Peter Neufeld

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Peter Neufeld
Peter Neufeld (382097244).jpg
Neufeld in 2009
Born (1950-07-17) July 17, 1950 (age 74)
New York City, U.S.
NationalityAmerican
Alma mater University of Wisconsin-Madison (BA)
New York University (JD)
OccupationLawyer
Known forDefense attorney on the O. J. Simpson murder case

Peter J. Neufeld [1] (born July 17, 1950) is an American attorney, co-founder, with Barry Scheck of the Innocence Project, [2] and a founding partner in the civil rights law firm Neufeld Scheck & Brustin. [3] Starting from his earliest years as an attorney representing clients at New York's Legal Aid Society, and teaching trial advocacy at Fordham School of Law from 1988 to 1991, he has focused on civil rights and the intersection of science and criminal justice. [4] [5] [6] [7]

Contents

Neufeld joined the Simpson defense team to assist with undermining the prosecution's DNA and forensic evidence. He is perhaps best known for discrediting the credibility of the blood trail between Nicole Brown Simpson's body and O. J. Simpson's car.

Early life and education

Neufeld was born in Brooklyn, New York City, on July 17, 1950, and grew up in West Hempstead on Long Island. [4] [8] He is Jewish. [9] As a teenager, he was active in both civil rights and antiwar movements and spent time in southeastern Kentucky as a member of the Encampment for Citizenship.[ clarification needed ] [10] In 1972, he graduated from the University of Wisconsin–Madison with a B.A. in history. [3] [11] In 1975, he earned a J.D. from the New York University School of Law. [3] [12]

Early cases defended and litigated

From 1976 to 1985, Neufeld worked as a staff attorney at the Legal Aid Society in the Bronx, New York City. It was during these years his focus on the intersection of law and science emerged. Some of the people defended while at Legal Aid include:

Cases defended and litigated in private practice

After leaving the Legal Aid Society, one of Neufeld's first cases was his defense, in 1988, of Damian Pizarro, a battered woman who killed her abuser in self-defense. [13] This case was the first successful use of battered woman syndrome to secure an acquittal in New York County. The case was filmed and released as a documentary on British television where it helped leverage the creation of safe houses for women victimized by domestic violence.

In 1989, in People v. Castro, Peter Neufeld and Barry Scheck won an unprecedented pretrial hearing, precluding the use of inculpatory DNA evidence that at the time had not been validated for use in criminal prosecutions. The court's ruling and attendant experts' consensus report led to the National Academy of Sciences establishing a panel to develop scientific standards for forensic DNA analysis. [14]

In 1991, in People v. McNulty, et al., Neufeld, with his wife Adele Bernhard, defended several Irish immigrants who had been beaten, falsely arrested and charged by the police in Yonkers, New York. After winning their acquittal, Neufeld successfully sued the police officers responsible for the beatings.

In 1995, Neufeld served on the defense team for O.J. Simpson's murder trial. [15] Neufeld joined the Simpson defense team to assist with undermining the prosecution's DNA and forensic evidence. He is perhaps best known for discrediting the credibility of the blood trail between Nicole Brown Simpson's body and O. J. Simpson's car.

In 1996, Peter Neufeld, Barry Scheck and Johnnie Cochran established the law partnership Cochran Neufeld & Scheck, with a focus on representing plaintiffs victimized by the excessive force of state actors, those who were wrongfully convicted, and others who claimed their civil rights were violated by the police or the government. After Mr. Cochran's death, in 2009 the firm changed its name to Neufeld Scheck & Brustin. The litigation of the firm frequently results in systemic reforms accompanying any monetary compensation for plaintiffs. Some of the people Neufeld represented in private practice, either alone or as a member of a team include:

Formation of the Innocence Project

Neufeld presenting Actual Innocence with co-authors Barry Scheck and Jim Dwyer Actual innocence book from ...innocence project (48591893406).jpg
Neufeld presenting Actual Innocence with co-authors Barry Scheck and Jim Dwyer

In 1992, Peter Neufeld and Barry Scheck founded the Innocence Project to assist convicted prisoners who could be proven innocent post-conviction through DNA testing. [19] To date, 343 people in the United States have been exonerated by DNA testing, including 20 who served time on death row. These people served an average of 14 years in prison before exoneration and release. The Innocence Project's full-time staff attorneys and Cardozo Law School clinic students provide direct representation or critical assistance in most of these cases. The Innocence Project states on its website that groundbreaking use of DNA technology to free innocent people has provided irrefutable proof that wrongful convictions are not isolated or rare events but instead arise from systemic defects. Now an independent nonprofit organization affiliated with Cardozo Law School, the Innocence Project's mission is to free innocent people who remain incarcerated and to bring substantive reform to the criminal justice system responsible for their unjust imprisonment. They get thousands of letters from wrongly convicted inmates every year.

Teaching and speaking

Neufeld taught trial advocacy at Fordham School of Law from 1988–1991. Currently he teaches Cardozo law students within the Innocence Project clinic. [20] Neufeld has lectured throughout the world on the causes of wrongful convictions and appropriate remedies and specifically on the fundamental lack of scientific rigor in much of forensic science.

In 1995, he was appointed to serve on the New York State Commission on Forensic Science by then-Governor George Pataki. [21]

In 2014, he was appointed by the U.S. Department of Justice to the National Commission on Forensic Science. [22] As of 2016, Neufeld continues to serve on both commissions. He also chaired the Medical Committee of the Board of Trustees for the Montefiore Medical Center from 1995 to 2015. [23]

Selected publications

R.A. Leo, P.J. Neufeld, S.A. Drizin, & A.E. Taslitz, "Promoting Accuracy in the Use of Confession Evidence: An Argument for Pre-Trial Reliability Assessments to Prevent Wrongful Convictions," Temple Law Review (2013).

S.A. Crowley & Neufeld, (2013). Increasing the Accuracy of Criminal Justice Decision-Making. In Philip H. Crowley & Thomas R. Zentall (Eds.), Comparative Decision Making. USA: Oxford University Press.

B.L. Garrett & Neufeld, "Invalid Forensic Science Testimony and Wrongful Convictions," Virginia Law Review, Vol. 95, No. 1, March 2009.

Leo, Drizin, Neufeld, B.R. Hall & A. Vatner, "Bringing Reliability Back In: False Confessions and Legal Safeguards in the Twenty-First Century," Wisconsin Law Review, Vol. 2006, No. 2.

Neufeld, "The Near Irrelevance of Daubert to Criminal Justice and Some Suggestions for Reform," American Journal of Public Health, Vol. 95, No. S1, 2005.

B.C. Scheck & Neufeld, "Toward the Formation of 'Innocence Commissions' in America," Judicature, Vol. 86, No. 2, 2002.

Neufeld, "Preventing the Execution of the Innocent," Hofstra Law Review, Vol. 29, No. 4, 2001.

——, "Legal and Ethical Implications of Post-Conviction DNA Exonerations," New England Law Review, Vol. 35, No. 1, 2001.

Neufeld & Scheck, "DNA and Innocence Scholarship," in Wrongly Convicted: Perspectives on Failed Justice, Rutgers University Press, Saundra Westervelt and John Humphrey, Eds., 2001.

Scheck, Neufeld & J. Dwyer, Actual Innocence: Five Days to Execution, And Other Dispatches From the Wrongly Convicted, Doubleday, February, 2000.

Neufeld & Scheck, Foreword to "DNA Exculpatory Cases Study Report," National Institute of Justice, 1996.

Neufeld, "Have You No Sense of Decency?" The Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, Vol. 84, No. 1, Spring 1993.

Neufeld & N. Colman, "When Science Takes the Witness Stand," Scientific American, May 1990, Vol. 262, No. 5.

Neufeld & Scheck, "Factors Affecting the Fallibility of DNA Profiling: Is There Less Than Meets the Eye?" Expert Evidence Reporter, December 1989, Vol. 1, No. 4.

Neufeld, "Admissibility of New or Novel Scientific Evidence in Criminal Cases," DNA Technology and Forensic Science, 32 Banbury Report, 1989.

Related Research Articles

Innocence Project, Inc. is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit legal organization that is committed to exonerating individuals who have been wrongly convicted, through the use of DNA testing and working to reform the criminal justice system to prevent future injustice. The group cites various studies estimating that in the United States between 1% and 10% of all prisoners are innocent. The Innocence Project was founded in 1992 by Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld who gained national attention in the mid-1990s as part of the "Dream Team" of lawyers who formed part of the defense in the O. J. Simpson murder case.

<i>Harvey v. Horan</i>

Harvey v. Horan, 278 F. 3d 370, is a federal court case dealing with felons' rights of access to DNA testing. The Eastern Virginia District Court originally found that felons were entitled access to DNA testing on potentially exculpatory evidence, but this finding was later overturned by the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals. Nevertheless, the case paved the way for the Innocence Protection Act, which ensures that convicted offenders can try to prove their innocence by requesting DNA testing on evidence in government's possession that was used in their case.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Miscarriage of justice</span> Conviction of a person for a crime that they did not commit

A miscarriage of justice occurs when an unfair outcome occurs in a criminal or civil proceeding, such as the conviction and punishment of a person for a crime they did not commit. Miscarriages are also known as wrongful convictions. Innocent people have sometimes ended up in prison for years before their conviction has eventually been overturned. They may be exonerated if new evidence comes to light or it is determined that the police or prosecutor committed some kind of misconduct at the original trial. In some jurisdictions this leads to the payment of compensation.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Barry Scheck</span> American attorney and legal scholar (born 1949)

Barry Charles Scheck is an American attorney and legal scholar. He received national media attention while serving on O. J. Simpson's defense team, collectively dubbed the "Dream Team", helping to win an acquittal in the highly publicized murder case. Scheck is the director of the Innocence Project and a professor at Yeshiva University's Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in New York City.

Darryl Hunt was an African-American man from Winston-Salem, North Carolina, who, in 1984, was wrongfully convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment for the rape and the murder of Deborah Sykes, a young white newspaper copy editor. After being convicted in that case, Hunt was tried in 1987 for the 1983 murder of Arthur Wilson, a 57-year-old black man of Winston-Salem. Both convictions were overturned on appeal in 1989. Hunt was tried again in the Wilson case in 1990; he was acquitted by an all-white jury. He was tried again on the Sykes charges in 1991; he was convicted.

Actual innocence is a special standard of review in legal cases to prove that a charged defendant did not commit the crimes that they were accused of, which is often applied by appellate courts to prevent a miscarriage of justice.

<i>After Innocence</i> 2005 American film

After Innocence is a 2005 American documentary film about men who were exonerated from death row by DNA evidence. Directed by Jessica Sanders, the film won the Special Jury Prize at the 2005 Sundance Film Festival.

Exoneration occurs when the conviction for a crime is reversed, either through demonstration of innocence, a flaw in the conviction, or otherwise. Attempts to exonerate individuals are particularly controversial in death penalty cases, especially where new evidence is put forth after the execution has taken place. The transitive verb, "to exonerate" can also mean to informally absolve one from blame.

Jeffrey Mark Deskovic is an American attorney from Peekskill, New York known for freeing the wrongly convicted. In 1990, at the age of 17, he was convicted of raping, beating, and strangling his Peekskill High School classmate, Angela Correa, who was 15 at the time of the murder.

The Innocence Project is a television drama series created by BBC Northern Ireland and first broadcast on BBC One on 9 November 2006. The series follows the work of Professor Jon Ford, who sets up The Innocence Project, peopled entirely by a hand-picked group of law students. They take on cases pro bono that no one else will handle, or those that have been forgotten or given up on, working for clients that would otherwise have no hope, and who have possibly been wrongly convicted. The series is based on a British version of the Innocence Project, a non-profit legal clinic in the United States.

In United States federal criminal law, the Innocence Protection Act is the first federal death penalty reform to be enacted. The Act seeks to ensure the fair administration of the death penalty and minimize the risk of executing innocent people. The Innocence Protection Act of 2001, introduced in the Senate as S. 486 and the House of Representatives as H.R. 912, was included as Title IV of the omnibus Justice for All Act of 2004, signed into law on October 30, 2004 by President George W. Bush as public law no. 108-405.

Greg Hampikian is an American biologist and the founder and director of the Idaho Innocence Project. He is considered one of the foremost forensic DNA experts in the United States.

Thomas Haynesworth is a resident of Richmond, Virginia, who served 27 years in state prison as a result of four wrongful convictions for crimes for which he was exonerated in 2011.

The Illinois Innocence Project, a member of the national Innocence Project network, is a non-profit legal organization that works to exonerate wrongfully convicted people and reform the criminal justice system to prevent future injustice.

The Nebraska Innocence Project was a member organization Nebraska-based chapter of a U.S non-profit organization called the Innocence Project, located in Omaha, Nebraska. In 2019, the Nebraska Innocence Project folded into the Midwest Innocence Project. The Midwest Innocence Project's mission is to educate about, advocate for, and obtain and support the exoneration and release of wrongfully convicted people in Nebraska, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, and Arkansas. The Nebraska chapter was founded in 2005 by a group of volunteers who were inspired by the work of Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld, founders of the Innocence Project in 1992. The Midwest Innocence Project (MIP) was founded in 2001 through the UMKC School of Law and is also part of the national Innocence Network.

The "Dream Team" refers to the team of trial lawyers that represented American athlete O. J. Simpson in his 1995 trial for the murder of his former wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and Ronald Goldman. The team included Robert Shapiro, Johnnie Cochran, Carl Douglas, Shawn Chapman Holley, Gerald Uelmen, Robert Kardashian, Alan Dershowitz, F. Lee Bailey, Barry Scheck, Peter Neufeld, Robert Blasier, and William Thompson.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Alissa Bjerkhoel</span> American wrongful conviction advocate

Alissa Leanne Bjerkhoel is an American litigation coordinator at the California Innocence Project (CIP), a law school clinic that investigates cases of factual innocence while training law students. Bjerkhoel was born in Truckee, California, and later graduated from California Western School of Law (CWSL) after previously obtaining a B.A. degree She has been an attorney with CIP since 2008. Bjerkhoel has served as counsel for CIP on numerous criminal cases, and achieved the legal exoneration of a number of convicted prisoners. Bjerkhoel serves as CIP's in-house DNA expert and also serves as a panel attorney with the nonprofit law firms Appellate Defenders, Inc. (ADI) and Sixth District Appellate Program (SDAP). She is a member of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences. Bjerkhoel has won a number of awards.

<i>Blind Injustice</i> (book) Non-fiction book by Mark Godsey about wrongful imprisonment

Blind Injustice is a nonfiction book by lawyer Mark Godsey. Godsey is the co-founder of the Ohio Innocence Project (OIP), which seeks to exonerate and overturn the convictions of people who have been wrongfully convicted. Drawing on Godsey's experience as a prosecutor for the Southern District of New York prior to his work at OIP, the book examines how the culture of the justice system is complicit in wrongful convictions. It was published in 2017 by the University of California Press.

References

  1. ↑ "The Innocence Project". Cardozo.yu.edu.
  2. ↑ "Team". Innocence Project. Retrieved 2022-07-21.
  3. 1 2 3 "Peter Neufeld / Partner | Our People |". Neufeld Scheck & Brustin, LLP. Retrieved 2022-07-21.
  4. 1 2 "The Age of Innoncence: Neufeld's DNA Crusade Rolls On". Observer. 2004-03-08. Retrieved 2022-07-21.
  5. ↑ "Peter Neufeld | What Jennifer Saw | FRONTLINE | PBS". www.pbs.org. Retrieved 2022-07-21.
  6. ↑ "Invalid Forensic Science Testimony," Garrett, Brandon L., Neufeld, Peter J., Virginia Law Review, March 2009, http://www.virginialawreview.org/sites/virginialawreview.org/files/1-2.pdf
  7. ↑ "Bob Goldberg Home Page". research.mcdb.ucla.edu. Retrieved 2022-07-21.
  8. ↑ Gawker, "Happy Birthday,…..Peter Neufeld;" http://gawker.com/tag/peter-neufeld
  9. ↑ "Actions by O.J.s attorney distress some Jewish leaders". JWeekly. Archived from the original on August 31, 2017.
  10. ↑ "Celebrating Ada Deer's 80th: A Benefit for the Encampment for Citizenship". www.brownpapertickets.com. Retrieved 2022-07-21.
  11. ↑ Promega Company website, "The Wisconsin Innocence Project," Kenefick, Kari B., " … Peter Neufeld has ties to the University of Wisconsin as a graduate, class of 1972;" http://www.promega.com/~/media/Files/Resources/Profiles%20In%20DNA/401/The%20Wisconsin%20Innocence%20Project.ashx
  12. ↑ "Experts discuss wrongful convictions at 2014 Law Alumni Association Conference | NYU School of Law". www.law.nyu.edu. Retrieved 2022-07-21.
  13. ↑ Kingson, Jennifer A. (1988-04-09). "Woman Acquitted in Slaying Of a Man Who Abused Her". The New York Times. ISSN   0362-4331 . Retrieved 2022-07-21.
  14. ↑ Kolata, Gina (1992-04-14). "U.S. PANEL SEEKING RESTRICTION ON USE OF DNA IN COURTS". The New York Times. ISSN   0362-4331 . Retrieved 2022-07-21.
  15. ↑ LLC, New York Media (1995-01-02). New York Magazine. New York Media, LLC.
  16. ↑ Gootman, Elissa (2003-04-01). "Suit Is Settled In Inmate Death, Lawyers Say". The New York Times. ISSN   0362-4331 . Retrieved 2022-07-21.
  17. ↑ Hsu, Spencer S. (2015-11-19). "District to pay $16.65 million to wrongly imprisoned man, attorneys say". Washington Post. ISSN   0190-8286 . Retrieved 2022-07-21.
  18. ↑ Timmer, John (2015-04-22). "The science (and lack thereof) behind the FBI's retreat on hair analysis". Ars Technica. Retrieved 2022-07-21.
  19. ↑ Costakes, Ariana (2017-09-20). "Cases Tested By Tainted Drug Analyst Must Be Dismissed". Innocence Project. Retrieved 2022-07-21.
  20. ↑ "Clinics". cardozo.yu.edu. Retrieved 2022-07-21.
  21. ↑ "Peter J. Neufeld". The Innocence Project. Archived from the original on 2013-09-05.
  22. ↑ "U.S. Departments of Justice and Commerce Name Experts to First-ever National Commission on Forensic Science". www.justice.gov. 2014-01-10. Retrieved 2022-07-21.
  23. ↑ "Montefiore Medical Center - Board of Trustees". www.montefiore.org. Retrieved 2022-07-21.
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