The Pennsylvania Innocence Project is coming to the law school, offering students new opportunities for experience in criminal law while giving wrongly convicted inmates a fresh shot at justice.

This spring semester, six students are enrolled in the Pennsylvania Innocence Project Practicum, through which they will work on actual cases of inmates seeking to overturn their convictions.

"For students, this is an opportunity to reverse engineer a criminal prosecution," said Dan Filler, senior associate dean for academic and faculty affairs. "They're going to start with a finished case and figure out how the prosecution built their case and how the defense responded. They're going to discover not only the holes and soft spots in a particular case, but more generally how cases go right and especially how cases go wrong."

Working in pairs, the students will review the cases of convicts who assert they were wrongly convicted and have exhausted their direct appeals, said Charlotte Whitmore, an adjunct professor who is working as a staff attorney at the Pennsylvania Innocence Project.

The students will study entire trial transcripts, review discovery documents and put together memoranda that point out where potential investigations could lead and what claims attorneys might pursue, Whitmore said. Each team will make a recommendation to the project's board as to whether their case merits pursuit.

Along the way, Whitmore said, the students may meet with the inmates themselves, their families or with prior attorneys.

Giselle Aloi, a 2L, said she enrolled in the practicum because of her interest in human rights.

"There's a blatant disregard for human rights in some cases," Aloi said. "There are significant issues in the legal system."

Through their work, the students will help chip away at a backlog of cases that have accumulated in the 18 months since Pennsylvania Innocence Project got started at Temple University.

Students began helping with preliminary screenings last year through the school's Pro Bono Service Program.

At that stage, students review applications to determine if the inmates were convicted in Pennsylvania, have exhausted their direct appeals and are claiming actual innocence, as opposed to ineffective counsel.

Nationwide, hundreds of inmates have been exonerated through the Innocence Project, which was launched in 1992 at the Benjamin Cardozo School of Law. By 2009, the project had exonerated more than 500 inmates, including 245 who were cleared through DNA evidence.

Those exonerated include Kenneth Granger, who was released from Graterford Prison in July 2010. Attorneys with the Pennsylvania Innocence Project and the Defender's Association won Granger's release after discovering that a police detective testifying in his murder trial concealed the fact that a witness had positively identified a different suspect. This critical fact had been suppressed, and Granger spent 27 years in prison.

Neha Yadav, a 2L, met Granger while he was still in prison and witnessed his release while performing pro bono work with the Innocence Project. Her classmate, Tony Chiaramonte, also met Granger while completing a summer internship with the organization.

Chiaramonte said the internship convinced him to focus on criminal law when he graduates.

"It's pretty eye opening to see that these guys had bad trial attorneys, and they end up in jail for the rest of their lives," Chiaramonte said.

While very few inmates who seek assistance from the organization have plausible claims, Yadav said, even a small number of stories like Granger's prove the importance of the organization's efforts.

"I saw a man come out of prison after 27 years," she said. "It's really, really important."