In the News

Controversy took center stage with students, doctoral candidates and faculty members talking about concerning topics like wrongful incarceration and Islamophobia as part of the first-ever Mountaineer Talks.

Emma Harrison, a sophomore political science and multidisciplinary studies student, used her 10 minute talk to highlight the issue of wrongful incarceration in the United States.

HUNTINGTON - The West Virginia Supreme Court heard arguments from Cabell County attorneys on Tuesday pleading for a new trial for a man sentenced to life without mercy after a jury found he killed a man over a lost dice game in Huntington in 2007.

Of the eight errors attorneys Connor Robertson and Todd Meadows argued, two essential arguments detail what they allege was suppressed and possibly exonerating testimony and disputable footwear forensic analysis, as detailed in a brief filed by the West Virginia Innocence Project.

Last March, President Obama commuted the federal prison sentences of 61 people. Three of those were clients of a project supervised in part by Italia Patti, ’14. That wasn’t all: in December, a fourth client joined that list when Obama commuted his sentence, too.

From 2014 to 2016, Patti was the Justice Franklin D. Cleckley Fellow at the West Virginia Innocence Project at the West Virginia University College of Law. As part of that role, she supervised clinic students who assisted prisoners with clemency requests through Clemency Project 2014, a federal program to expedite clemency reviews for inmates who likely would have received shorter sentences today, and who meet other criteria, including having served more than ten years and having no history of violence in or out of prison. Patti and the clinic students also handled wrongful convictions and other matters.