Barry Scheck
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| Barry Scheck | |
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| Born | September 19, 1949 Queens, New York, U.S. |
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Barry C. Scheck (b. September 19, 1949 in Queens, NY) is an American lawyer. Although he received national media attention while serving on O.J. Simpson's defense team, winning an acquittal in the highly publicized murder trial, Scheck's more influential legal work lies in his dedication to exposing wrongful convictions as director of the Innocence Project.
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[edit] Education
Scheck graduated from the Horace Mann School in Riverdale, New York in 1967. He then went on to receive a B.S. from Yale University in 1971 and a J.D. and M.C.P. from the University of California at Berkeley in 1974
[edit] Cases He Defended
Barry Scheck was part of the dream team that defended O.J. Simpson. He was associated with clearing in 1999 of Dennis Fritz and Ron Williamson who had spent 11 years in prison of wrongful murder convictions.[1] He was also the lead lawyer who defended British au pair Louise Woodward in her 1997 murder trial. More recently, he has been retained by wrongly accused Duke University lacrosse player Reade Seligmann to represent him in a civil lawsuit filed on October 5, 2007 against the city of Durham, North Carolina, its former district attorney, Mike Nifong, and others.[2]
[edit] Innocence Project
Scheck co-founded the Innocence Project in 1992 with Peter Neufeld, also his co-counsel on the O.J. Simpson defense team. The Project is dedicated to the utilization of DNA evidence as a means to exculpate individuals of crimes for which they were wrongfully convicted. As of May 28, 2008, 217 wrongful convictions have been overturned by DNA testing thanks to the Project and other legal organizations. The Innocence Project does not use legal technicalities to challenge convictions; the Project only accepts cases in which newly discovered scientific evidence can potentially raise a reasonable doubt as to a criminal defendant's guilt.
Scheck is a professor at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, where he established the first Innocence Project. He is Director of Clinical Education for the Trial Advocacy Program and the Center for the Study of Law and Ethics, and a former staff attorney at the Legal Aid Society of New York. From 2004-2005 he served as president of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers. In 1996 he received the Robert C. Heeney Award, the "NACDL’s most prestigious award . . . given annually to the one criminal defense attorney who best exemplifies the goals and values of the Association, and the legal profession" (NACDL website "Awards" section).
[edit] Selected bibliography
Scheck, Barry, Peter Neufeld, and Jim Dwyer. Actual Innocence. New York: Doubleday, 2000. ISBN 0-385-49341-X.
–––, Peter Neufeld, and Taryn Simon. The Innocents. New York: Umbrage Editions in association with The Innocence Project, 2003. ISBN 1-884167-18-7. [Photographs and Interviews by Taryn Simon; commentary by Peter Neufeld and Barry Scheck.]
[edit] References
[edit] External links
- After Innocence a documentary film about the Innocence Project, featuring Barry Scheck
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