Habeas Project the Wrongfully Imprisoned
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By Nancy Godson
he decision on June 30, 2008, was unanimous, which is somewhat rare for the Georgia Supreme Court. Yet when representatives of Mercer’s Habeas Project appealed the malice murder conviction of Tavaris Smith, all seven justices agreed that the trial judge had construed his defense as an insanity plea. Such a plea implies intent, and Smith’s lawyers had insisted that their client was asleep when he shot his wife in 2003 and couldn’t know what he was doing. Smith was granted a new trial and the State of Georgia gained a new legal precedent: “The Sleepwalker Defense.” Sarah Gerwig-Moore, assistant professor at Mercer’s Walter F. George School of Law and adviser to the Habeas Project, remembers telling Smith the good news. “It was a beautiful moment,” she said. “I said, ‘Tavaris, we won! We won! It was unanimous!’ We both cried.” Smith v. The State was one of several recent cases handled through Mercer’s Law and Public Service Program, a Universitywide initiative in which undergraduates from any of Mercer’s schools and colleges can serve as interns and work with law students and faculty on actual cases for academic credit. Professor Tim Floyd, program director, and Gerwig-Moore steer the program, which includes a public defender clinic, classes in poverty law, a public interest practicum, summer and judicial externships, and the Habeas Project. Habeas corpus, which in Latin means ‘you have the body,’ is a legal petition filed with the court that challenges the right of a prison or court to hold a person. Habeas Corpus petitions are usually presented on the grounds that a prisoner’s constitutional rights were compromised. The Habeas Project distinguishes Mercer as the first and, so far, only program in Georgia to handle noncapital, post-conviction cases on a strictly pro bono basis. To people who are wrongfully imprisoned, it represents a legal lifeline that could lead to a new trial. In Georgia, those who are found guilty at trial are guaranteed a public defender to present a direct appeal on their behalf, but if they lose at court, they also lose their right to counsel on subsequent appeals. It is at this point that Mercer’s Habeas Project steps in. “Persons serving prison sentences often lack the knowledge and resources to push their cases further without legal assistance,” Gerwig-Moore said. “The Habeas Project bridges a legal gap and serves as a resource to prisoners whose legal rights are going unmet.” As one can imagine, the project receives crushing amounts of mail from Georgia prisoners begging for legal help. To make the project manageable, Professor Gerwig-Moore closely monitors the Supreme Court docket, filtering cases through her understanding of trends in statewide and national law before choosing those to present to Mercer students for consideration. “I always try to select cases that I think we have a strong chance of winning,” she said. “I also look for compelling facts in a T h e M e rc e r i a n | s p r i n g 2 0 0 9
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