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Arizona Justice Project moves to ASU campus

By dmc-admin

Published: March 25, 2008 at 1:00 am

An Arizona organization that helps inmates overturn wrongful convictions has moved to ASU's Sandra Day O'Connor College of Law. The Arizona Justice Project was created in 1998 and was previously housed at the Phoenix law firm Osborn Maledon, P.A. "I think the move is a great development. We have always worked with law students and law faculty," said Larry Hammond, founding member and first chairman of AZJP. "It improves the credibility of the project and also gives us the resources to do things." Hammond said the additional resources gained from the move have allowed AZJP to hire much-needed employees. "Now we have a development director to help raise money, an executive director and a paid administrative assistant to help us keep track of these cases. Really, overnight we have the ability to raise more money and have more immediate and direct involvement with the law schools," he said. AZJP was founded by members of the Arizona Attorneys for Criminal Justice. At the time, it was the fifth organization in the U.S. set up to defend wrongly accused convicts. There are now at least 40 similar organizations. "The primary reason for the founding is to provide a service for people who are in prison and who are no longer able to obtain council at public expense but have claims that they are innocent of the crime they were convicted or have suffered as a result of some other very obvious injustice in the criminal arena," Hammond said. AZJP will take on cases from every level of crime, except death-penalty cases. But Hammond said the majority of the cases will be those with longer sentences. "We do everything, except death-penalty cases, and the reason we don't is because people that are on death row are allowed council at public expense already," Hammond said. "But because the person needs to be incarcerated long enough for the case to be investigated, it is really the people who are serving longer sentences who wind up being the usual target populations of these projects." AZJP has received 2,500 applications from inmates to have their case heard in the past decade. About 250 of those cases have resulted in overturned convictions. "Over 200 of those are the result of (former Gov. Fife) Symington having failed to properly handle a number of clemency applications, so all of those are one case really," Hammond said. The AZJP caseload also includes many that are the result of the convict not being allowed a proper defense. "The best example of this is battered-woman cases. For many years in Arizona, a woman could not assert as a defense that she is a battered woman, but now it is allowed," he said. "So, we have been back in court for those cases."

ARIZONA LEGISLATIVE REPORT

Arizona Justice Project moves to ASU campus

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