User talk:Jacquie GCD

The Irish Innocence Project
The Irish Innocence Project (website here) was set up in September 2009 by David Langwallner, Dean of Law at Griffith College, and barrister and serves as founding director. The Irish Innocence Project investigates and seeks to overturn cases in which people claim they are factually innocent but have been convicted of a crime they didn't commit. The Irish Innocence Project works to find new or newly discovered facts or evidence that show there has been a miscarriage of justice under the mandate of the Criminal Procedure Act 1993 and the posthumous pardon procedure. It is one of 68 projects recognized globally by the umbrella membership organization, the Innocence Network. It is the only innocence project in the world whose home is at a 200 year-old former prison where at least one man, Joseph Poole, is believed to have been wrongfully convicted, hanged and is buried in an unmarked grave somewhere on the grounds of Griffith College. It is one of two projects out of 68 that has both law and journalism students working cooperatively on cases.

The Irish Innocence Project currently has about 21 students from Griffith College, Trinity College and Dublin City University working on approximately 25 cases under the supervision of about eight pro-bono supervising lawyers. It recently was designated as a tax exempt charity in Ireland by the Revenue Department.

The Irish Innocence Project enables students to develop a number of core clinical skills in that students work on the closed case files of serving, or former, prisoners who claim factual innocence. These skills include interviewing witnesses, applicants and serving prisoners, undertaking targeted and focused practical research, gaining exposure to real court documents and ‘ learning by doing’, i.e. practising constitutional law, criminal law et al. Griffith College provides an institutional home for the Irish Innocence Project. In 2013 Fulbright scholar Anne Driscoll, (website here) an award-winning journalist and senior reporter for the Justice Brandeis Law Project at the Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism of Brandeis University, came to Ireland to work with the Irish Innocence Project. She was awarded a Fulbright to train law student caseworkers how to use journalism skills to progress cases. She returned in September as the Project Manager and remains a key figure in the project. In 2013, Dean Langwallner arranged for six students did internships at innocence projects in Cincinatti and Arizona and in 2014 four caseworkers from the project did internships at the Arizona Innocence Project and California Innocence Project.

On 9 January, the Irish Innocence Project received word that Harry Gleeson, a farm worker who was wrongfully convicted of murdering a neighbor, Moll McCarthy, and was hanged on April 23, 1941, will be exonerated by a presidential pardon in the coming weeks. The case was brought to the Irish Innocence Project in 2010 by the Justice for Harry Gleeson group, which is composed of family and supporters of Harry, including his grand nephew Kevin Gleeson. The Irish Innocence Project, through the work of director David Langwallner and student caseworker Tertius Van Eeden, was able to establish that a gun register was tampered with and had not been admitted into evidence and an American pathologist Peter Cummings examined the autopsy and found the time of death supported Harry's alibi.