Summer law clerks Alexa Stebbins and Madison Wadsworth got their first taste of conducting legal investigations with a road trip to South Dakota this month to interview witnesses in a current GN-IP case. Prepped by GN-IP attorney Andrew Markquart, Alexa and Madison travelled to Hartford (a suburb of Sioux Falls) and Pine Ridge Reservation where they tracked down two people related to the case. We sat down with Alexa to learn more about what it takes to conduct legal investigations, what she learned from her trip, and why she believes innocence work is critical to making her a better attorney and our society a more just one.
Great North Innocence Project: Tell us about your trip to South Dakota.
Alexa Stebbins: This was both my and Madison’s first time conducting witness interviews for an investigation, so it was a little nerve-wracking and we knew there would be some trial and error. We just had a list of addresses, so we weren’t even sure we would be able to track everyone down who we wanted to talk to and there ended up being some people we couldn’t find. But, we did interview two people. Overall though, it was a really good learning experience.
GN-IP: How did those interviews go? How did the interviewees respond to your questions?
AS: The interviews were a little nerve-wracking just because I’d never done it before. The first person we spoke with was a little bit of a shot in the dark because we didn’t know how much this person would really know about the case. It helped that our very first one was lower stakes so we could get the initial jitters out of the way. In the end, the man couldn’t remember any helpful details. However, he was very nice and glad to speak with us.
The second interview was a little bit more stressful because we weren’t sure how we would be received. We’d been told by other people involved in the case that this person may not want to talk to us and had a strained relationship with the family of the person currently convicted of the crime. This person was a witness to the crime and also the best friend of the victim, and so we knew this could be a difficult topic for the interviewee to talk about. Ultimately, she was very nice and open to speaking with us, and everything ended up working out well.
GN-IP: What’s one thing you learned from this experience about conducting investigative interviews?
AS: I think it would be that you should have a backup plan to your backup plan. You don’t know who you’re going to be able to find or whether they will talk to you. It’s important to have a game plan—if this person doesn’t answer the door, what will we do? Will we wait here or move on to the next house?
GN-IP: Some of these cases deal with very difficult subject matter. How do you keep yourself in a good headspace when conducting interviews about these crimes?
AS: I was a double major in psychology and criminal justice in undergrad, and so I’ve had a lot of experience and practice reading about cases. However, there’s something different between reading the case on paper and actually meeting the people or visiting the places you’ve read about. You’re reminded that nobody is really a completely bad person—maybe they made a mistake during a hard time in their life. In the end, I try to remind myself that I have a job to do and just to stick to the facts.
GN-IP: Tell us a little bit about your journey into law. What made you first interested in becoming a lawyer?
AS: I’ve wanted to be a lawyer since I was a freshman in high school after I read To Kill a Mockingbird. I thought it was so wrong how Atticus Finch was treated in the book for defending an innocent man (Tom Robinson). It made me want to get involved where things were going wrong.
Later during my undergraduate education, I had the chance to do some work with [GN-IP attorney] Andrew Markquart and to hear from Kirk Bloodsworth, the first person in the United States to be exonerated through post-conviction DNA testing. These experiences really made me interested in innocence work and legal ethics.
GN-IP: What do you hope to do with your legal career?
AS: At first, I thought I wanted to do defense work, and then maybe I’d get into prosecutorial work down the road for a different experience. However, something Andrew [Markquart] said really stuck with me. He said, “In this field, it really comes down to where you think you can do the most good and help the most people. There’s already lot of people working on innocence work. The question is, do you think you can do more good here [working on innocence cases in post-conviction] or as a prosecutor who doesn’t make the mistakes that you’re learning about and which lead to wrongful convictions?” After that, I decided that I actually want to be a prosecutor—I want to re-instill a sense of ethics into the prosecutorial field.
GN-IP: Why do you think innocence work is important?
AS: I believe that the work we do is incredibly important for everyone involved. Sometimes I hear people say, ‘that person might be innocent of this crime but they’re probably guilty of other things.’ However, that is not fair to the person who is incarcerated for a crime they did not do. It is not fair to the victim because the person who committed a crime against them is still free. It’s not fair to society because the guilty person may still be committing other criminal acts. It shouldn’t matter if someone is guilty of doing something else, in the end, a person should not be in prison for a crime that they did not commit.