Before Deerfield Academy junior Emmett Aho even started his internship at the Innocence Project in New York City last summer, a question had already crept into his mind: how could he bring the nonprofit’s message back home to his high school?
The Innocence Project is a nonprofit organization committed to freeing incarcerated, innocent individuals while fighting for reform to prevent wrongful convictions before they happen. Over the summer, Aho worked with a supervising attorney on cases of wrongfully convicted individuals behind bars.
“I was really fortunate to be able to work with the Innocence Project itself, but a lot of kids and most people don’t have that opportunity,” Aho said. “Us being students in high school, we aren’t lawyers, we aren’t able to help free people from prison directly, but what I thought this club could accomplish coming to Deerfield is to spread awareness and get people involved.”
He told his friends and fellow juniors Barrett Adams, Henry Paterson, Nosa Idehen and Clara Lipman his idea for a club dedicated to carrying out the Innocence Project’s goals on Deerfield Academy’s campus.
“It immediately made me think of the ethics class,” Adams recalled.
The five juniors had each taken an ethics class unraveling the criminal justice system. Idehen remembered learning about the often lengthy timeline between an individual’s first day in incarceration and the trial.
“For me, the thing that stuck out was the fact that the prison system in the U.S. is for profit. That by itself doesn’t feel right to me, but then, when I learned and saw the numbers of possibly how many people are in the prison system that are falsely incarcerated, that just adds another layer to it and made me want to get involved,” Aho said.
A 2016 Harvard article claimed that about 1% of incarcerated individuals are actually innocent, a conservative estimate translating to roughly 20,000 people, according to the Innocence Project.
For all five students, a field trip to the Franklin County Jail marked a memory that refused to fade as they observed the reality of the class’s lectures.
“Seeing what life was like in there, it wasn’t a place I would want to stay in, especially if I was innocent, so it just stuck with me,” Adams recalled.
With a father in the law enforcement field, Lipman grew up understanding the delay between a trial and conviction and “even further delay” between a conviction and exoneration. For class, Lipman later read “Just Mercy,” a memoir that tells the true story of Equal Justice Initiative founder Bryan Stevenson.
“When Emmett approached me about this idea at the beginning of the year, it had felt like a culmination of so many things that had been building up in my own mind,” Lipman said.
The five juniors now lead the student-run club.
“It’s deeply gratifying to see students like this exhibit such dedication to cause and to community that they’re willing to take time from their heavily scheduled lives to live their values like this,” said Brian Hamilton, faculty advisor and chair of Deerfield Academy’s Department of History and Social Science. “Working with students like this is what draws teachers to Deerfield and keeps them here.”
Hamilton stressed that he only offers administrative and budgetary support; the students do the rest.
Although the first few meetings focused on sharing the Innocence Project’s mission with new members, the group of five plan to invite guest speakers with experience facing or fighting the issue of false incarceration, host screenings of documentaries and movies, starting with the adaptation of “Just Mercy,” and dig into real cases of incarcerated individuals presumed to be innocent. Paterson described the club’s plans as zooming out with discussions about the problem of false incarceration and faulty forms of evidence and zooming in by pinpointing cases.
When club members hear from speakers entangled in the issue and look at specific cases, they think of the problem the Innocence Project faces as not an existential issue, but a real one, Lipman and Paterson said.
“Seeing names, faces, voices — that makes it a lot more real. Especially for me, being around people who have been affected by it, it makes it 10 times more impactful and it makes you much more likely to go out in the world and do something,” Paterson said. “People can tell you that there’s an issue, but until you can see it or hear it from someone who’s directly there, I don’t think it really hits home.”
Lipman agreed with Paterson.
“Humans are empathetic creatures, and when you present someone with something that they can relate to or relate to people that are directly affected like a spouse, a child, a parent, a family member, I think it really will make you dive right in and will tie you to it, and even if you don’t think it will, something will stick with you, because you think that that could be you or that could be your mom or that could be your friend,” she said.
With 160 members so far, Aho said turnout has been impressive, but it’s not enough.
“That’s still 490 students who aren’t involved, so bringing in guest speakers and screening those documentaries could make it more appealing for students to come in,” Aho explained.
He plans to not only educate members, but encourage them to take action and write to their legislators demanding reform of the criminal justice system. With students from across the country who have their eyes set on a range of goals for after high school, the five leaders said the club will pack an impact that outlasts their time at Deerfield Academy and the next group of leaders they hope will carry the torch.
“I think the scope of the project has a lot of potential,” Idehen said.
“Even if all people receive from this club coming to meetings is the idea and the knowledge of the Innocence Project, they’ll take that to their higher education or to their hometown and to their future life,” Lipman said. “It will just spread it so much further than we can do as 18-year-old kids.”