Since 2001, 10 wrongfully convicted prisoners in Florida have been exonerated, with many owing their freedom to the work done by the Florida Innocence Project. On Thursday, the Florida’s Innocence Project’s Executive Director Seth Miller visited the Levin College of Law to talk about his work, and how to limit wrongful convictions.

The work of the Innocence Project of Florida is well illustrated by the case of William Dillon.

In 1981, James Dvorak was found beaten to death in Brevard County. Police and prosecutors acted quickly, and before the year was out, Dillon was behind bars after being convicted of first-degree murder. Forensic evidence in the form of a bloody and sweaty t-shirt, testimony of Dillon’s former girlfriend, a man Dillon met in prison, and a scent-tracking dog all pointed to Dillon’s guilt.

But there was a problem. His former girlfriend later said she fabricated her testimony, the man in prison got sexual-battery charge charges dropped for testifying, and the scent-tracking dog handler was found to be, as the Arizona Supreme Court described him, a “charlatan.”

Even still, all his appeals were denied, as were requests to test the biological evidence. In 2007, with the assistance of public defenders and the Innocence Project of Florida, they were finally able to gain access to that t-shirt, which showed Dillon’s innocence. He was finally freed in 2008, having spent 27 years in prison for a crime he didn’t commit.

While it may appear that there is an adversarial relationship between law enforcement and the Innocence Project, Miller says that’s far from the truth.

“A lot of people look at the Innocence Project and they say ‘Oh, you’re just a bunch of radical criminal defense attorneys,’” Miller said. “We take pride in working with folks in law enforcement. We don’t want to tell them how to do their jobs, we want to work with them to find the best ways, based on proven social science, to both strengthen investigations and prosecutions, and diminish the number of wrongful convictions.”

In fact, Miller said that the Innocence Project will be working with the Florida Police Chief’s Association to come up with guidelines for witness identification procedures, noting that misidentification is the most common cause of wrongful convictions.

The Florida legislature sought to solve the problem by passing a bill that would give wrongfully convicted prisoners $50,000 for each year they spent in prison. This might sound like a victory, but Miller described it as “a horrible bill.” He elaborated by explaining that when compensation claims are contested, the burden of proof shifts to the exonerated individual, who must show “actual innocence,” which has been shown to be extremely difficult to meet.

“In cases where the state attorney’s office opposes that compensation in the adversarial process they’ve laid out in the bill, people have not been compensated.”

Miller pointed the case of James Richardson, who spent 21 years in prison after being wrongfully convicted of poisoning his children, a crime that the children’s babysitter later confessed to. But even with this “affirmative evidence of innocence” his claim was denied. “So I’m not sure anyone can get compensated.”

The standard of proof is just one mechanism to limit who may be compensated, others including a requirement that a claimant have an otherwise clean record.

“It’s really just a method to exclude people we have to pay, while getting the political perks of passing a bill that looks good,” Miller said.