The University of Notre Dame’s Exoneration Justice Clinic wants to remedy problems in the criminal justice system. Since 2020, the clinic has given Notre Dame students real-world legal experience addressing one of system’s gravest failures: wrongful convictions.
The clinic focuses on three areas: working to free individuals imprisoned for crimes they didn’t commit; connecting exonerated individuals with critical social services, from vocational training to mental health counseling; and advocating for legislative reform that will prevent wrongful convictions.
Each year, up to 15 Notre Dame law students and two undergraduate seniors who plan to attend law school participate in these efforts for academic credit. During the fall semester, they attend weekly classroom sessions to discuss the cases they’re working on and the relevant law. The clinic also offers a nine-week summer internship to three law students and three seniors who are paid to work on wrongful conviction cases.
The work during the academic year and summer internship involves the review of trial transcripts, police reports, witness statements and other materials that may uncover exculpatory evidence and demonstrate a client’s innocence. Students also conduct legal research, draft motions and briefs, and interview trial witnesses. In addition, they meet with their clients at the prisons where they’re incarcerated.
Such an experience can be a seminal moment in itself. “It’s clearly a very powerful, life-transforming experience for students,” says the clinic’s director, Jimmy Gurulé, a former federal prosecutor, assistant U.S. attorney general and undersecretary of the Treasury Department who joined the Notre Dame law faculty in 1989. “When they make that connection with their client, they realize they are working not just for a name on a court document but for a real person imprisoned for a crime they did not commit.”
For these students, the clinic experience transforms the law from theory into lived reality. “It’s not enough that our students recognize academic knowledge and doctrine,” Gurulé says. “It’s critically important that they understand the application of those principles and how they play out in the real world. It’s really law in action.”
Over the past four years, students working through the clinic have contributed to the exoneration of two individuals and have a current caseload that includes several more. In a motion they took all the way to the Indiana Supreme Court, they succeeded in having a judge recused from four cases where, they believed, she had a conflict of interest. They also helped pass a state law in 2022 that requires evidence that could be subjected to DNA analysis — a key factor in identifying actual perpetrators and preventing wrongful convictions — to be preserved for 20 years. They have also worked on bills prohibiting law enforcement officers from bullying the juveniles they’re interrogating with lies or from unduly influencing eyewitnesses who are asked to identify suspects in a lineup or photo spread.
Callie Chaney ’24J.D. was able to work on a pair of cases during her two years at the clinic, including one she pursued from the beginning of the investigation to the completion of a fully drafted post-conviction brief. The experience affirmed the importance of keeping detailed notes — “because I saw what sloppy lawyering did to clients,” she says — and prepared her for jailhouse meetings with clients she serves now as a public defender in Frankfort, Kentucky, where she sometimes has to deliver bad news.
For Chaney, the best takeaway came from working alongside the clinic staff and other students dedicated to the cause. “I was shaped by the people I was working with, by their work ethic and thirst for justice,” she says. “That will stay with me no matter what area of law I go into.”
In addition to providing hands-on experience for students and impacting the lives of their clients, Gurulé sees the clinic serving a broader purpose. “Through our collective efforts we’re reforming the criminal justice system, bringing light to bear on its weaknesses, injustices and in some cases corruption,” he says. “Students are at the forefront of this. It’s providing them an intimate insight into the system.”
John Rosengren is a Pulitzer nominee and freelance journalist who lives in Minneapolis.