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Norfolk's Commonwealth Attorney has initiated a review of decades of criminal convictions linked to a disgraced Norfolk police detective.
Robert Glenn Ford elicited false confessions to secure several convictions that were eventually overturned.
The most notorious was the case of the Norfolk Four, a group of Navy sailors who were wrongfully convicted of the rape and murder of an 18-year-old woman in 1997.
The Project for Informed Reform from the University of Virginia School of Law is handling the review.
WHRO talked to Professor Deirdre Enright, who oversees the project.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
WHRO: What is the Project for Informed Reform and how did you get involved with the effort with the Norfolk Commonwealth's Attorney?
Deirdre Enright: For many years I defended death row inmates post-conviction in Virginia, and then I was asked to start the Innocence Project at UVA Law School. I did that for 13 years and it was wonderful.
But I was becoming very mindful towards the end of my time there that all the things that cause wrongful convictions are still happening and that we haven't fixed things as we've come through the process. We've come to understand that we wrongfully convict many more people than we ever used to think that we did, but we aren't fixing things in real time as we go.
I asked Dean for permission to start the Project for Informed Reform, trying to fix things that are broken or or study things and suggest better ways to do them.
The Robert Glenn Ford Project, though, was something that has been in my head forever, for decades, because one of my first capital murder cases, he was involved in. That was probably 20 years ago.
And along the way, I've become aware of other cases where Glen Ford's crooked behavior resulted in bad convictions. And when he was convicted in 2010, we all thought, ‘well, now the state of Virginia will go back and look at his caseload,’ which is how corrupt cops are dealt with in other states. And of course, no one ever did.
And then (Norfolk Commonwealth’s Attorney) Ramin Fatehi, part of this platform was ‘let's look into those cases.’
An even better approach would be for him to not have his own people look into it because of appearances, because of the lack of transparency. So I wrote him a letter and said ‘I've wanted to do this forever. I have ten clinic students. We have no dog in this fight.’ It's like the Innocence Project cases: you're either going to have it or you're not and you'll proceed or you won't.
WHRO: There are 90 cases in the prosecutor's files that you know involve Ford and even more that he may have been involved with. What's the process going to be for the project examining those cases?
DE: We’ll at least start with a process that I learned in the Innocence Project, which is going backwards, taking what we see in his files and then starting to build the entire case file. So going to find the defense attorney's files if we see things that look concerning.
We've assigned out our first ten cases to the first ten clinic students, and we've been meeting already all semester. And every one of them contains things that I wouldn't sa ‘Oh, this is a wrongful conviction,’ but I would say they bring these notations that are in the file and they say ‘Is that weird?’ And I've looked at what almost every one of them has said and thought ‘yeah, that's not the normal way things go.’ Doesn't mean it's a wrongful conviction. Doesn’t mean Glenn Ford did it. But there's red flags already. And those were the first ten cases.
WHRO: In a lot of the cases where the defendants have already been exonerated, evidence shows Ford using coercive interrogations to force false confessions. Is that the main thing that you're looking for, or are there other things you expect to find in these case files?
DE: Interrogations and confessions, absolutely, that's one of the things he did.
The other thing that we are seeing is him telling people, according to them, ‘if you don't tell me who did it, it's going to be you.’
And so for people who say, as some did, ‘I just don't know anything, I don't know anything, I can't tell you anything,’ and then later on – sometimes not in that case but in an entirely different case – they become the suspect and then the defendant.
And they trace it back to ‘because I wouldn't do what he said.’
WHRO: And ultimately, what is the goal of this review?
DE: So the goal is to identify and then hopefully assist the people who have been wrongfully convicted. If they're incarcerated, then to find either Innocence Projects or private law firms or private lawyers who will take these cases and exonerate them. So to right the wrongs, obviously, that's one goal.
And the other goal is to hold Glenn Ford responsible for his conduct if there was bad conduct.
And then there's the the educator goal, I think, which is to show what people who don't have an agenda can do that a lot of people who have an agenda appear not interested in doing.
