The Midwest Center for Justice

    Twenty years have passed since this Court declared that the death penalty must be imposed fairly, and with reasonable consistency, or not at all, . . . and, despite the effort of the States and courts to devise legal formulas and procedural rules to meet this daunting challenge, the death penalty remains fraught with arbitrariness, discrimination, caprice, and mistake.

    --Justice Harry Blackmun, dissenting in Callins v. Collins
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    The Midwest Center for Justice is a small public interest law firm that represents indigent death row prisoners in Indiana, Ohio, Kentucky, Mississippi and Alabama. Our office is staffed by two attorneys.  We also work with several attorneys from outside our office, as well as with mitigation specialists, investigators and various mental health and forensic experts in the course of representing clients.

    We exclusively represent death-sentenced prisoners in state post-conviction, federal direct appeal and federal habeas corpus proceedings, as well as in clemency proceedings whenever the need arises.  Representation at the post-conviction level generally requires the following: a complete factual and legal investigation of the case; presentation of evidence to state trial courts; briefing the case to the state supreme court; preparing a petition for a writ of habeas corpus that is filed in the federal district court; briefing of the case to the Fifth, Sixth or Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals; a petition for a writ of certiorari to the Supreme Court of the United States; and, sometimes, petitioning for executive clemency.  Each client is represented by a team consisting of (at least) two lawyers, and often a mitigation specialist and an investigator.

    Our office has handled over 50 capital cases in six states. In early January, 2005, we were granted certiorari by the United States Supreme Court on one of our cases, Stumpf v. Mitchell, No. 04-637, which we argued in the Supreme Court on April 19, 2005. It subsequently was remanded to the Sixth Circuit, where it is pending.