Innocence Network Announces First-Ever Awards for Champion of Justice, Journalism and Lifetime Achievement
Awards will be presented to Columbus Dispatch reporters, Washington, DC, police detective and late Pennsylvania journalist at conference April 16-18 in Atlanta
(NEW YORK, NY; March 16, 2010) – The Innocence Network, an affiliation of organizations that provide pro bono legal and investigative services for wrongfully convicted people, today announced the winners of its first-ever national awards for public service and investigative journalism.
The awards will be presented at the tenth-annual Innocence Network Conference on wrongful convictions and criminal justice reforms, April 16-18 in Atlanta.
Recipients of the awards are:
The Champion of Justice Award: Washington, DC, Detective Jim Trainum.
This award honors public servants who go above and beyond in supporting and championing efforts that free the wrongfully convicted and/or reform the criminal justice system to prevent wrongful convictions.
The Journalism Award: Mike Wagner and Geoff Dutton of the Columbus Dispatch.
This award honors investigative reporting that brings to life the process of identifying and exonerating wrongfully convicted individuals.
Special Lifetime Achievement Award: Pete Shellem, reporter from the Harrisburg Patriot-News in Pennsylvania who died in 2009.
“It’s fitting that we’re honoring these public servants and journalists at the tenth annual Innocence Network conference. There’s been a sea change in public awareness about wrongful convictions over the last decade. Policymakers and people across the criminal justice field are more engaged in helping overturn wrongful convictions and improve our system of justice, and these awards honor those who helped make that happen,” said Keith Findley, President of the Innocence Network, Co-Director of the Wisconsin Innocence Project and Clinical Professor at University of Wisconsin Law School.
The Innocence Network has become a crucial resource for the wrongfully convicted and their families. It now includes 55 member organizations, 47 of which are in the United States. Each organization operates independently but they coordinate to share information and expertise. For more on the tenth-annual network conference, which the Georgia Innocence Project is hosting, click here.
The awards will be presented on the opening afternoon of the conference, Friday, April 16. The afternoon sessions of the conference begins at 1:45 p.m. and includes plenary sessions, an update on Innocence Network activities around the world, an introduction of the scores of exonerated people who will attend the conference, and the awards presentation. The Friday afternoon and evening sessions are open for members of the media to attend. The annual conference is the largest gathering in the country of exonerated people and those working to overturn wrongful convictions.
Following is more information on the 2010 Innocence Network Award recipients.
The Champion of Justice Award
The Champion of Justice Award recipient Jim Trainum is a cold-case detective and the head of the Washington, DC, Metropolitan Police Department’s Violent Crime Case Review Project. A committed detective, he wasn’t interested in criminal justice reform until he learned he obtained a false confession in a high-profile abduction and murder case. In recent years, he has devoted an unprecedented amount of time to supporting efforts that free the wrongfully convicted and working to reform the criminal justice to prevent wrongful convictions.
Trainum also helps search for evidence that can be subjected to DNA testing in post-conviction appeals, something that paid off this year when Trainum located the evidence that helped exonerate Donald Gates, who spent 28 years in prison for a rape and murder he did not commit. Before that, Trainum supported the clemency petition of the Norfolk Four— the case of four men convicted of a 1997 Virginia murder based almost entirely on their questionable confessions—who received conditional pardons in 2009. He performed a review of the confessions in question and he was the only law enforcement officer to testify at the six-hour parole hearing. Trainum has also spoken out publicly in favor of specific criminal justice reforms across the country and testified in front of state legislators about the need for reforms that can make the justice system more accurate and reliable.
The Journalism Award
The Journalism Award honors investigative reporting that brings to life the process of identifying and exonerating wrongfully convicted individuals. This year, two reporters—Mike Wagner and Geoff Dutton—are receiving the award for their series in the Columbus Dispatch, titled “Test of Convictions.”
In the 14-part series, Wagner and Dutton conducted a yearlong review that uncovered deep flaws in Ohio’s system for post-conviction DNA testing. They learned that police and courts regularly destroy evidence, prosecutors routinely oppose DNA testing and judges often dismiss inmate requests without a reason, though the law requires one. Working in consultation with the Ohio Innocence Project, they identified 30 cases of prisoners who might be exonerated through DNA testing. So far, two people have been exonerated through the project, Joseph Fears (who served 26 years in prison) and Robert McClendon (who served 17 years). The series also helped spark statewide legislative reforms in Ohio on access to DNA testing, eyewitness identification procedures and other critical measures to improve the state’s criminal justice system.
The Lifetime Achievement Award
A special award for lifetime achievement is being given posthumously to Pete Shellem, a reporter from the Harrisburg Patriot-News who died in October.
Shellem covered the police beat for small local newspapers before becoming an investigative reporter at the Patriot-News, a daily newspaper in Pennsylvania where he worked for 23 years. Through his dogged investigative reporting, Shellem almost singlehandedly exonerated five people in unrelated cases. They served a combined total of more than 68 years in prison. In each case, Shellem uncovered evidence of innocence – that police, attorneys and courts had missed – and spent years working to free people who were wrongfully convicted.
As his work became more well-known, Shellem would receive hundreds of phone calls and letters from other prisoners pleading for help. Barry Scheck, Co-Director of the Innocence Project (affiliated with Cardozo School of Law in New York), said Shellem “got into the nitty-gritty details of cases, and when he believed someone was wrongfully convicted he wouldn’t stop until he got justice.”
The Lifetime Achievement and Champion of Justice awards were decided by a committee of the Innocence Network Board of Directors, based on nominations from the public. A panel of five expert, independent judges reviewed nominations from the public for the Journalism Award and selected the winner. The judges for the Journalism Award are: Candace Rondeaux, formerly the Islamabad/Kabul bureau chief for the Washington Post and now a senior analyst for the International Crisis Group, an international think tank focused on conflict resolution and prevention; Maurice Possley, a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter who specialized in criminal justice at the Chicago Tribune before becoming an investigator and researcher for the Northern California Innocence Project at Santa Clara University School of Law; Bob Paynter, a recently retired Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist whose reporting for the Akron Beacon Journal and the Plain Dealer have helped free two innocent men from prison and raised serious questions about the factual guilt of several others; Jami Floyd, an attorney, news anchor (most recently at Court-TV, which became TruTV) and legal analyst; and Melba Newsome, a freelance writer who specializes in investigative reporting and has been published in Time, the New York Times, O: The Oprah Magazine and others.