“Lightning strikes anywhere, any place, at any given time,” Miguel Solorio said. “So does injustice.”
Solorio spent 25 years in prison for a murder he didn’t commit.
“That feeling being in there, it’s like being stranded in the middle of the ocean, right? And you're hoping and praying that a plane or a boat, a submarine or something passes by to rescue you,” he said.
For Solorio, that boat was an innocence project in northern California.
They helped exonerate him in 2023.
He came to California Western School of Law’s Innocence and Justice Clinic relaunch Wednesday night. It was formerly known as the California Innocence Project.
After a change in leadership, there was a public misperception that the clinic had closed, said supervising attorney Lindsey Mercer.
She said they relaunched in part "to say, 'No, we didn't close. We're here. We’re continuing the legacy and the work of this clinic.'"
She said the clinic is needed because the justice system is run by humans, and it’s flawed.
“You're supposed to be innocent until proven guilty, but often in the system, you're guilty until proven innocent,” she said. “We have such a fear of letting a guilty person go free, that we're willing to risk incarcerating an innocent one to avoid that risk. And I think we need to switch that.”
Clinic leaders said they received more than 1,100 pieces of mail last year asking for help. Their waitlist is about 200 people long. The vast majority are Black or Latino, usually from lower-income neighborhoods.
The clinic relies on donations, and students like Diana Wong.
“You know in the law movies where there's like that whole two-minute montage where they're reading trial transcripts and discovery, and then it's the big courtroom scenes? Yeah, it's like that two-minute montage is what we spend most of our time doing,” Wong said, laughing. “It doesn't feel like work because, like, you get so invested in the cases and you're so passionate about it, you just kind of don't want to stop.”
Wong said she just accepted a position at the public defender’s office.
That pipeline is a key part of the clinic’s mission — whether their students end up as defenders or prosecutors or judges, they’ll bring with them an understanding that the lightning of injustice can strike anyone.
