence Clinic in 2009. The legal teams associated with this clinic work to prove the innocence of convicted individuals, some of whom are serving long sentences. The idea for such an effort started in the 1990s with the advent of DNA as a way to test the validity of convictions and potentially correct wrongful convictions. You may be surprised to know that it costs about $40,000/yr per person in prison and if wrongful convictions were overturned, it would save a great amount of money.
Some examples of leading causes of wrongful convictions: eyewitness misidentification, false confessions, police misconduct, ineffective counsel, erroneous forensic evidence, jailhouse informants, racism, biased judges, etc.
The clinic was founded at UM Law in 2009 and funded by the Law School. Law students do the work with help from interns. The process is this: they take on only MI cases, a person contacts them, then complete a 19 page questionnaire, reviewed by two law students, they determine if a ‘plausable’ chance of innocence and ability to prove. If yes, then move forward. Only about 10% turn into an official investigation. The case is then turned over to 2 new law students to draft a motion to file in trial court. Only 10% of further invest cases get accepted.
In total they have received over 6000 questionnaires and have taken on only about 60 cases.
To date they have 41 victories and counting! 4 women, 37 men. Many served long sentences before being overturned. The longest was 46 years served. Ten cases have been in the past year and as time goes on they are getting much less pushback from prosecutors as they win more cases.
David provided some examples of cases from the last year:
Washtenaw County – convicted of robbing a car wash on the testimony of his estranged father. Father had an incentive to do this as it reduced a sentence he was facing.
Wayne County – convicted of shooting his friend, but he was not in the area at the time, confessed under duress. Later, his place of work didn’t have data that he was at work at the time, but they used phone records instead, and determined where he was at the time of the crime.
Washtenaw – murder of pharmacist, the individual is severely mentally disabled, was persuaded to confess, served 36 years. The team was able to prove that he was at the Post Office after investigation.
Another person, Jeff, served 21 years and was finally exonerated in Kalamazoo last week. Former Marine, worked for VA as security officer, farmer and outdoorsman. In 1990, two hunters were killed in the area of his farm. Jeff became an immediate suspect, but had an alibi that he was hunting in a different area. When he returned home, two detectives concluded that he did have an alibi. However, 10 yrs later he was convicted anyway by a group of cold case investigators. Innocence project was contacted by the initial two detectives, and after deep investigation (and a lot of details), Jeff was exonerated.
Our Quote of the Day: You can’t buy happiness but you can buy ice cream and that is pretty much the same thing. Unknown.
Respectfully submitted: Pattie Katcher
