Giving Tuesday

By making a gift on Giving Tuesday, you can help the Oklahoma Innocence Project free wrongfully convicted men and women who are imprisoned for crimes they did not commit. By supporting the Oklahoma Innocence Project, you’ll help uphold the integrity of our criminal justice system now and for years to come. From investigation to exoneration, your donation provides the Oklahoma Innocence Project with the resources required to pursue an innocence claim within our legal system. Watch the video to learn more.

Your generous support means everything to us and to our clients. Help us right these wrongs. Help us fight to bring innocent Oklahomans home.

Quarterly Update - June

Clinic Update

The Oklahoma Innocence Project Clinic just finished up a busy spring semester. With seven 2L and 3L students in their first semester in the clinic, and two 3L students completing a second semester in the clinic, OKIP was busy making headway on numerous cases both in the investigative and litigation stages. Students in the clinic assist in building case files, collecting documents, formulating investigation plans, interviewing witnesses, and drafting pleadings. Though the limitations placed on legal education this semester due to the Coronavirus outbreak had an impact on what the students could do, we managed to continue to move cases forward and research legal issues relevant to the cases we are working on.

Black Lives Matter

Black Lives Matter

On May 25th, George Floyd, a 46-year old Black man, was killed by police after an officer kneeled on his neck for nearly nine minutes. Floyd’s life and future is one of many taken unjustly by police brutality. Between 2013 and 2019, police violence in the United States led to the deaths of 7,666 people, most of them Black Americans. The number of police killings in the country disproportionately affects Black people, who are three times as likely as white Americans to be killed by the police. In 8 of the 100 largest cities in the United States, police departments kill Black men at higher rates than the U.S. murder rate itself. It makes no difference the crime rate of the city—levels of violent crime in U.S. cities do not determine rates of police violence. And rarely is there ever any accountability; in 99% of the cases where an officer killed a civilian between 2013 – 2019, the officer was not charged with a crime.

Quarterly Update - September

Clinic Update

2019 has been a very busy year for the Oklahoma Innocence Project.  Legal Administrator, Cheryl Burns just finished her first year of work with the Project. If you have not been in the Project for a while, I invite you to come in. Cheryl has spent the last year organizing and rearranging the office space to accommodate our students and numerous volunteers. She has also created more office space, as we have added a full-time Legal Director to the Project.

Andrea Miller, who has been the Project’s clinical professor for the past three years, joined OKIP full time in July as our Legal Director. Andrea had an impressive career with the Oklahoma County Public Defender’s Office and upon her retirement from the Public Defender’s office agreed to join OKIP. We are so happy to have her years of experience and analytical ability in reviewing cases for the Project’s clients.

We are also very excited to announce that an Advisory Board for OKIP has been formed. Bonnie and Cullen Thomas, Valerie Couch, John Hudson and Brent Stockwell have agreed to serve on OKIP’s Advisory Board. Their role will be to advise OKIP on fundraising and policy. The Advisory Board had its first meeting on August 2, 2019, where we discussed our caseload and resource needs. We are grateful to our Board members for their willingness to serve on the Board and look forward to their leadership and direction.  

In August, the NY Innocence Project reached out to our Executive Director, Vicki Behenna to testify on September 10, 2019, at the Congressional House Science Committee hearing on progress in forensic science 10 years after the 2009 National Academy of Sciences report, "Strengthening Forensic Science in the United States: A Path Forward." The committee is interested in learning about progress made and considering work that still needs to be done. This is quite an honor to be asked among all other Innocence Projects across the country.      

Ginnie Graham: Oklahoma protecting against false confessions and eyewitness misidentification

In 1987, about four months after a brutal rape and kidnapping, the 20-year-old Tulsa victim asked to hear men in a police lineup speak because, she said, she would never forget the voice of her attacker. She was denied.

Arvin Carsell McGee Jr. was in the mix because some police officers thought he resembled a sketch. He had been on a deferred sentence agreement for possessing a stolen credit card and vehicle.

The victim positively identified him, and McGee would face three trials, the first two ending in a mistrial with single jurors holding out.

With each trial, the victim became more convincing in her testimony, and McGee became more adamant in his denials. The only science was from blood testing that matched 19% of the black male population, and his alibi was his girlfriend.

It’s difficult to not believe a victim swearing with full, emotional detail that a specific person committed such an intimately violent act. It makes sense a person being violated would have an ironclad memory.

OK-CADP fundraiser features Innocence Project’s Vanessa Potkin and pays tribute to death penalty foe Jim Rowan

Nearly 200 guests attended the 28th Annual Oklahoma Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty (OK-CADP) Awards Dinner & Meeting on Saturday, June 8 at the Capitol View Event Center in Oklahoma City. The evening included a cocktail reception, a buffet dinner by Ingrid’s Catering, followed by an awards program.  Flowers were provided by A Date With Iris.