After almost nine years of serving time for a crime he did not commit, Kirk Bloodsworth began working with the Arizona Justice Project to provide resources and advocacy for victims of wrongful conviction.
Bloodsworth and members of the Arizona Justice Project used Wrongful Conviction Day on Wednesday as a platform for discussing the issue at hand.
Lindsay Herf, executive director of the Arizona Justice Project, said the organization is one of the members of the innocence network.
“It was the innocence network that essentially launched and decided to talk about the factors that lead to wrongful conviction and the consequences of it,” she said.
According to Herf, Kirk Bloodsworth was the first person exonerated in our country, who was sentenced to death in the state of Maryland for rape and murder of a young girl in 1982. He served two years on death row and nearly nine years in prison for the crime.
“This was in a time before DNA testing technology existed and he was convicted based on eyewitness identification and that was pretty much it,” she said.
In 1993 evidence was found using DNA testing that proved him innocent. She said cases like Bloodsworth’s are what drive the organization. Herf said this problem is not just happening to Bloodsworth, however.
“It’s kind of a combination of the fact that there hasn’t been just one or two, but that there have been thousands of people where mistakes have been made in the system and who have been exonerated,” she said.
The organization is able to provide aid and services to support local claims of innocence through its sister clinic, the Arizona State University Post-Conviction Clinic led by Katie Puzauskas.
Puzauskas is the supervising legal clinic attorney for the Post-Conviction Clinic. The clinic allows law students to enroll in the program to focus on cases while getting first hand experience.
“We investigate and litigate claims of wrongful conviction,” she said. “They are student lawyers that are certified and they do a lot of the investigation, writing, and research that gives them practical experience.”
Puzauskas got involved as an advocate for wrongful conviction after hearing from the founder of the innocence project, Barry Scheck, during her time in law school. She said she started working with the Arizona Justice Project afterwards with the sister clinic.
“All of the intake is done by the Arizona Justice Project,” Puzauskas said. “The project refers cases to the clinics and then the clinic investigates and, if there’s evidence, litigates cases.”
Puzauskas said one of the hardest parts of advocating for wrongful conviction is changing someone’s mind after they believed something else for so long.
“When we get a case it’s often years after the convictions, sometimes three or four decades and finality is very hard for the victims,” she said. “It’s hard when you think you have the right person and you find out you don’t.”
Bloodsworth, an exoneree and executive director of Witness to Innocence, spent eight years, 10 months and 19 days in prison before being exonerated.
“It took a year for me to get exoneree and I got a full pardon from the governor in Maryland first,” he said. “I’m telling my story. Whether it’s one or 80, we should take care of exonerees as people. If we make the mistake, we should take care of it.”
Bloodsworth said it was not easy when trying to go through the process without having access to the resources that another person would.
“If the state government and the criminal justice system incarcerate a person wrongfully, no matter what mistake was made, you should have any resources available to you that anyone else could have,” he said.
There are currently no programs for someone who has been wrongfully convicted and that in certain states, including Arizona, exonerees are not compensated, according to Bloodsworth.
“People just say they’re sorry and honestly they call some of the compensation rewards, but I don’t know how you can call it a reward to go through that,” Bloodsworth said. “It’s a big disconnect within the system itself.”
Bloodsworth said that as an honorably discharged marine with no criminal record or history, winding up on death row in prison shows that it can happen to anybody.
“Sometimes bad things happen to good people and they make something better of it,” he said. “I’m not sure if that’s what I’m doing, but I sure am trying”
Contact the reporter at hfoote1@asu.edu.
