LAW 2002, or Blind Injustice, is a special Honors Seminar offered through the College of Law. Taught by the founder of the Ohio Innocence Project and UC Law Professor Mark Godsey, the course aims to teach undergraduates about wrongful convictions in the criminal justice system and the many underlying psychological factors that contribute to them. I chose to take this class because I had heard so much about it beforehand. My older sister had taken the class when she was an undergrad and had nothing but good things to say. Also, as someone who wants to attend law school in the future, I knew that learning about these topics would be a good foundation for my legal education. And it's not every day that an undergraduate gets the opportunity to take a class taught by an actual law professor and a very successful lawyer. The course itself was pretty self-explanatory: each week we would read about different factors that can contribute to wrongful convictions - ranging from simple things like incompetent lawyering to more complex ideas like tunnel vision or confirmation bias. After doing the readings, students would write a reflection paper about what they learned from the readings and share applicable stories if they had any. During class time, we would talk about the readings and our reflection papers, as well as listen to different speakers and the stories they had to tell. At the end of the semester, everyone took their knowledge gleaned from the readings and applied it to an actual wrongful conviction case.

Honestly, it's hard to choose my favorite part of this class because I got so much out of it. If I had to pick, I'd say getting to hear from actual exonerees and listening to their stories was the most impactful. It was so insane to me that over the weekend I would read about someone like Nancy Smith, whose wrongful conviction led to her spending time in prison and missing out on raising her children, and then a few days later I would see Nancy Smith in the classroom, talking to us about her experience and how it affected her. It was one thing to read about the injustice in the textbooks, but to see its impacts on the person in real life and to hear how ridiculous some of their stories were really resonated with me, and I will definitely carry this with me into law school. Another part of the class that will also stay with me was the tour of the Ohio Supreme Court. Our class took a field trip to Columbus to see the building, observe oral arguments for the day, and get a private tour of the justices' quarters from Ohio Supreme Court Justice Michael P. Donnelly. It was so surreal to sit in the deliberation room and hear about how the justices work together to make decisions and share them with the state. This trip showed me a lot about our legal system and even made me consider the idea of becoming a judge someday. Overall, I am walking away from this course with infinitely more knowledge about our criminal justice system and how pervasive the blind injustice is. I absolutely loved this course and am quite sad that I won't be spending three hours of my week in the law building next semester.

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I chose to showcase my final project for this class, which was to write a paper and give a presentation about an actual wrongful conviction case and apply all the concepts we learned in the class throughout the semester to determine what happened that led to the injustice. I chose to showcase this assignment because it truly sums up everything I learned in this seminar and shows my own takeaways from the lessons taught. My final project examined the wrongful conviction of Ronald Williamson, a man whose case was rife with junk science, police and prosecutorial misconduct, and tunnel vision. Most of my knowledge on the topic came from The Innocent Man Netflix documentary, which was spearheaded by the Innocence Project and author John Grisham. This project was an awesome experience. I thoroughly enjoyed watching the documentary, taking extensive notes, and getting the opportunity to take everything I learned throughout the semester and use it to understand how something so awful can happen in our justice system.