Aimee Maxwell does it all at the Georgia Innocence Project, from litigating cases that have freed wrongfully convicted men to tidying the organization’s office outside a bowling alley.
From the looks of the cramped work space, it’s clear Maxwell hasn’t had time for the latter. Nor has she had much time for raising money, and there lies a big problem: The Georgia Innocence Project is almost broke.
Running on a shoestring has been the norm since the organization started in 2002. It has since exonerated five men, using DNA testing to show authorities they were not guilty of the crimes for which they endured long prison stints.
“Early on, the cases were clear cut,” said Maxwell. “They were rape cases. There was a rape kit; there was DNA. But now we’re looking at completely closed cases. No one wants to open them. No one wants to admit they made a mistake.”
Many of the new cases Maxwell wants to open are old murder cases. “These take an incredible amount of time,” she said. “You have to litigate them.”
And Maxwell, one of the group’s three employees (there is another attorney, an office manager, volunteer lawyers and a gaggle of interns), figures she will be doing it for free soon. Working without a salary will buy some breathing room and help the Georgia Innocence Project’s money stretch out.
The rumor was the organization was on its last legs, but this week it got a $10,000 lifeline from a board member. The annual budget is about $160,000, Maxwell estimates, down from budgets that used to be north of $200,000. One of its founding board members called it a “lean, mean justice machine.”
Part of the problem has been a drought of heart-tugging stories of late, said Bill Weber, a former U.S. Marines lawyer and the organization’s board chair.
“We haven’t had an exoneration in a while,” Weber said. “It gets a ton of press and the legislature debating it. We’ve worked through the low-hanging fruit and are digging in on the hard cases.”
Benefactors are drawn to causes that cure disease, provide widespread social justice or allow them to attend art openings and sip Cabernet Sauvignon. But the Georgia Innocence Project now largely toils in obscurity, an ugly duckling rarely considered when people ink checks.
Part of it may be that many think of it as some sort of soft-on-crime, leftie org.
“We’re not Democrat or Republican; we’re not pro- or anti-death penalty; we’re not pro-crime,” said Maxwell. “We just don’t want innocent people in prison.”
It’s said that prison is filled with innocent people — if you ask the inmates. The office has received more than 6,000 letters requesting help and has picked up about 60 cases for representation, or one in 100. Sometimes, in fact, Georgia Innocence lawyers will prove the freedom-seeker guilty.
One of the people who sometimes reads incoming mail is Clarence Harrison, a man who once sent the organization a letter himself. In 1987, the water and sewer worker was convicted of raping a woman as she waited for a bus in DeKalb County. DNA tests of the rape kit used as evidence against Harrison showed he did not commit the crime, and he was released in 2004.
» Read Clarence Harrison's story: "The Exonerated"
The decade from 1999 to 2010 saw many such exonerations across the country, from rape convictions that occurred before DNA testing was established. The Georgia Innocence Project is helping with a massive project to go through the GBI’s evidence vaults to see if other people have been wrongly convicted.
“I went for years reaching out for help and no one would write back,” Harrison told me this week. “I don’t want the project closing; maybe we’re not hitting the right people” for donations.
Harrison has gotten married since his release but has also struggled, selling the remainder of his $1 million annuity to settle medical costs, taxes and other bills.
But he has done fund raisers for Georgia Innocence and “would like to give all the exonerees together to raise money. I have nothing to give them but my name and my time.”
Marietta lawyer Chuck Clay was sad to hear the Georgia Innocence Project has fallen on hard times and was surprised to hear the group’s operating budget.
“Wow, that’s such a small amount,” he said, calling the group “a game changer.”
“It’s so very important,” he said. “You never want to underestimate the type of program that costs so little and that painfully, and thank God, mercifully exonerates people.”
Clay is no bleeding heart liberal, he’s former state senator who also once headed Georgia’s Republican Party. He is also the prosecutor who helped put an innocent man away for 24 years.
Robert Clark was convicted of raping and savagely beating a woman in a case that had circumstantial evidence stacked against him and the victim’s insistent eyewitness identification.
“I will never forget the face, the skin color and his voice, ” the woman testified. Georgia Innocence teamed up with The Innocence Project from New York to free Clark in 2005.
Clay reflected on that long-ago moment, “You say, ‘Wow, look at the vagaries of the human mind.’ This is the ultimate backstop. I hope they find a way to continue.”
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