Wisconsin Innocence Project changes lives for students and the wrongfully convicted.
There are plenty of things that Gabriella Marquez ’25 and Noemi Reyes ’25 will remember from their time at the Wisconsin Innocence Project (WIP), a University of Wisconsin Law School clinic in the Frank J. Remington Center that seeks to exonerate the wrongfully convicted.
Like the first time they visited their client, Manuel Cucuta, at the Racine Correctional Institute, where he had been incarcerated since 1999 on a double murder charge.
“I was nervous,” recalled Reyes. “I had never been in a prison before.”
Or the long hours they spent pounding the pavement in Milwaukee, trying to gather witness statements about a crime that Cucuta, now age 44, allegedly committed when he was just 15.
But one moment in particular stands out: Sitting in court alongside Cucuta and Christopher Lau, WIP co-director, three days before Thanksgiving when a Milwaukee County judge declared that he would vacate Cucuta’s sentence.
“Manuel looked over at me and I smiled at him, and I saw tears slowly coming down from his eyes,” said Marquez. “It was a moment I’ll never forget.”
It was the second of a series of recent wins for WIP, whose hard-fought battles often last years and involve multiple cohorts of law students and supervising attorneys. Founded in 1998 by Keith Findley and John Pray, now emeritus professors at UW Law, WIP is one of the oldest innocence organizations in the United States (the first was established in 1992 at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in New York City).
Since its inception, WIP has secured the release of more than 30 people wrongly convicted of serious crimes such as murder and sexual assault. Students and clinical faculty members have also advocated in many ways for criminal justice reforms that would prevent future injustices: working with the Wisconsin Criminal Justice Study Commission, participating in legislative committees and writing amicus briefs to state and federal courts, producing scholarly articles to help understand and remedy the causes of wrongful convictions, and speaking at conferences and seminars to heighten awareness of the problem.
“We understand that the work that we do won’t change the system wholesale. But we’re giving these clients a chance to struggle and to resist and to, for once, say, ‘What happened to me was wrong.’ We’re the last hope, and maybe the only hope, for a lot of folks who are incarcerated.” – Christopher Lau
In September 2024, Lau’s co-director, Rachel Burg, along with another team of UW Law students, secured the release of David Bintz, who, together with his brother, Robert, had been incarcerated for 25 years for allegedly murdering a Green Bay woman in 1987. WIP had represented David since the early 2000s, and the breakthrough in his case came as the result of new DNA evidence developed by the Great North Innocence Project, a Minneapolis-based nonprofit that represented Robert.
Neatly illustrating the intergenerational quality of much of WIP’s work, current UW Law faculty member Lanny Glinberg ’07, who now directs the Prosecution Project — a Remington Center clinic that examines the role and ethical obligations of the prosecutor in the criminal justice system — was a student in WIP when it first developed a DNA profile aimed at freeing David, and went on to serve as a supervising attorney in WIP in 2012 and 2013.
Within the span of two months in Fall 2024, WIP achieved the release of two of its clients, both incarcerated for over 25 years. These photos capture just some of the emotional moments from those long days, which were the results of yearslong work.
(Above) In September, David Bintz, convicted in a 1987 murder, was released from prison. He was greeted by Rachel Burg, Zoe Engberg and other members of the WIP team.
(Above) In November, a judge vacated the life sentence of Manuel Cucuta, who was arrested for a 1995 double murder when he was just a teenager. He was embraced by loved ones in many tearful reunions.
Like WIP, Great North is part of the Innocence Network, an international coalition of 71 organizations — some standalone nonprofits, others housed in public defenders’ offices or in law school clinics like WIP — dedicated to freeing the innocent and preventing wrongful convictions.
“It’s pretty amazing,” said Burg, who noted that WIP was a founding member of the network.
Lau and Burg share not only a deep commitment to the goals of WIP, but also a clear-eyed view of what it can accomplish.
“We understand that the work that we do won’t change the system wholesale,” said Lau. “But we’re giving these clients a chance to struggle and to resist and to, for once, say, ‘What happened to me was wrong.’”
Hundreds of applications for representation come in every year.
“We’re the last hope, and maybe the only hope, for a lot of folks who are incarcerated,” Lau said.
Unfortunately, most requests are rejected for lack of a clear legal path forward. Even those they accept have only a slim chance of succeeding, Lau continued.
Nonetheless, WIP offers its clients two things that have typically been beyond their grasp: a voice and a means of fighting for justice.
And it gives students like Marquez and Reyes a thorough education in the ways the criminal justice system can fail, along with opportunities to highlight and correct them.
Those opportunities will soon increase thanks to a $1.5 million grant from the U.S. Department of Justice to investigate cases that could benefit from advancements in DNA technology. The idea, Burg explained, is to conduct a historic “look-back” at previous applicants and clients to identify cases that might benefit from improvements in testing like those that led to the Bintz exoneration. The grant was awarded in Fall 2024; in late January, the new federal administration ordered a brief pause to most agency grants before reversing course, creating a level of uncertainty that remained as of press time.
“To see some of the students make the shift from ‘I thought the Innocence Project would be a fun clinic’ to ‘This is going to be my life’s work’ is pretty special.” – Rachel Burg
Burg and Lau wrote the grant to enable WIP to hire two additional attorneys and an investigator, conduct new forensic testing and expand outreach efforts to community organizations that can connect the clinic to potential clients and people with relevant information. It will also help fund the work of Dant’e Cottingham, a reentry and outreach support specialist at the Remington Center who helps reintegrate the formerly incarcerated back into communities across the state.
Just as importantly, adding more staff will allow the clinic to take on more students, who in turn act as the leads on WIP cases, becoming intimately familiar with them over the course of a year. Students typically spend the fall and spring semesters of their second year in the clinic, with a few like Marquez and Reyes returning in their third year as capacity allows.
In addition to screening applicants, assisting with cases in active litigation and doing investigative work on projects like the Cucuta and Bintz cases, students take a weekly seminar in which Burg and Lau cover major topics in criminal law and enumerate the various factors that can lead to wrongful convictions, from ineffective counsel and official misconduct to unreliable eyewitness testimony and flawed forensic evidence.
For some, participating in WIP is a life-changing experience; for others, it’s even a draw to UW Law.
That’s how it was, in part, for Marquez.
“But it wasn’t until I met Manuel that I realized, ‘Oh, this is the reason why I’m in law school,’” she said.
It’s an inspiring process to witness, said Burg.
“To see some of the students make the shift from ‘I thought the Wisconsin Innocence Project would be a fun clinic’ to ‘This is going to be my life’s work’ is pretty special,” she explained.
Burg and Lau do their best to prepare students for the practicalities of investigative work, like approaching police departments, digging through old files and persuading reluctant witnesses to engage in conversation.
“We’ll literally have someone slam the door in a student’s face to see how they react,” Lau said. “We want to ensure they’re prepared for anything.”
Faculty also hold weekly supervision meetings with students to help them plan, strategize and reflect upon their work.
“We are a law firm working on criminal cases, but we are also a clinic,” explained Burg. “So, we focus heavily on the pedagogy of what we’re doing with students, instilling in them the skills they’ll need to be lawyers.”
Some lessons are more difficult than others.
Last summer, for example, Lau, Marquez and Reyes crafted the motion that would ultimately lead to Cucuta’s release from prison after 27 years. All three were convinced of Cucuta’s innocence, and their initial draft advocated strongly for exoneration. But the district attorney’s office would only agree to reduce Cucuta’s charge; Cucuta made the difficult decision to forgo declaring his innocence in court to continue fighting for exoneration from the outside.
It wasn’t exactly what Marquez and Reyes wanted, but it was the right option for their client given the circumstances.
“That’s part of the teaching process, too,” said Lau. “What will sway a particular audience at a particular point?”
The initial draft of the motion, for instance, strongly advocated for Cucuta’s innocence — a stance that Marquez and Reyes were initially loath to abandon. But they eventually saw the wisdom of focusing on what the district attorney’s office was willing to accept and what the judge would most likely find persuasive.
The experience of getting to know Cucuta, his family and the families of the victims — some of whom have advocated for his exoneration — has given the students a new perspective on the criminal justice system and those who are caught up in it.
“I have a lot more sympathy for those affected by the justice system because of my experience in WIP,” Marquez said. “It’s changed the way I see incarcerated people, and the way I see the families of those affected.”
It has also made them think more critically about what they read in old reports and case files, and to question even the most basic facts of a case as presented in the official record.
“This has challenged me not to take everything at face value and really dig deeper,” Reyes said.
Despite that healthy skepticism, their work with WIP has increased their sense of optimism, heightening their belief that no matter how daunting a task may seem, there’s always hope.
“It’s made me believe that anything is possible,” Reyes said.
Visit the Wisconsin Innocence Project’s webpage to learn more about the clinic and support its work.
By Alexander Gelfand, Photos of Manuel Cucuta by Alyssa Lentz