Former Ohio Innocence Project attorney reviews Hamilton County convictions
The Cincinnati Enquirer reports that former Ohio Innocence Project attorney Donald Caster will now work with Hamilton County as part of its new Conviction Integrity Unit, designed to strengthen the public’s trust in the criminal justice system.
Caster served on faculty at the University of Cincinnati College Law and as a staff attorney for OIP for nearly 14 years. He’s represented several individuals challenging convictions he considered to be wrongful and fighting to free people who had spent years in prison.
Hamilton County Prosecutor Connie Pillich announced Caster’s installment Tuesday. The creation of the Conviction Integrity Unity fulfills a campaign promise Pillich made two years ago campaigning against former prosecutor Melissa Powers. At the time, an Enquirer investigation had found several Hamilton County homicide cases had fallen apart after prosecutors made deals with informants who testified in exchange for leniency in their own cases.
Three of those cases ended with acquittals, two with orders for new trials and one with an overturned murder conviction, reports the Enquirer. Some defendants convicted in those cases served years in jail or prison before their release.
Donald Caster shown in the UC College of Law. Photo provided.
A graduate of UC Law, Caster was finishing law school when he kept hearing excited talk about “this thing that was going to happen” and change the landscape for individuals wrongfully convicted. That’s when a relatively new professor, Mark Godsey, and John Cranley, a Cincinnati politician, staked out unused space in the old UC law library, explains Caster.
Godsey and Cranley, who later became a Cincinnati mayor, were co-founders of the Ohio Innocence Project. Godsey is the current director of OIP.
“They were going to work on cases and eventually you started to hear that they were having some success,” Caster told UC News in a previous story. “They would get some volunteer lawyers in the community to help out from time to time and a bunch of law students who were just sort of working through criminal defense cases. They were trying to deal with this sort of enormous demand for help because an innocence project had not existed in Ohio before that.”
Caster, who also has taught at UC Law, has represented eight people from across Ohio who were ultimately released because they were innocent. Collectively, they'd spent 159 years in prison, reports the Enquirer.
Founded in 2003, the Ohio Innocence Project at UC Law is celebrating its 23th anniversary and is continuing its initial purpose: working to free every person in Ohio who has been convicted of a crime they didn’t commit. So far, 45 individuals have been exonerated or freed after collectively serving more than 800 years behind bars.
Read the full story in the Cincinnati Enquirer.
Other media including WVXU, WKRC, and WLWT, also reported Caster’s story.
Featured top image from iStock.
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