Public Service Initiative (PSI)
The Public Service Initiative (PSI) is a full-service public interest law project housed within our firm. The PSI team of lawyers and legal staff has successfully litigated complex cases implicating constitutional protections, including capital punishment, juvenile life without parole and innocence cases. PSI adopts a strategy of broad-based advocacy on behalf of its clients that can include individual and impact litigation, policy reform and media advocacy. Highlights of its recent work include:
DNA Testing Secured by PSI Clears Death Row Client Christopher Barbour and Identifies Man Already Serving Life for a Different Murder
After 30 years of asserting that he was wrongfully convicted, Alabama death row client Christopher Barbour finally had a federal hearing on his actual innocence.
PSI, alongside co-counsel, including Yale Law School’s clinical program and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund had tirelessly advocated for years for access to DNA testing of crime scene evidence, urging that it would prove Mr. Barbour’s innocence. After decades of delay, and over Alabama’s staunch opposition, a federal district judge ruled that Mr. Barbour was entitled to have probative crime-scene evidence tested. DNA testing subsequently excluded Mr. Barbour and his co-defendants as contributors of biological evidence left at the murder and rape crime scene. Checking the evidence against a database of known felons showed that the DNA in fact points to a man already serving a life sentence in Alabama for stabbing a different woman to death. PSI’s investigative efforts indicate this man lived next door to the victim, and that he had motive and the opportunity to assail her. Over a four-day evidentiary hearing before the US District Court for the Middle District of Alabama, the legal team presented this and other evidence of Christopher Barbour’s actual innocence.
Post-hearing briefs were fully submitted in September 2023. The legal team now awaits the Court’s decision, which, if favorable, will allow Mr. Barbour’s constitutional claims to be heard on the merits and, ultimately, for his actual innocence to be fully vindicated.
PSI Continues to Pursue the Exoneration of Death Row Client Rodney Reed
Three years ago, PSI joined the legal team (including the Innocence Project in New York) for Rodney Reed, a man sentenced to death in Texas, who was nearly executed in November 2019. Mr. Reed has a strong claim of actual innocence, as well as other powerful claims concerning the state’s use of unreliable evidence and suppression of exculpatory evidence. In July 2021, over a two-week evidentiary hearing, the defense team presented all the evidence demonstrating Mr. Reed’s innocence. The hearing included more than 20 witnesses on behalf of Mr. Reed, including forensic pathologists who concluded that Mr. Reed’s conviction was based on flawed forensic testimony; friends of the victim who testified about a prior relationship between the victim and Mr. Reed; and witnesses who substantiated the defense’s claim that the victim’s fiancé is the true perpetrator of the crime.
Despite compelling evidence of Mr. Reed’s innocence, the Texas trial court denied relief.
On appeal, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals found that the trial court abdicated its fact-finding responsibility by adopting the State’s Proposed Findings almost word for word, but nonetheless still ruled against Mr. Reed. PSI and co-counsel filed a cert petition challenging that decision, which is currently pending before the US Supreme Court.
PSI continues to pursue other possible avenues to obtain relief for Mr. Reed. In April of 2023, the US Supreme Court ruled that Mr. Reed timely filed his challenge to Texas’s post-conviction DNA testing statute—allowing him to continue his efforts to obtain DNA testing on the murder weapon. Mr. Reed’s request for DNA testing is still pending before the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. Additionally, in December of 2023, in the US District Court for the Western District of Texas, PSI moved filed for relief from the final judgment in Mr. Reed’s federal habeas proceedings based on fraudulent discovery claims the State made during those proceedings.
PSI Continues to Fight for Relief for Client Kenneth Reams
Having secured a decision that vacated Kenneth Reams’s death sentence, PSI and co-counsel the NAACP LDF are now working to secure relief on the life sentence Mr. Reams is serving in Arkansas.
At the age of 18, Kenneth Reams, who is black, was sentenced to death as an accomplice to a botched robbery that resulted in the death of a white man. He became the youngest person incarcerated on death row in Arkansas. While on death row, and in solitary confinement for more than two decades, Mr. Reams has come to exemplify redemption and rehabilitation as a painter, poet, founder of a nonprofit, art event organizer and frequent guest speaker in schools across the country.
In 2018, PSI and the NAACP LDF secured a decision in the Arkansas Supreme Court to vacate Mr. Reams’s death sentence due to ineffective counsel at the penalty phase of his trial. PSI and co-counsel continue to advocate for Mr. Ream’s release from prison. Mr. Reams’s federal habeas petition – raising claims of guilt phase ineffective assistance of counsel and race discrimination in jury selection – is pending in the US District Court for the Eastern District of Arkansas. PSI is also working to showcase Mr. Reams’s remarkable rehabilitation, including, among other efforts, by assisting with the coordination of exhibitions of Mr. Reams’s artwork at the Schomberg Center; Stella Adler Studio of Acting; and Columbia Law School. Among his many accolades, Mr. Reams is a 2024 recipient of an Art for Justice Fund grant, administered by the Ford Foundation, which provides resources for incarcerated and recently released artists and advocates who work to reform our criminal legal system.
PSI Secures the Release of Albert Woodfox, of the Angola 3, Who Served More Time in Solitary Confinement Than Anyone in US History
PSI secured the release of Albert Woodfox, of the Angola 3, who served 44 years in solitary confinement – a story that is told in Mr. Woodfox’s highly praised memoir, Solitary.
Louisiana prisoner Albert Woodfox (of the Angola 3) was freed after serving more time in solitary confinement – 44 years – than anyone in US history. His release came after extensive and ultimately successful litigation by PSI of his federal habeas corpus petition. As Louisiana prosecutors were preparing to retry Mr. Woodfox a third time, even though all key witnesses on both sides of the case were deceased, US District Court Judge James Brady barred a third trial at our request. While that order was vacated by a sharply split two-to-one Fifth Circuit panel, PSI filed a petition for writ of certiorari in the US Supreme Court, to which the state was ordered to respond. Louisiana’s new attorney general took note of these proceedings and determined it was appropriate to settle the matter. The state abandoned the murder charges, and Mr. Woodfox entered nolo contendere pleas to two lesser offenses and was released from custody. Mr. Woodfox’s memoir was published in January 2019. Solitary was a finalist for our country’s most coveted book award – the National Book Award – and for a Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction.
PSI’s Principal Amicus Brief Plays a Critical Role in Persuading the US Supreme Court That Indigent Defendants Are Entitled to Independent Experts
PSI submitted the principal amicus brief on behalf of several national defense organizations in McWilliams v. Dunn, which – as evidenced by the majority opinion’s reliance on the brief – was critical to convincing the US Supreme Court that an indigent defendant is entitled to a mental health expert independent of the state and prosecution.
At issue in McWilliams v. Dunn, an Alabama capital case, was whether prosecutors for Alabama complied with a 1985 US Supreme Court decision by providing an indigent, mentally ill defendant with access only to state mental health officials, rather than to a professional who was independent of the state and prosecution. PSI was asked to submit the principal amicus brief on behalf of several national defense organizations, including the National Association for Public Defense, the National Legal and Defender Association and the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers. The brief was necessary to establish that, in most jurisdictions, at the time of Mr. McWilliams’ conviction, mental health professionals appointed in a capital case were required to operate independently of the prosecution. Not only was the brief accepted, but it was also prominently relied upon by Justice Stephen Breyer’s majority opinion. A five-justice majority agreed with PSI’s brief and found due process violated and remanded the case to the Eleventh Circuit for further consideration.
PSI Secures the Release and Full Pardon for Client Joseph J. Dick Jr., of the Norfolk Four, Who Was Wrongfully Convicted in 1999
PSI secured a court ruling stating that Joseph J. Dick Jr. was innocent, leading to the dismissal of all criminal charges against him and his co-defendants (the Norfolk Four) and, one year later, an absolute pardon for all of them from the Governor of Virginia.
The “Norfolk Four” are four men, Derek Tice, Danial Williams, Joseph J. Dick Jr. and Eric C. Wilson, who were wrongly convicted in 1999 for the 1997 rape and murder of Michelle Moore-Bosko in Norfolk, Virginia. In the fall of 2016, PSI secured an important ruling pertaining to its client, Mr. Dick, when Judge John Gibney ruled in their habeas corpus litigation that the Norfolk Four were innocent. That order led state prosecutors to dismiss all criminal charges in December 2016. On March 21, 2017, at PSI’s urging, Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe granted the Norfolk Four full absolute pardons.