The Innocence Project at Twenty: An Interview with Barry Scheck

The late 1980s witnessed the debut of DNA on the stages of the world’s judiciaries. In the United Kingdom, DNA ‘‘minisatellites’’ (discovered by Sir Alec Jeffreys and chronicled previously in this series of PLOS Genetics interviews) made their breathtaking appearance in two compelling stories: an immigration case and a double rape-murder case in which a village’s entire male population offered up its blood for testing. Meanwhile in the United States, the plodding search for ‘‘RFLPs’’ (restriction fragment length polymorphisms) ultimately gave rise to a set of DNA markers that wended their way into the American courtroom. Directing, producing, and starring in the saga of this transformational technology were a pair of New York lawyers, Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld, whose relentless efforts and strict adherence to scientific principles have reshaped the landscape of criminal justice far beyond the application of DNA testing. Scheck and Neufeld came to know each other in the mid-1970s as public defenders in the Bronx Legal Aid Society. In 1978, Scheck (Image 1) joined Cardozo School of Law to develop law clinics for students in their second and third years, while Neufeld later moved on to private practice. As described in their book Actual Innocence (cowritten with Jim Dwyer), Scheck and Neufeld were brought back in to their old Bronx office to assist with the exoneration of Marion Coakley, who had been wrongfully convicted of rape. This case led them not only to learn about DNA as evidentiary material, but also to exonerate other falsely imprisoned individuals using DNA analysis—a mission that became the Innocence Project. At the time of this interview, the Innocence Project was celebrating its twentieth anniversary, with 290 DNAbased exonerations of innocent people to its credit and, through its network, exonerations of hundreds more through non– DNA-based strategies. Also highly effective in policy making, the Project has championed high standards not just for DNA testing, but also for eyewitness identification, defendant interrogation, and pattern evidence. I was able to meet with Scheck on the seventh floor of 40 Worth Street, home of the Innocence Project. His small corner office, made large by windows overlooking lower Manhattan, was haphazardly decorated with award plaques, clocks, plates, and cups and his desk littered with issues of Science strewn among the law journals—all visual reminders of his success in marrying these two disciplines. Gitschier: Let’s start with how you came to work at Cardozo Law School. Scheck: I had a colleague in the Bronx Legal Aid Office who got an offer from a new law school. He went to another school, but he told the search committee, ‘‘I have a friend who is exactly the kind of person you want.’’ So they reached out to me and asked me to interview, and this was at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, which had just started. It is part of Yeshiva University, which also has the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. They were looking for somebody to run all their clinical programs and to be on a tenure track, which clinicians often don’t get. And to use the Miller analogy, Cardozo would be to law as Einstein is to medicine. And in fact, I think 34 years later the school is really outstanding, and I’ve been there from the beginning. Gitschier: Tell me a little about what the clinical programs in law look like. Scheck: The first year of law school is a total immersion process where you train