It was Good Week for …
Co-op law school programs, after the Massachusetts Bar Association recognized Northeastern University School of Law’s Cooperative Legal Education Program as an “enviable” model. After students’ first year of school, students in the program alternat quarters between academic study and with an employer. On average, 40 percent of students at post-graduate positions with their former co-op employers.
“The profession is finally paying attention to the need for law students to have practical training,” said Dean Emily Spieler. “We’ve spent more than four decades educating students to enter the world of practice with the hands-on skills and real-world experience necessary to practice law effectively on the day they graduate.”
It was Bad Week for …
The State of Texas, after an investigation by a Columbia Law School professor and a group of students revealed new evidence that suggests Texas executed an innocent man in 1989. The investigation showed how Carlos DeLuna, a poor Hispanic man in his twenties with childlike intelligence was convicted of murder on the basis of a single, nighttime eyewitness with no corroborating forensic evidence.
DeLuna had claimed that another man named Carlos had committed the murder, but the lead prosecutor told the jury that the other Carlos was “phantom.” The investigation showed, however, that another Carlos was known to police and prosecutors at the time of the trial as someone with a long history of crimes similar to the one for which DeLuna was executed. Moreover, an audiotape suppressed during the trial shows that police chased another man who matched the other Carlos’s description for 30 minutes immediately following the crime. The other was Carlos later arrested for murdering another woman.
