The Law School’s Innocence Clinic scored a victory last week after the Wayne County Prosecutor’s Office, citing lack of evidence, dropped murder charges against a man imprisoned since 2001.
Dwayne Provience, 36, has been on an electronic tether since he was freed from prison in November. The prosecutor’s decision comes on the 10th anniversary of the shooting death of the man Provience was accused of killing.
“If it wasn’t for the Michigan Innocence Clinic, students doing the legwork to find information, I’d still be in prison today,” Provience says.
Students in the Innocence Clinic argued Provience should be freed in part because a key witness recanted and in part because the Wayne County Prosecutor’s Office, in a separate homicide case, had argued that someone else committed the killing Provience was locked up for. Other holes in the government’s case and missing investigatory files also helped convince the judge to free Provience on an electronic tether in November, Innocence Clinic leaders say.
It was the Innocence Clinic’s third major exoneration since it was founded in the winter of 2009.
“What we had amassed over the year that we worked on this case was overwhelming evidence” that police had prosecuted the wrong man, says clinic cofounder David Moran, a law professor.
In addition to the satisfaction of freeing a man Moran called “a wonderful person, the nicest man you’d ever want to meet,” both he and clinic cofounder Bridget McCormack pointed out the intense learning experience their students went through.
“I think this case was a tremendous educational experience for all six students who worked on it,” Moran says.
Third-year law student Judd Grutman, one of the first two student attorneys who worked on the case, agreed.
“I feel great, but I’m mostly happy for Dwayne,” Grutman says. “Obviously, we changed his life — but more than that, he’s changed us, too.”
