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Wednesday, June 3, 1998
By ANDREW SCHNEIDER Trial lawyers, law professors from the University of Washington and their students will provide legal aid for many of the 16 men and women who were imprisoned because of the Wenatchee child-sex prosecutions. At a news conference yesterday near the Capitol, the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers said it will assist and probably help pay for the legal work under an effort called "Innocence Project Northwest." "The investigations, prosecutions and trials in the Wenatchee cases is just the type of gross miscarriage of justice that the Innocence Project was created to address," said Cheryl Amitay, special counsel for legislative affairs with the defense lawyers association. The Seattle Innocence Project was started last fall by Professor Jacqueline McMurtrie and local lawyer Fred Leatherman. The decision to help the Wenatchee group was made in May. "Everything we've done so far has come out of our own pockets so we eagerly welcome the support from NACDL," said McMurtrie. "There is an enormous amount of work to be done on the Wenatchee cases, and we can use all the help that's offered." Under the program, an experienced lawyer will supervise and manage a team of two or three law students, who will do the legal research and legwork. Together, each group assigned to a specific prisoner will develop the legal motions needed to get the convictions re-examined by the appellate court. "We need to substantiate the claims of actual innocence of each of these men and women," said Leatherman. "The problem is made more difficult by the fact that the time to file appeals is quickly running out." Six lawyers have already agreed to assist with the project, and Leatherman says he has put out a plea for help from other NACDL members. "Sixteen people (from Wenatchee) remain in prison due to unjust convictions," Leatherman wrote his colleagues. "We are joining the cause to liberate these 16." The University of Washington project is modeled after a program that began in 1992 at New York's Car-dozo Law School. That program and similar operations in several states have freed dozens of innocent people from prison and from death row. Under the rules of the Washington court system, those still imprisoned from the Wenatchee trials can have a court-appointed lawyer assigned only after a judge first agrees to examine the case. The maneuvering required to get an effective appeal before the court is complex and expensive. Without exception, those still imprisoned are too poor to hire lawyers. Seattle lawyers Robert Van Siclen, Eric Nielsen and Robert Rosenthal have been working for free for months handling the appeals of Carol and Mark Doggett, Idella and Harold Everett and Manuel Hildago. All were jailed in 1994 and 1995. Yesterday's news conference, which was coordinated by Jack Hill, the director of Pierce County's Office of Assigned Counsel, and Kathryn Lyon, a former Tacoma public defender and author of The Wenatchee Report and "Witch Hunt," was held at the ACLU's Washington, D.C., headquarters, across from the Capitol. The ACLU, the defense lawyer's association, The National Justice Committee and other organizations repeated a call made in New York last week for federal investigations by Congress, the Justice Department and the Department of Health and Human Services. Gerald Lefcourt, NACDL president, joined the call for federal intervention. "When the public defenders were outspent and outgunned as they were in Wenatchee, then truth is the first casualty," he said in a statement. "The families devastated by the witch hunt in Wenatchee were not let down by the criminal justice system and the child protective agencies, they were destroyed by them." Four women, who said they represented an "abuse awareness" group called "One Voice," handed out packets of information they said were from Chelan County Prosecutors Gary Riesen and Roy Fore. The packets strongly denounced the finding of Lyon's book and several newspaper reports, including an investigative series by the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Members of the group said Riesen's office provided information that proved Wenatchee police Officer Robert Perez did not coerce accusations from children, nor confessions from several of the accused. And that "nowhere near" 29,726 counts of child rape and molestation were generated. "This is a scandal. There was no witch hunt in Wenatchee. Officer Perez and the prosecutors did a wonderful job," said Jenny Miller of One Voice. However, the women representing One Voice admitted they had never been to Wenatchee and had not followed the testimony in the ongoing civil case. Nor, they said, had they read the opinions of Superior Court Judges Wallis Friel and Michael Donohue, which countered most of the claims they were making. Carol Hopkins, who heads The Justice Committee, told them the federal investigations are being requested "to determine the truth, whatever it is." But Eileen King, spokeswoman for One Voice, said her organization would not support the call for federal intervention "because we have no position on it."
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