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58 LOUISVILLE MAGAZINE 3.16 5 8 UNTIL PROVEN INNOCENT When Linda Smith started as a public defender in the '90s, the general public didn't take police brutality, false confessions and wrongful convictions seriously. "When you talked about it, people would laugh at you," Smith says of those assuming the system was perfect, without a reasonable doubt. "Even some judges." During her days as a post-conviction attorney with the Kentucky Department of Public Advocacy, she snifed out the ways honesty goes unserved. She paid attention to unyielding prosecutors, to the larger cases abounding nationally, partic- ularly the O.J. Simpson trial in 1994 and its experts in DNA — a mark of evidence unknown to most lawyers at the time. In 2010, after working capital-punishment cases, Smith joined as supervising attorney at the Kentucky Innocence Project, a sec- tion of the DPA devoted to exonerating the wrongfully convicted. KIP is located in Frankfort and was formed in 2001 — one of the frst in the country — by then-head of the DPA Marguerite Tomas, who used to say, "It takes a gentle breeze to blow someone into jail and the perfect storm to get them out." When Smith took the job, already seven men had been exonerated because of KIP. Two were Louisvillians. One: William Gregory, falsely identifed, convicted of attempted rape and burglary, locked up for seven years and freed in 2000 by mito- chondrial DNA testing — the frst to be exonerated based on DNA alone (with the help of the original Innocence Project in New York). Two: Edwin Chandler, coerced to confess (falsely) to a murder charge, im- prisoned nine years and exonerated in '09 by DNA testing — his fngerprints were not the prints on the evidence, which the prosecution withheld in trial. (Kentucky doesn't require retribution payments. Gregory sued the police department and was awarded $4 million. Chandler was compensated $8.2 million after a lawsuit and now lives in Georgia.) Smith has helped exonerate two more Louisvillians: Michael VonAllmen and Kerry Porter, who both shared their stories with Louis- ville Magazine. Part two of KIP's current two-part crew is investigator Jimmer Dudley, whose resume includes the Naval Criminal Inves- tigative Service. He now leads post-con- viction DNA-related cases, which require physical evidence, and non-DNA cases, too. "It's going back and trying to fnd someone that maybe lied back in the day. Or were unreliable. Someone new that didn't come forward before because they were scared. Tat's the long, hard part," Dudley says. With help of University of Louisville, University of Kentucky and Northern Kentucky University law students, plus funding from the Kentucky Bar Associ- ation and occasional grants, KIP works on 20 to 30 wrongful-conviction cases per year pro bono. Te waiting list is 300 deep, always new names claiming inno- cence. So far, KIP investigations have led to 15 exonerations, or one a year. ("We inves- tigate a lot of cases that don't go anywhere," Dudley says.) Nationwide in 2015, the land of the free freed a record 149 people, most with an average 15-year sentence, some even sentenced to death row. Why only one freed soul a year in Ken- tucky? "We have the burden of reasonable certainty," Dudley says. "Tat's why DNA is so big. It's scientifc fact." On average, it takes fve to eight years to investigate, litigate and fnalize an exoneration. "It be- comes this game: 'How little info can we give the defense attorney,'" Smith says. "We want to look at police fles, prosecution in- formation. But it's always, 'No, no, no.'" In Kentucky, there is no post-conviction access to evidence from the prosecution that could determine innocence versus guilt. "And pri- or to 2013, if I found your biological evi- dence at the county clerk's ofce, I couldn't even get it tested," Smith says. (Until former Gov. Steve Beshear signed a DNA bill, only inmates on death row were allowed to get their DNA tested as evidence post-convic- tion. And even now, you must petition for that evidence in court.) "We say, 'Once the bell has been rung, you can't un-ring it,'" Dudley says. Tere are other factors. Plenty. Te dependency on eyewitness testimonies — which can be skewed by trauma, a suggestive comment from an ofcer, only one person in the lineup who resembles By Arielle Christian Photos by Chris Witzke Exoneration with help from the Kentucky Innocence Project.