In a windowless seminar room at the University of Oregon in Eugene, it’s the first day of a course titled Investigating Injustice. The instructor, Rita Radostitz, paces the room and fires off questions.

“Jessica, what do you think the role of a lawyer should be in a criminal defense case?” she asks a student with short red hair.

“Um … to provide the best defense possible?”

“Kristin, what does ‘reasonable doubt’ mean to you?”

“One hundred percent sure,” answers a blond student, nodding firmly.

“Let’s do a quick survey. How many people think it’s unconstitutional to execute someone who’s innocent?”

Several students — about half the class — shoot their hands in the air. Radostitz, an attorney who has worked on death penalty cases in Texas, nods slowly.

“Well, you’re all wrong,” she says. The hands sink, and the students glance at each other uncertainly.

From 2004 to 2005, Radostitz was the director of the Oregon Innocence Project, a fledgling attempt to tackle wrongful convictions through courses at the University of Oregon’s journalism and law schools. The nation’s first innocence project, at Yeshiva University’s law school in New York City, was created in 1992; built around the potential of DNA testing to conclusively clear inmates who claimed innocence, the Cardozo Innocence Project has since helped exonerate 183 people.

Press attention to such cases has not only raised awareness of injustice within the criminal justice system, but has also spurred the creation of similar projects. Today, there are several dozen innocence projects across the country, accepting cases from forty-three states. Most are nonprofit legal clinics based out of law schools, run by lawyers and staffed by law students. Others are independent nonprofits, or run by law firms; two are housed in journalism schools. Oregon has briefly tried all of these models; in its current incarnation, the Oregon Innocence Project is run by law students at the University of Oregon. But without funding or expert oversight, it’s not likely to last.

“Innocence projects are great because they really do invoke a justice issue that everybody supports,” says Margie Paris, the dean of the University of Oregon School of Law. “There isn’t a constituency in favor of convicting the wrong people and locking them up. That’s a part of the criminal justice system that we ought to get right, because we do have the public behind it. And they’re great experiences for students. But they’re also expensive experiences.”

Tim Gleason, the dean of the university’s journalism school, agrees with Paris. “Students and faculty are interested, but the bottom line is that we haven’t been able to find the resources to fund the project,” he says. “Another challenge was how to set it up in a way that would retain the integrity of the legal process and the integrity of the journalistic process at the same time. The role of the journalist and the role of the legal advocate may be complementary, but they must be kept separate. I think the lawyers [at faculty meetings] were saying, in essence, that they would see the journalists as their public relations office, and the journalists were saying, ‘Hey, we have to be autonomous.’”

Radostitz, who has taught Investigating Injustice twice and may do so again, agrees that both the funding and the structure of the project presented obstacles. “Originally, the faculty and I agreed that setting up an outside nonprofit was the best model, because it was the best way to protect a publicly funded university from outside criticism — in other words, complaints that taxpayer dollars were undermining the criminal justice system,” she says. “But setting up the nonprofit proved challenging.”

She adds that the Oregon Innocence Project would have been the first joint law and journalism innocence project in the country, but the inherent conflicts between legal and journalistic ethics proved too big a stumbling block. “Lawyers have this obligation to keep things secret and journalists have this obligation to not keep things secret,” she says. “That’s tough.” Radostitz recently taught a legal clinic in investigating innocence claims and helped organize the Oregon Innocence Network, a loose assembly of Oregonians interested in innocence issues. But she no longer expects to direct a statewide project.

“Innocence projects need either a professor on the journalism side or on the law side,” says Bill Moushey, an investigative reporter for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and the director of the innocence project at Pittsburgh’s Point Park University. “Someone has to buy in and basically take it over. Student-run organizations do not work; they’re usually all gone in a year or two.”

But even with a dedicated director, innocence projects can be unstable: Moushey estimates that, nationwide, 75 percent of them struggle to find adequate funding. The result is that a national movement to free the innocent still rests heavily on the shoulders of young, unpaid, inexperienced students. “Nearly all innocence projects are clinical educational models,” says Moushey. “Of course all innocence projects would like to have complete full-time staffs and only use students in a minor role, but that’s the model.”

“Students are so willing to put in time on a volunteer basis,” says Paris. “They see their role as one of really contributing to society and correcting injustices. [The UO law school] attracts students who are just really interested in serving the public good. That’s true of Oregon in general; there’s something about Oregon that has that tradition.”

Westbrook Johnson, a third-year law student at the University of Oregon who’s the current director of the Oregon Innocence Project, says that the project has received more than 150 letters of appeal from inmates since its inception in 2004. “One hundred and fifty people in Oregon claiming to be innocent,” she says. “That says we need an innocence project here.”

Paris, however, wonders how great Oregon’s need for an innocence project really is. The state has only 3.5 million inhabitants, with about 13,000 of them incarcerated; Texas, on the other hand, boasts more than 20 million denizens and more than 170,000 inmates, nearly double the imprisonment proportion of Oregon. “Undoubtedly, the sheer number of people who are actually innocent here is lower,” says Paris. “Still, I think there’s probably always a need for places to which people who’ve fallen through the cracks can turn.”