January 2001

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Master's students Cliff Nelson and Lani Harac spent long hours last semester investigating the case against Peter Penn.

Building a case for the defense

Class works to uncover the truth about three inmates who may have been convicted wrongly

Photo by Sean Busher

When Jill Aitoro found out that her fall semester Specialized Reporting class would be investigating the cases of three men who may have been wrongly convicted of sexually abusing schoolchildren, she wasn’t exactly enthusiastic.

"When we started, I was a little uncomfortable with the topic," said Aitoro, a second-year master’s student in the news-editorial sequence. Even if the men were convicted with insufficient evidence, she said, they still might be guilty. If they had abused children, working to set them free was hardly an enticing opportunity.

But once she and her classmates in JOMC 254 waded into the evidence, visited the inmates and became familiar with the cases, Aitoro said they began to find a new perspective — and some troubling cracks in the North Carolina justice system.

The students’ efforts were the introductory segment of a joint project between the School of Journalism and Mass Communication, the UNC-CH School of Law and the Duke Law School. The initiative, called the North Carolina Center on Actual Innocence, is one of a growing number of similar projects nationwide, particularly at law schools, which seek to provide assistance to inmates who claim to be innocent but have exhausted their appeals. As part of the North Carolina effort, the class’s role was to investigate the cases of certain inmates believed to be have been unjustly convicted and uncover the truth.

"It’s a great framework for training investigative reporters," said Professor Phil Meyer. "They’ve learned a lot about interviewing, searching public records and critical thinking." In fact, Meyer said he’s never had a class in which students have gotten "as much of a workout as this one."

An era of anxiety

The three convictions investigated by the class came during the late 1980s and early 1990s, a time when heightened awareness about child sexual abuse led to an eruption of mass-molestation cases around the country.

The most famous North Carolina example was the Little Rascals case, which began in Edenton in 1989. Robert Kelly, the co-owner of the Little Rascals Day Care Center, was alleged to be the leader of a group of pedophiles responsible for numerous acts of sexual and physical abuse against children at the center. Charges were brought against seven employees, and Kelly himself was convicted of 99 charges and sentenced to 12 life terms in prison.

Kelly’s conviction eventually was overturned by the state’s Court of Appeals, which ruled that he had not received a fair trial, and today he and his codefendants are all free. But some people believe there are others, convicted in similar cases around that time, who remain in prison even though they are innocent.

"Given the amount of hysteria at the time, some of the individuals went to prison on very little evidence," Meyer said.

The class selected three such convicts’ cases to investigate: Peter Penn, Michael Britt and Perry Marley. Students divided into three teams, each assigned to one of the men. As they investigated the specific cases, class members also gained insights into the state’s justice system as a whole.

"You really wanted them to learn how to go from a fairly simple issue and set of facts to ‘how do you look at this issue in the broader context?’" said Pete Weitzel, former managing editor of the Miami Herald. "It’s the whole issue of child sexual abuse and how the court system deals with it."

Weitzel, who has been working with the Innocence Project at the UNC-CH and Duke law schools since May, volunteered last semester to help Meyer with the class. He said police are generally less equipped to deal with child sexual abuse cases than felonies such as murder, because in child abuse cases there is often little or no physical evidence.

"You don’t have the DNA bullet," Weitzel said. Much of the time, there’s no "conclusive scientific evidence that he did it or he didn’t do it."

Despite the inherent difficulties in investigating such cases, Aitoro said she was amazed by the deficiencies in the state’s handling of Penn’s case, which her team investigated.

"Court-appointed defense just blows my mind in terms of what they get away with," she said, adding that in North Carolina, "the last thing you want is to get arrested for a crime then get a court-appointed attorney."

Aitoro said Penn’s lawyer put a grand total of 20 hours into the case: eight in the courtroom, four hanging around outside the courtroom waiting to go in, and only eight hours — the equivalent one full work day — preparing for trial. Penn was sentenced to life in prison and has been there for 10 years.

Now that the class is finished, Aitoro said project participants hope to find newspapers and magazines that will publish an in-depth feature article or series of articles about the specific cases or about the shortcomings in the legal system that allow such things to happen.

Making time

One of the major obstacles facing the class last semester was simply a lack of time. As students and instructors discovered, completing thorough investigations within the constraints of the semester schedule was virtually impossible.

Meyer said he and Weitzel are looking at ways to restructure the project to ease demands on students’ time and better accommodate such a large undertaking.

"We’re still looking at what the best model is," Meyer said. "Maybe it’s individual study, or maybe it’s master’s thesis projects." He also said he would like to carry the project over to the Advanced Reporting class (JOMC 154). Another possibility would be focusing on only one case next time instead of three.

All of the students faced the challenge of balancing the substantial workload of the Specialized Reporting class with their other classes and responsibilities. But some students clearly became more enthusiastic about the class than others did. Second-year master’s student Cliff Nelson even quit his job so he could devote more time to the project.

Though most of the students didn’t make sacrifices quite so large, Weitzel said that "as soon as they got out and started interviewing people, got out in the middle of the chase," students were less likely to begrudge the extra hours.

Meyer agreed that once class members began to make real progress, once their investigations began to produce results, all the hard work and long hours seemed to become less of a burden.

"One of the great pleasures of investigative reporting is the sense of resistance overcome," he said.

Zach Hoskins is assistant dean for communication.