habeas corpus

An excerpt of the piece I wrote for the Connecticut Law Tribune about a possible case of wrongful conviction in a double homicide and the law clinic who won a new trial for their client: 

When eight law school students had their first day ever in court, the stakes could not have been higher: They were representing a man who contends he was wrongly convicted of a double New Haven homicide.

The payoff was not only a learning experience, but a December ruling by a federal judge that their client's constitutional rights were violated when evidence that the key prosecution witness had been coached by a detective was kept from the defense counsel.

Brett Dignam was overseeing the students. These days, she's clinical professor of law at Columbia Law School. But she started working on the case of Scott L. Lewis when she was a professor at Yale Law School who led the institution's prison legal services, complex federal litigation and Supreme Court advocacy clinics.

Along with Dignam, Elora Mukherjee, who co-teaches Columbia's mass incarceration clinic with Dignam, and a rotating cast of law students have represented Lewis in his fight to win a new trial.

Last month, Connecticut U.S. Senior District Judge Charles Haight Jr. granted Lewis' habeas corpus petition.

The case is not over yet because the Connecticut's Commissioner of Correction filed a notice of appeal to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit on Jan. 15. Jo Anne Sulik, senior assistant state's attorney with the Office of the Chief State's Attorney, did not respond to a request for comment.

Lewis, who is serving a 120-year prison sentence, represented himself for 14 years in an area of extremely complicated federal law, Dignam said. As far as she knows, he was the first person to seek DNA testing when Connecticut passed a law authorizing convicted defendants to make such motions.

Lewis went from handling his case all by himself to dealing with the challenges of being represented by a law clinic full of budding lawyers who change with the academic season, she said. There is no continuity because there are eight new students each semester working on the case, Dignam said.

"To be part of the legal education of generations of law students says something" about Lewis, Dignam said.