James Earl Coleman

Last updated
James Earl Coleman
Born
James Earl Coleman Jr.

(1946-12-01) December 1, 1946 (age 76)
Charlotte, North Carolina, U.S.
Alma mater
Occupation(s)Lawyer, law professor
Spouse Doriane Lambelet Coleman
Children3

James Earl Coleman Jr. (born December 1, 1946) is an American attorney. He currently serves as the John S. Bradway Professor of Law and Director of the Center for Criminal Justice and Professional Responsibility at the Duke University School of Law. [1] He was the primary member of the last defense team of serial killer Ted Bundy. [2] [3]

Contents

In 2006 he was appointed chair of a review committee regarding the 2006 Duke University lacrosse case. [4] He has appeared on 60 Minutes , The Early Show , and other national broadcasts. [5]

Coleman teaches Law at the Duke University School of Law, where he is also co-director of the Duke Law Wrongful Convictions Clinic and faculty advisor of the Innocence Project. [6] In 2015 Coleman was honored with the Raeder-Taslitz Award from the American Bar Association’s Criminal Justice Section. [7] In 2022, Coleman was named the 2022 Lemkin Rule of Law Guardian by the Bolch Judicial Institute at Duke Law School. [8]

Education and early career

Coleman was born in Charlotte, North Carolina in 1946. After graduating from a local public school in 1965, he attended a post-graduate year at Phillips Exeter Academy. He went on to attend Harvard University and Columbia Law School. Coleman clerked for the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan. [1]

After a year of private practice in New York, Coleman spent the next 15 years at the Washington, D.C. law firm of Wilmer Cutler and Pickering, the last 12 as a partner. Coleman also served as chief counsel for the U.S. House Committee on Standards of Official Conduct (Ethics Committee), and as deputy general counsel for the U.S. Department of Education. [1]

Bundy litigation

In 1986, Coleman and his associate, Polly Nelson, joined the defense team of serial killer Ted Bundy. [2] They were able to secure three stays before Bundy was finally executed on January 24, 1989. [9] Coleman was featured in the Netflix series, Conversations with a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes , and the Amazon Prime Video series, Ted Bundy: Falling for a Killer .

Duke lacrosse

In 2006, Duke University president Richard H. Brodhead appointed Coleman to chair one of five investigative committees formed in the wake of the Duke lacrosse case. The ad-hoc lacrosse review committee assessed the university's lacrosse team's culture, amid rape allegations, to determine whether the team's actions formed a pattern. Coleman stated that they would examine the team's conduct during the previous five years, across a three week period, before submitting a report. [10] The Coleman report surmised that the players who had been charged "treated Duke staffers with respect... and had no record of sexist, racist, or other forms of anti-social behavior." [11] [12]

In interviews with 60 Minutes and CBS, and in an article he wrote for the Huffington Post , Coleman voiced his concerns about the justice system on display throughout the Duke lacrosse case. [13] [14] [15]

Coleman said that former district attorney Mike Nifong had committed serious prosecutorial misconduct, and if defendants were convicted, there "would be a basis to have the conviction overturned based on his conduct." [16]

Wrongful convictions

As a professor at the Duke University School of Law, Coleman is the co-director of the Wrongful Convictions Clinic and the faculty advisor for the Innocence Project. Both programs work to exonerate wrongfully convicted inmates primarily in North Carolina. In recent years Coleman and the Wrongful Convictions Clinic have succeeded in exonerating former inmates including LaMonte Armstrong and Shawn Massey. [17] [18] [19]

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.

<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.

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.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Peter Neufeld</span> American attorney

Peter J. Neufeld is an American attorney, co-founder, with Barry Scheck of the Innocence Project, and a founding partner in the civil rights law firm Neufeld Scheck & Brustin. 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.

Rob Warden is a Chicago legal affairs journalist and co-founder of three organizations dedicated to exonerating the innocent and reforming criminal justice: the Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law, the National Registry of Exonerations at the University of California-Irvine, and Injustice Watch, a non-partisan, not-for-profit, journalism organization that conducts in-depth research exposing institutional failures that obstruct justice and equality. As an investigative journalist in the 1970s, he began focusing on death penalty cases, which led to a career exposing and publicizing the injustices and misconduct in the legal system. Warden's work was instrumental in the blanket commutation of death row cases in Illinois in 2003 and in the abolition of the Illinois death penalty in 2011.

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 convicts 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.

This is a list of notable overturned convictions in the United States.

The Innocence Network is an affiliation of organizations dedicated to providing pro bono legal and investigative services to individuals seeking to prove innocence of crimes for which they have been convicted and working to redress the causes of wrongful convictions. Most organizations involved are in the United States, covering all 50 states; however, the network includes organizations in Canada, Australia, the Netherlands and the UK.

Earl Washington Jr. is a former Virginia death-row inmate, who was fully exonerated of murder charges against him in 2000. He had been wrongfully convicted and sentenced to death in 1984 for the 1982 rape and murder of Rebecca Lyn Williams in Culpeper, Virginia. Washington has an IQ estimated at 69, which classifies him as intellectually disabled. He was coerced into confessing to the crime when arrested on an unrelated charge a year later. He narrowly escaped being executed in 1985 and 1994.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Delbert Tibbs</span> American poet

Delbert Lee Tibbs was an American man who was wrongfully convicted of murder and rape in 1974 in Florida and sentenced to death. Later exonerated, Tibbs became a writer and anti-death penalty activist.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Clarence Elkins</span> American wrongfully convicted for murder and rape

Clarence Arnold Elkins Sr. is an American man who was wrongfully convicted of the 1998 rape and murder of his mother-in-law, Judith Johnson, and the rape and assault of his wife's niece, Brooke Sutton. He was convicted solely on the basis of the testimony of his wife's six-year-old niece who testified that Elkins was the perpetrator.

The National Registry of Exonerations is a project of the University of Michigan Law School, Michigan State University College of Law and the University of California Irvine Newkirk Center for Science and Society. The Registry was co-founded in 2012 with the Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern University School of Law to provide detailed information about known exonerations in the United States since 1989. As of February 6, 2020, the Registry has 2,551 known exonerations in the United States since 1989. The National Registry does not include more than 1,800 defendants cleared in 15 large-scale police scandals that came to light between 1989 and March 7, 2017, in which officers systematically framed innocent defendants.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">California Innocence Project</span> American legal non-profit founded 1999

The California Innocence Project is a non-profit based at California Western School of Law in San Diego, California, United States, which provides pro bono legal services to individuals who maintain their factual innocence of crime(s) for which they have been convicted. It is an independent chapter of the Innocence Project. Its mission is to exonerate wrongly convicted inmates through the use of DNA and other evidences.

The Ford Heights Four were formerly imprisoned convicts, who were falsely accused and convicted of the double murder of Lawrence Lionberg and Carol Schmal in Ford Heights, Illinois, and later exonerated. Jimerson and Williams were sentenced to death, Adams to 75 years in prison and Rainge to life. Following the murder in 1978, the four spent almost two decades in prison before being released in 1996. This miscarriage of justice was due to false forensic testimony, coercion of a prosecution witness, perjury by another witness who had an incentive to lie, and prosecution and police misconduct. The DNA evidence uncovered in the investigation to clear their names eventually led to the arrest and conviction of the real killers.

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

Michael "Mike" Semanchik is Managing Attorney at the California Innocence Project (CIP). As part of his work with CIP, he has been involved in many cases involving the exoneration of previously convicted prisoners, working closely with the organization's director, Justin Brooks, and also preparing petitions for many of CIP's clients. After working at CIP while still a law student at California Western School of Law, following graduation in 2010 he became an investigator and then a staff attorney there.

<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.

The Center on Wrongful Convictions of Youth, part of Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law's Bluhm Legal Clinic, is a non-profit legal clinic that represents children who have been convicted of crimes they did not commit. Founded by Northwestern Law Professor Steven Drizin and directed by Professor Laura Nirider, it is the first organization in the world to focus exclusively on wrongfully convicted children. Through its intertwined research, scholarship, teaching, and advocacy, the Center has developed expertise in the problem of false confessions, police interrogation practices, and constitutional doctrine governing the interrogation room.

Steven A. Drizin is an American lawyer and academic. He is a Clinical Professor of Law at the Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law in Chicago, where he has been on the faculty since 1991. At Northwestern, Drizin teaches courses on Wrongful Convictions and Juvenile Justice. He has written extensively on the topics of police interrogations and false confessions. Among the general public, Drizin is known for his ongoing representation of Brendan Dassey, one of the protagonists in the Netflix documentary series, Making a Murderer.

References

  1. 1 2 3 "James E. Coleman Jr. - Duke University School of Law". law.duke.edu.
  2. 1 2 When attorney James Coleman recently advised Ted Bundy..., OrlandoSentinel.com; accessed May 18, 2017.
  3. ↑ Bundy Attorney Still Wants Answers
    Says Killer Hid `Whys' Of Rampage    , deseretnews.com; accessed May 18, 2017.
  4. ↑ Duke Lacrosse Rape Accuser's Murder Charge is Latest Twist in Gothic Tale, TheDailyBeast.com; accessed May 18, 2017.
  5. ↑ Professor: Lacrosse Case A Perfect Storm, CBSNews.com; accessed May 18, 2017.
  6. ↑ "James E. Coleman Jr. - Duke University School of Law". law.duke.edu.
  7. ↑ "ABA honors Coleman with criminal justice award - Duke University School of Law". law.duke.edu.
  8. ↑ "James e. Coleman Jr. Named 2022 Lemkin Rule of Law Guardian". 29 July 2022.
  9. ↑ Dezern, Craig; Roy, Roger; Date, Shirish (January 23, 1989). Bundy prays and reads Bible. Killer records a message to be heard after his death. Orlando Sentinel
  10. ↑ "Rape Accusations Prompt Introspection at Duke"; NPR 2006-04-07. Accessed: 2023-10-25
  11. ↑ Wasserman, Howard M. (ed.), Institutional Failures: Duke Lacrosse, Universities, the News Media, and the Legal System; Ashgate Publishing; 2010, p. 77. Accessed 2023-10-25. ISBN   9781138276956
  12. ↑ REPORT OF THE LACROSSE AD HOC REVIEW COMMITTEE; J.E. Coleman, et al; 2006 Office of News & Communications. Accessed: 2023-10-25
  13. ↑ "Professor: Lacrosse Case A Perfect Storm". cbsnews.com. 12 April 2007. Retrieved August 25, 2017.
  14. ↑ Taylor, Stuart Jr; Johnson, K.C. (September 7, 2007). "Guilty in the Duke Case" – via washingtonpost.com.
  15. ↑ Coleman, James E. Jr (May 4, 2009). "One System, Two Realities". huffingtonpost.com.
  16. ↑ Duke Rape Suspects Speak Out, cbsnews.com, October 15, 2006.
  17. ↑ "Wrongfully convicted man is free". The News & Observer. 2013-04-08. Archived from the original on 2013-12-31. Retrieved 2017-05-19.
  18. ↑ Ammons, Jessie (26 May 2010). "Duke Law School helps exonerate wrongfully convicted Shawn Massey, who served 12 years in prison". indyweek.com. Archived from the original on 26 August 2017. Retrieved August 25, 2017.
  19. ↑ "James E. Coleman Jr. opinion". huffingtonpost.com. Retrieved August 25, 2017.
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