Harmless Error returns

It's been a while since my last post - sometimes life throws things at you faster than you can blog about them. Here's what I've been up to in the last month:

1) Won my first motion to suppress in a DWI case. As with most DWI cases where your client looks really intoxicated on the video, you better hope the initial stop wasn't legally valid and you can suppress everything after that. Such was the case here, to my client's great relief.

2) The Actual Innocence Clinic at the University of Texas School of Law, in cooperation with the Dallas District Attorney and the UT Arlington Innocence Project, obtained our first exoneration. I flew up Friday to the hearing, which was an amazing experience. As I listened to Claude Simmons and Christopher Scott talk about the things they missed while incarcerated, I couldn't help but fight back tears. Claude's father passed away while he was in prison, and he had never been able to say his goodbyes. Chris missed raising his son, who was present in the courtroom. I also thought of Bob Dawson, one of my mentoring attorneys and a founder of our clinic who passed away in 2005. How he would have loved to have seen this. As a student, I loved actual innocence work so much he used to kid me that I would end up marrying a convict. While it hasn't come to pass yet, there's still time. The hearing was a great experience - and a reminder of why I first wanted to go to law school.