Change Agents
Change Agents
Academy of Achievement
Barry Scheck
17 minutes Posted Sep 13, 2014 at 2:00 pm.
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Show notes
Barry Scheck has been honored as the most
outstanding criminal defense lawyer in America. A pioneer of the
use of DNA evidence, he co-founded the Innocence Project at
Cardozo Law School in New York City. In the past decade, the
Project has helped secure the exoneration of more than 200 men
previously convicted of crimes they did not commit, many of whom
would have faced execution but for the intervention of Scheck and
his associates. He describes many of these cases in his book,
Actual Innocence: Five Days to Execution and Other Dispatches
From the Wrongly Convicted. Scheck may be best known to the
American public as the DNA expert on the O.J. Simpson defense
team, an occasion he saw as an opportunity to promote higher
standards in the handling of DNA evidence. He has frequently
served as an expert advisor to law enforcement agencies,
including the FBI, and has assisted in the investigation of
unsolved crimes such as the JonBenet Ramsey murder. He has served
as counsel in numerous civil and criminal actions involving the
rights of battered women and incidents of police brutality,
including the Abner Louima police assault incident in New York.
He co-founded the Innocence Project after six years of litigation
to establish standards for the use of DNA evidence in U.S.
courts. In this two-part podcast, recorded at the 2014
International Achievement Summit in San Francisco, he discusses
his work as founder of the Innocence project, his long campaign
to inject DNA evidence into the legal system, and the resulting
exoneration of innocent men and women wrongly convicted of
violent crimes.