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Late in 2004, Keith Findley met Jarrett Adams in the visitor\u2019s room at the maximum-security Green Bay Correctional Institution. Adams was serving a 28-year sentence for doing something stupid.<\/p>\n
At the age of 17, he drove with two other friends from Chicago to the UW-Whitewater campus, where they partied and had consensual sex with a young white student. \u201cI should never have been up there,\u201d Adams says in an October interview. \u201cWe were all kids.\u201d<\/p>\n
The woman told officers she was raped. The private attorney the state Public Defender\u2019s Office poorly paid to defend Adams offered a no-defense defense. One judge questioned the charge, but prosecutors refiled it and an all-white Jefferson County jury convicted Adams of rape. The judge planned to give Adams a 20-year sentence but, after overhearing him refuse to apologize for a crime he didn\u2019t commit, she added eight more years.<\/p>\n
Adams served time in several Wisconsin prisons. When not in his cell, he was in the law library, searching for ways the criminal justice system that locked him up could set him free.<\/p>\n
On a portable typewriter his mom bought him, Adams would hunt and peck hundreds of letters to lawyers and officials in Wisconsin\u2019s criminal justice system, pleading for their attention \u2014 and help. He sent one to the Wisconsin Innocence Project, founded in 1998 by UW Law School Professor Keith Findley to free inmates convicted of crimes they did not commit.<\/p>\n
Some years, the Wisconsin Innocence Project received 500 letters like those Adams sent from prison. Law school students who did the initial research on Adams\u2019 case first wanted to try to appeal the conviction of a friend of Adams also convicted of raping the UW-Whitewater student.<\/p>\n
Findley said no. The deadline to file the friend\u2019s federal appeal had passed.<\/p>\n
But, Findley noticed, the deadline to appeal Adams\u2019 conviction was only days away. They would take his case. They would handle his appeal. They would go to Green Bay.<\/p>\n
Days later they sat across from Adams and told him the news. \u201cThat sentence \u2014 \u2018we want to take your case\u2019 \u2014 crashes in my head like a crack of thunder,\u201d Adams writes in his 2021 book, Redeeming Justice<\/em><\/a>. \u201cThe words echo. The words drown out all other sound.\u201d<\/p>\n Adams had done so much legal research for other inmates he earned the nickname \u201cLi\u2019l Johnnie Cochran with the glasses,\u201d a reference to the defense attorney who got former NFL star O.J. Simpson acquitted of murder.<\/p>\n Adams told Findley he should use an \u201cineffective counsel\u201d defense, because his attorney had been so incompetent. Adams had found a case, Strickland v. Washington<\/em>, that set a precedent on the standard for ineffective counsel.<\/p>\n It wasn\u2019t Findley\u2019s first choice.<\/p>\n \u201cWe are absolutely going to include the ineffective assistance, of course,\u201d Adams quotes Findley as saying in his book. \u201cBut that is one of the hardest burdens to meet. We want to lead with another argument.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cInsufficient evidence,\u201d said law school student Jim Miller.<\/p>\n \u201cThe young woman testified that nobody threatened her, nobody forced her,\u201d Findley explained. \u201cShe said that over and over.\u201d<\/p>\n Adams continued to argue for ineffective counsel, but expressed faith in his new lawyers. \u201cWhen you put your name on my case, when you say this is coming from the Wisconsin Innocence Project, people will take notice. I defer to you. I believe in my argument. But I am comfortable with whatever makes you comfortable.\u201d<\/p>\n Findley and his team beat the deadline for appeal by two days.<\/p>\n Not a unique tale<\/strong><\/p>\n Findley is still incredulous that Adams was convicted when the alleged rape victim testified in court that Adams had not threatened her or forced her to have sex.<\/p>\n \u201cIn Whitewater, Wisconsin, when a young woman comes in and says, \u2018Even though he didn\u2019t do anything to threaten me, and didn\u2019t do anything violent, and didn\u2019t outwardly do anything illegal, I had sex with him\u2019…It rang true with the jurors, because he\u2019s a Black man,\u201d Findley says in an interview. \u201cI mean, that\u2019s the only thing that made sense out of this story at all. And that\u2019s not a unique tale in Wisconsin, I\u2019m afraid.\u201d<\/p>\n Findley\u2019s observation is based on more than three decades in the field, six years as a public defender and more than two decades with the Wisconsin Innocence Project, which turns 25 this year.<\/p>\n Findley, who was born in Kansas but moved around a lot as a child, says his parents instilled in him a \u201csense of justice.\u201d His dad was a \u201cprogressive\u201d Methodist minister; his mom, a social worker and mental health counselor. After one stint at the UW Law School, he worked as a public defender for six years before returning to teach there in 1997.<\/p>\n In 1998, after science nationally had proven the power of DNA to convict, acquit and free those wrongly convicted of violent crimes, Findley pitched a controversial idea to another UW Law School professor, John Pray. \u201cWisconsin had the sense that we were far more civilized than the rest of the country, that our [criminal justice] system was superior,\u201d Findley says. \u201cWe wondered if we had innocent people here, too.<\/p>\n \u201cIn a friendly way, we were kind of ridiculed by some of our colleagues. \u2018Found any innocent people in prison yet?\u2019 But it didn\u2019t take long until we did, and they kept snowballing. And \u2014 guess what \u2014 Wisconsin is no different than the rest of the country when it comes to convicting innocent people.\u201d<\/p>\n Findley not only pioneered Wisconsin\u2019s Innocence Project, but helped cofound and for several years lead the Innocence Network<\/a>, a worldwide coalition of some 70 innocence projects.<\/p>\n Findley \u201cset a sterling example to his students and other staff to put in the hard work necessary to overturn convictions,\u201d recalls Pray, now clinical professor emeritus. \u201cHe had the ability to keep an open mind and creatively think of ways that a convicted person might be proven innocent. Often this was through the use of DNA, but sometimes we found novel ways to prove innocence.\u201d<\/p>\n In one case, says Pray, \u201cKeith obtained incriminating tape recordings that were used at trial against our client, and Keith had the idea to forensically examine the recordings, and found that they had been altered, and when that became known, it was clear that the recordings were not incriminating at all. In other cases, we found new witnesses, or obtained statements from witnesses who had testified against our client at trial, who were now recanting.<\/p>\n \u201cIn another case, Keith dug into the science of shaken baby syndrome, and was able to demonstrate the flawed presentation of evidence at trial. This was no small feat, for it involved Keith burying his head in medical books and articles to fully understand the science.\u201d<\/p>\n Findley has not shied away from controversial cases. In 2002, he led the appeals that got a California company to retest sperm evidence, which resulted in the freeing of Christopher Ochoa, who had served 13 years of a life sentence for raping and killing an Austin, Texas, Pizza Hut worker. Ochoa, who asked for Innocence Project help, said he had confessed to the crime after being coerced by police and threatened with the death penalty.<\/p>\n In 2003, Findley led the appeal that exonerated Steven Avery, who had served 18 years after being falsely convicted of the 1985 rape of a woman who had been jogging along a Lake Michigan shoreline. The Innocence Project had 13 hairs from the victim retested, implicating someone serving a prison sentence for another sexual assault. The case led to a new legal standard on witness identifications.<\/p>\n But the Innocence Project experienced blowback for its work after Avery was charged in 2005 with the murder of Wisconsin photographer Teresa Halbach. Though it did not represent Avery on the new charges he was facing, it decided to remove information about his 2003 exoneration from its website. \u201cOver time, the website became the focus for angry complaints that it was adding insult to the Halbach family\u2019s very tragic loss, and the site was generating considerable anger directed toward Avery,\u201d the Innocence Project explains<\/a> on its website. The project decided to remove all case descriptions from their website temporarily \u201cout of respect for the Halbach family, and in hopes of cooling public passions.\u201d After \u201cpassions subsided,\u201d all cases were returned to the website.<\/p>\n