(cheerful music) (cheerful music continues) - Thanks to an Illinois group, 33 Illinoisans wrongly imprisoned have been exonerated over the last 25 years.

Some of those people served decades behind bars.

We're talking with the Illinois Innocence Project tonight.

And Lauren Kaeseberg, who is the legal director, joins us now from Chicago.

Lauren, good to see you.

- Nice to see you, Mark.

- For people who aren't familiar, tell us a little bit about the Illinois Innocence Project and what you do.

- The Illinois Innocence Project is a legal organization.

We're based at the University of Illinois Springfield.

And we represent innocent people who are wrongfully convicted, in prison, fighting for their freedom, and to clear their names.

In addition to that advocacy and fighting on behalf of innocent people, we also have an education mission, where we educate students at the University of Illinois Springfield, undergraduate students.

We work with law students around the state, and we do public speaking engagements.

We work to educate the public around wrongful convictions.

In addition to that, we have a reform mission, where we work to advance legislation and policy changes, including different new laws and bills.

And then we have a really unique and groundbreaking police training program that is mandated by the State of Illinois now, that the Illinois Innocence Project trains every new police cadet in the State of Illinois in a wrongful conviction training program.

- Interesting.

I wanna get back to that in just a few minutes, but tell us a little bit about the people who work for the Illinois Innocence Project, their backgrounds, and where they come from.

- Yeah, so we have a really incredible, passionate staff of folks who work for the project.

We have some volunteers who assist with cases and assist with other matters.

One of the really, I think, interesting things that I love about working at the project is that, sort of, once we have someone who is a student with us, or someone who starts out as a volunteer, so often, they wanna stay, and they're so dedicated to the work that we do.

So a lot of our staff has actually been with us for many years and in different sort of roles, starting out as... We have one staff attorney right now who used to actually be an undergraduate student at the University of Illinois Springfield, who then went on to law school, and now is an attorney, sort of full circle, working with us.

But we have a staff of attorneys, we have staff that is based around the entire state.

Our main office is in Springfield.

And based in Springfield is our director and our operations director.

And we have a full office there at the university with attorneys and administrative staff.

Also based in Springfield is our director of our Wrongful Conviction Awareness and Avoidance police training program.

And that staff is there.

And then in the Chicago area, we have a robust legal staff that work up here in Chicago.

And we have even staff that are based sort of in other places.

We have someone who's just outside of Peoria.

And so we all work together in teams.

We come together on Zooms, we see each other in court, we see each other at, you know, events and hearings, and things of that nature.

- Very good.

Well, this is very interesting stuff.

I'm curious how the Innocence Project learns about these different cases.

And what are the procedures for choosing a case?

Because I'm sure once word gets out that you guys are helping people, that everybody and their brother who's incarcerated (Lauren laughs) probably wants your help.

So how do you determine what cases to take?

- You know, it's funny, because when I started doing this work, you know, over 20 years ago, as a student, one of the things I would hear from people all the time is like, "Doesn't everybody say they're innocent?"

You know, and it sort of was like almost mocked.

And now, what we've learned over the last 20-plus years of seeing exonerations, thousands of people across the country being exonerated, is that this is a real problem.

There are thousands of people in Illinois alone that are wrongfully convicted.

There are estimates, statistics, that have been developed by government agencies, objective statistics, and belief that there's approximately at least 5% of people in prison are wrongfully convicted.

5% doesn't sound like that big of a number, but if you think of it, it's every 20th person getting convicted in a court system, is wrongfully convicted according to this research and these studies.

And so we start from a premise of knowing that this is a prolific problem, this is an epidemic problem within our society, within our legal system.

That said, we get hundreds and hundreds of applications every year.

And we are actually, as an organization, only able to accept 1% of the cases of people who write to us.

Sometimes we get referred cases by other attorneys.

So that can happen, where someone, you know, who represented someone on an appeal comes to us and says, "My client was innocent.

I know it in my bones.

They need help.

I can't help them anymore.

You guys are the ones.

We need you to do this."

Most of the time, though, the process begins with a innocent person in prison writing us a letter.

We're still one of the few places, I think, in this country, or in this world, that operates through snail mail.

So (laughs) our clients write handwritten letters to us.

We get plea after plea to our office in Springfield, where we have an incredible intake staff.

That intake staff is comprised of an attorney, some administrative positions in our office, and we have undergraduate students at UIS, who work to go through these letters, try to acquire as much information about them as possible.

We have an initial screening process, where a person who's an applicant at that point has to meet a certain number of criteria in order to even get through the first stage of the screening.

And then if they get through that first stage of the screening, there's additional work done to look at the appellate opinions on the case, look at any news articles, try to wrap minds around what this case is about.

Are there red flags that come up?

So one, really, I think, insightful and incredible part of the work that we do is that we're able to help individual people, but through that work, we learn about the system.

So you start to see trends, and you see patterns, and we know common causes of wrongful conviction.

So if you have a juvenile who says that they falsely confess, and you know that the records show that they were held at the police station for two days, and only released when they were told that they could see their parent, and then that wasn't true, and they confess to a crime, in your head, you have a little alert.

And so that's a red flag.

So our intake team recognizes those.

They sort of triage cases and categorize them.

And then cases that then get to the next step that look like there's a credible possible claim of innocence, it's a complete deep-dive into the case.

And sometimes our intake process can take years by itself, where they acquire all the documents, they get trial transcripts, police reports, lab reports, anything they can do, they send FOIAs, they try to get, you know, information from any place they can get it.

And then they pull together, working with students at the university, a comprehensive evaluation of the case, and then they'll present that to our legal team.

And so the attorneys, our investigators, and our legal staff will sit in these meetings, hear about these cases, and make decisions about what more investigation could be done or what could we do to, you know, decide if this is a case that we wanna take on.

And then, you know, like I said, 99% of applicants get that sort of bad newsletter in the mail, that we don't have the resources, or we, you know, we don't have the ability to take on their case, but for that 1% that do, you know, we take it, and it's sort of off to the races, to try to do everything we can to prove their innocence.

- Sure.

You talked about patterns and things like that.

And looking at some of the folks that you've helped, I mean, you've helped white people, Black people, men, women, all kinds of people.

But do you find that it's mostly minorities that are asking for your help and/or end up being exonerated?

- I think what this work shows you is that it really can happen to anybody.

You know, we have seen clients who have come from communities that have high levels of crime and high arrest rates.

And so you can, you know, they're statistically probably more likely to be wrongfully convicted, coming from a community where there are higher police presence and higher police encounters.

And then we have clients who, you know, are, to some folks, like they're an next door neighbor, and it's a totally different community.

Wrongful convictions can happen to anyone.

You know, sometimes the cases, I think, that highlight that the best can be cases of our women clients that we have.

Most women who are wrongfully convicted are wrongfully convicted of a crime.

Oftentimes, it's not even an actual crime to begin with, but a tragic accident, a tragic medical occurrence, because they're a caregiver, you know, they wanna help.

At the outset of the police investigation, police see them as sort of being suspicious, and they end up getting wrapped up and accused, and ultimately convicted.

And so when you see those cases of mothers convicted of murdering their child, or of a daycare worker convicted of murdering a child they cared for, I think those really highlight like this can really happen to anybody.

Another, I think, keen example of that, we have a client, his name is Brian Beals.

He was exonerated back in December of 2023.

He was from the Inglewood community.

He was an African American football player and incredible student.

He was a student at SIU in Carbondale, playing football.

In 1987, he went home for Thanksgiving break.

And in his community, a little boy was shot and killed.

The shooter of that crime was actually shooting at Brian, and missed him, and hit this little boy.

But between police misconduct and eyewitnesses who were coerced and lied, he got wrongfully convicted of that.

He spent 35 years in prison for this horrible crime.

And he was a law enforcement major at SIU, as a football player, home for Thanksgiving break.

So I think what we see is this can happen to anyone, but certainly, the statistics show that if you are Black or brown, or from a community that is, you know, lower class in terms of economics, that you are more likely to be wrongfully convicted or somehow find your way in the system.

- And do you see any kind of pattern in terms of what may contribute to these cases in terms of, like you mentioned, police misconduct, maybe an effective lawyer, witness who may not be telling the truth?

What are you seeing there?

- Yeah, so there are clearly identifiable risk factors for wrongful conviction.

They include all the things that you just mentioned.

So witness misidentification is a leading cause of wrongful conviction.

So most people believe that when someone witnesses a crime, or they're the victim of a crime, that they lock that occurrence in their memory.

And when they go back and think about the crime, it's like replaying like a movie.

Like you just remember it, you see it, you remember the person's face.

But there is an entire body of science that is developed that shows the fallibility of human memory.

And all of these issues, like if you're the victim of a crime, and there's a gun involved, the fact that there's a gun present distracts your attention away from the perpetrator's face, and you're focusing on the weapon, because you need to preserve your life.

It's these like survival instincts that kick in.

And so all these different factors that can lead to a person not really remembering the face of the person as well as they think they do.

And then these post-event factors can come into play, where police, sometimes on purpose, most oftentimes inadvertently, can make suggestions to a witness, or they can give cues.

So we saw some reforms actually in Illinois back in 2015 that increased the reliability of eyewitness identification procedures in the state.

So you no longer, in Illinois, should have, by law, a officer conduct a lineup with a witness who's the same officer who's investigating the crime and knows who the suspect is.

You should have a blind administration of a lineup, because it's just human nature to, you know, subliminally give clues to a witness.

So that's one factor.

Another factor could be, you know, false confession, or a confession in a case, you look at the factors that surround a person giving an inculpatory statement.

Bad lawyering, we see that all the time.

So a defense attorney who doesn't do a proper investigation, doesn't call witnesses, doesn't go out in the street and go to the crime scene, doesn't believe their client.

Bad lawyering can lead to a lot of problems that end up in a wrongful conviction.

And then similarly, you know, state misconducts, whether that be by the prosecutor's office at times or by the police, we unfortunately see that far too often as well.

- You mentioned the case of Brian Beals a little bit ago.

What are some of the other cases that you've worked on, or that the IIP has worked on, over the last few decades that really stand out?

- Oh, it feels like they're all like our children.

You know, it's like everyone is so unique and so special in different ways.

I think a way to maybe think about it is the way that we approach cases.

And so, you know, there are some cases that you have to fight, and you fight for years, and you litigate them.

And ultimately, you end up with an exoneration.

So a good example of a case like that could be the case of Marilyn Mulero, who was a long-time client of the Illinois Innocence Project prior to her exoneration, which ultimately happened.

Marilyn was convicted wrongfully, alongside two other women, back in 1992 in Chicago, in the Humboldt Park neighborhood, after a shooting of two men happened in the actual like bathroom at Humboldt Park in Chicago.

Marilyn spent 28 years in prison for this crime, which she did not commit, five of those years around death row.

And she ultimately was exonerated after litigating her case for a long time, going before every venue we could get in front of.

Sometimes we are able to work in cooperation or collaboration with different prosecutor's offices.

So there are conviction integrity units that have sort of become a new thing around the country.

And throughout certain counties in Illinois, you have units within the prosecutor's office that are charged with hearing claims of innocence and working to try to determine whether or not someone's wrongfully convicted.

An example there would be the case of Herman Williams, who was a Lake County client of ours.

He was wrongfully convicted of the murder of his ex-wife in 1993, up in Waukegan, at the northern, sort of, far northern part of the state.

We were able to work with the CIU, a newly created CIU, up in Lake County, and uncover new evidence of Herman's innocence, which included DNA testing, it included evidence that the police officer, detective in that case, had a pattern and practice of misconduct and falsifying testimony, a variety of things that came to light that ultimately led to Herman's exoneration, after 27 years spent in prison of a life sentence.

Herman is another example of where this could happen to anybody.

Herman was a decorated Navy, he is now a veteran, but at the time, he was an active Navy member, and was in Illinois because he was at the Great Lakes Naval Base up there.

So this is another one where it could happen to anybody.

In addition to sort of litigating, working with prosecutor's offices, sometimes we get to the end of the road, or there aren't any procedural avenues available, and we'll end up filing a clemency petition in front of the governor's office.

We have the unique success, I guess, you could say, if you call it that, of having the only posthumous clemency, pardon, in Illinois history.

And that was of our client who we represented after his death in prison, Grover Thompson.

Grover was convicted of a 1981 sexual assault case in Mount Vernon, Illinois.

He spent 15 years in prison of his 40-year sentence, and sadly died in prison as an innocent man.

Years later, his family still fought to clear his name.

A detective from Carbondale, who was incredible, took on the fight and reached out to us, and we were able to go in.

And actually, Governor Rauner granted him an actual-innocence pardon, posthumously, and cleared his name after his death.

So, you know, what we find is that there are just every story... You could take the whole, you know, half-hour segment to talk about just one case.

They're all fascinating, they're all devastating, but I think they all highlight different aspects of the way that we have to find creative ways to fight and clear people's names, you know, decades and decades after their wrongful conviction.

- Yeah, it's been 15 years since Illinois abolished the death penalty.

And even as far back as 2000, there was a moratorium because of wrongful convictions.

I mean, do we know of people who have been executed in Illinois that were innocent?

- I mean, that is a really good question.

I am not in a position today to give you names of people who were executed, who were innocent, in Illinois, but I can tell you that that has happened, and it's happened around the country.

In fact, just this past week, there was an individual in Texas, who was identified by a commission in Texas, in, again, working with a conviction integrity unit at a prosecutor's office and the governor's office there, and they identified a man who had been executed, and they actually did a whole, almost a ceremony, within their council to acknowledge that this man had been executed and was innocent.

So the National Institute of Justice years ago did a study, and they determined, as a federal government agency, that 4% of death row inmates are innocent, that's the error rate on death row.

And in death row cases, people have actually, as terrible as they are, a little bit more access to a defense.

So in Illinois, you would get an additional attorney, you would have additional resources for investigation, because the stakes are so high.

And so we know that if it's 4% on death row cases, where there's more resources at trial, and there's more opportunities for reviewing the conviction on the other side of it, it's much greater in non-death cases, the rate of wrongful conviction.

- In addition to helping these innocent folks get out of prison, I wanna talk a little bit about what the organization does in terms of legislative changes, and as you mentioned earlier, police training.

Tell us a little bit about that.

- The police training is truly innovative, and it's such an incredible program to be a part of as an organization.

So several years ago, our organization, the Illinois Innocence Project, started working at the Police Training Institute in Champaign at a one training organization, doing a voluntary, optional training for police cadets.

That has now completely grown and snowballed into a statewide program now.

So the Illinois Training and Standards Board, which oversees all of the training for new police cadets in the state, mandates that every new police officer in the state receive our wrongful conviction training.

So it's a four-hour course.

We have our director of police training, it's the WCAA program, Wrongful Conviction Awareness and Avoidance.

And that director goes in with an attorney and two exonerated individuals at every session.

So starting a few years ago, every new police officer in the state has had an encounter with an innocence attorney and two people who were in prison for crimes they didn't commit.

We're collecting data around that, doing surveys of these officers.

We really believe that it will have an impact to have that firsthand exposure and understanding.

Part of the training includes these causes of wrongful conviction, and the factors and ways to identify, and like if your gut is saying something's off, and ways to identify what's the chain of command, and how do I address it as a police officer if I think that we're maybe arresting the wrong person, or this evidence isn't leading exactly where we thought it was gonna lead?

So that's truly incredible, and we believe it's the sort of a domino effect, and we'll see changes like that around the country as well.

There are other states, and even an agency from Canada has come to Illinois to observe our training and potentially replicate it in other places.

In terms of legislation, we have been really lucky to be a part of some groundbreaking, nationally, you know, leading the nation in amazing legislation here in Illinois that comes from our experience in wrongful conviction cases.

We were able to pass a bill that requires extra diligence and information in cases that include jailhouse informants.

So if you are a defendant, and you have a case in court, and there's a jailhouse informant, sometimes called a snitch, who's saying that you, you know, gave them information, or, you know, confessed to the crime to them, there's a whole new standard in Illinois that allows for the courts to really dig in there and see how credible is this jailhouse informant, and what they're saying, and is it true?

In 2019, I'm sorry, in 2021, we were able to pass, we helped write and then pass a juvenile deception bill in Illinois that now prohibits the use of lying to juveniles in the interrogation room.

So what, I think, most people don't know is that it's legal for the police to lie to you if you're being interrogated.

That has always been true.

It's still true for adults in the State of Illinois and throughout the country, everywhere.

But in Illinois, we're the first state in the country to ban the use of lying with minors in the interrogation room.

That came from our understanding and knowledge that juveniles are more likely to falsely confess, period.

And they're especially more likely confess to something they didn't do if the police lied to them, or if they're given an incentive that they could leave.

You know, if you just sign this paper, your mom's in the next room, and she'll take you home.

Or lying to them and saying, "You know, actually, your fingerprints are on this gun, and we know you were in the room.

We did rapid DNA testing.

We know you were there."

And a juvenile who doesn't know any different is terrified.

And they think, "Well, if I can just get out of this room, everyone's gonna know I didn't do it, so let me just do what they want me to do and get out of the room."

But they sign their life away in those cases.

And so we were able to reform that aspect of the law and passed that bill.

Currently, in Illinois, we are working on increasing the amount of compensation that the state gives, or restitution that the state gives, to wrongfully convicted individuals.

Where we have always led the way in legislation in Illinois based on wrongful convictions, we fall woefully short when it comes to giving restitution to the victims of wrongful conviction, to the survivors, the exonerees.

Currently, in Illinois, we give an average of around $11,000 a year to someone who spent, you know, these decades in prison for crimes they didn't commit.

The federal standard now is $50,000 a year.

And so we're trying to push our legislature to pass a bill to increase that amount, and really acknowledge and restore at least some semblance of, you know, financial stability to individuals when they walk out of prison with nothing.

- Yeah, Lauren, wow.

I think that's another topic for another show.

That's really- - Yeah.

- Interesting to see what happens to these folks once they do get out after decades behind bars.

Where can people find out more about the Illinois Innocence Project?

- We are online with the illinoisinnocenceproject.org.

We've got a social media presence on Facebook, on Instagram.

And what's really exciting for us is that it's our 25th anniversary this year in 2026.

We were founded in 2001 at the University of Illinois Springfield.

And so we've got a whole year plan to be able to acknowledge all of our successes.

We have a big event plan in November of this year.

And we encourage anyone to look us up online and support the work that we do.

- All right, Lauren Kaeseberg is the legal director of the Illinois Innocence Project.

I wish we had more time, but we're out of time.

Thank you for joining us.

Very enlightening.

- Thank you, Mark.

- All right.

And we appreciate everyone out there joining us.

You can watch this segment again at wtvp.org.

Check us out on social media, Facebook, and Instagram.

Have a good night.

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