In her role as an assistant public defender for the Maryland Office of the Public Defender, (MOPD), Erica J. Suter spends countless hours reading pro se filings — documents submitted by defendants acting as their own attorney — looking for cases MOPD attorneys should follow up on.
Suter also defends clients represented by the state public defender’s office and works with colleagues to advocate for broad criminal justice reforms. She trains fellow assistant public defenders on how to craft legal arguments using social science research into topics such as the unreliability of eyewitness identifications and coercive interrogation techniques.
Suter, 49, is the new director of the Innocence Project Clinic at the University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law. The clinic is a partnership with the MOPD. The initiative builds on the Innocence Project Clinic at the University of Baltimore School of Law where Suter previously served as the director. The Innocence Project there obtained exonerations and sentence reductions for 20 defendants, including Adnan Syed, whose case was highlighted in the podcast “Serial.” In March, a Baltimore judge resentenced Syed to time served and probation, after ruling he should not serve any additional prison time for the 1999 killing of Hae Min Lee.
This interview has been lightly edited for space and clarity.
How many students will participate in the clinic?
Six students this year. It’s a yearlong clinic, and we pair them in teams of two. Each team works on a single case throughout the year.
How were the students chosen?
Every student has to participate in a clinic. They get to rank their choices, but ultimately, it’s a lottery system.
What kind of training will these students receive?
We meet twice a week in a seminar and I have weekly supervision meetings with the team. The team meetings are very case-specific, whether it’s their investigative plan, their research, or the statute they’re using. In the seminar, we’re covering a lot of the skills that will help them, regardless of the kind of law they ultimately practice. The thing that’s special in this clinic is that they get to learn those skills: how to interview a client, how to talk to a witness, how to manage your file, how to document your work, but they get to do it through the lens of innocence work and through the lens of criminal defense. In addition, we have classes on interviewing, and we have classes on client counseling.
They learn about creating an investigative plan. We do simulations on what your first encounter with your incarcerated client will be like, because there are things that are unique to interviewing a client who’s incarcerated. They learn the full range of criminal defense skills while working on their case throughout the year.
What does the screening process for deciding which cases to take look like?
We — myself, the Innocence Project at UBalt Law, the Mid-Atlantic Innocence Project, and sometimes the MOPD’s post-conviction division — screen our cases before they get to the students. We believe that there’s some ability through investigation to develop evidence of innocence. Sometimes the heartbreaking piece of this work is that you may be personally convinced that somebody’s innocent, but you can’t find the smoking gun, the thing that allows you to get back into court. In the screening process, we’re looking at what somebody’s story is versus what the evidence is. Are there potential avenues of investigation that might yield new evidence that we can take back to the court? Is there possible evidence that could be retested? Are there witnesses that we can go back to?
What will the investigative process look like?
For students, it’ll usually start with meeting their client in prison and learning what their client has to say. Then it may involve the students, sometimes with an investigator or with me, literally doorstepping people. You find out where somebody is, then you show up on their doorstep and see if they’re going to talk to you. The other, perhaps less exciting part, is filing MPIA [Maryland Public Information Act] requests and combing through documents. Through MPIA requests, we sometimes find documents that were never turned over to the defense.
The students will have to learn how to talk to people they’ve never met before and try to persuade them to talk. The students often just want to pick up the phone. You explain to students that it may feel easier, but it is harder for somebody to turn you down when you’re face-to-face, especially if you’re an earnest student who’s working hard and trying to help somebody. The students really get hands-on experience on every single aspect of lawyering in these cases. We’re meeting several times a week with the students, but I’m the safety net; they get to really lawyer these cases.
To what extent will your students investigate cases that hinge on DNA evidence?
The clinic accepts DNA cases and non-DNA cases [cases where there is no DNA to test]. Students will work on cases involving DNA as well as other forensic evidence. Depending on the nature of the case against the defendant, DNA may not be available for testing. Sometimes an exoneration is based on a recanting witness or witnesses, such as the Harlem Park Three [three Baltimore students who were accused of killing a 9th grader and served 36 years in prison before being exonerated in 2019].
Sometimes it may involve a Brady violation or some other form of official misconduct. Sometimes, the case may not involve a crime at all because there was a medical misdiagnosis, where the injury or death is a result of natural causes and not the result of a defendant’s wrongdoing. There are myriad cases where DNA testing is not the path to exoneration.
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