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John Maki does new media work for midwest innocence projects, including the Center on Wrongful Convictions, the Wisconsin Innocence Project, the Ohio Innocence Project, and the Michigan Innocence Clinic.
As part of his work, he does short (5-8 minutes) youtube documentaries about wrongful convictions. Some of these documentaries focus on exonerations, and include exclusive footage of people walking out of prison and interviews with their lawyers, while others focus on pending actual innocence cases, case histories, and issues related to wrongful conviction reform.
Via email, he sent the details of two great new videos today:
“No DNA to Test: The Wrongful Conviction of Dwayne Provience” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JMCPqD4IMjE
This is a recent Michigan Innocence Clinic case. Provience, a native of Detroit, was given a new trial a couple weeks ago, and his official exoneration is imminent. This case is an incredible example of police and prosecutorial misconduct. Provience spent almost 10 years in prison for murder, even though the Detroit police department possessed evidence at the time of his conviction that proved he was innocent.“It Could Happen to Anyone: The Wrongful Conviction of Alan Beaman” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwbdZCdNbwk
This is a Center on Wrongful Conviction case. Alan was a college student from a conservative Republican, Christian family in Rockford, IL, when he was wrongfully convicted of murdering his ex-girlfriend. This was an egregious example of prosecutorial overreaching. There was no direct evidence that linked Alan to the crime, while there was powerful evidence that he was in fact 140 miles from the crime when it took place. In 2008, the Supreme Court of Illinois reversed and vacated his conviction, finding that the conviction rested on “tenuous circumstances,” and that the prosecutor had failed to disclose exculpatory evidence. The video focuses on Alan’s parents and how they dealt with their son’s wrongful conviction. Here’s more on Alan’s case: http://www.law.northwestern.edu/cwc/exonerations/ilBeamanSummary.html
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