Wofford College has established itself as a leader in wrongful conviction work in South Carolina, and Wofford students now have an opportunity for hands-on experience in the field beginning this fall.
The South Carolina Innocence Initiative at Wofford will begin a first-of-its-kind case review program, allowing undergraduates to review claims of innocence from inmates in South Carolina jails and prisons.
The initiative is led by Dr. Dawn McQuiston, professor of psychology, who has worked in the wrongful conviction space for two decades and testified in hearings related to innocence claims. Her testimony has led to exonerations of the innocent in South Carolina.
“Typically, law school students would be instrumental in helping lawyers review these cases initially – reading trial transcripts, police reports, witness statements, screening other info. But historically in South Carolina, there’s no mechanism for law students to help,” she says.
Most claims of actual innocence made by inmates in South Carolina are being reviewed by the North Carolina Center on Actual Innocence in Durham, McQuiston says. Under this new program at Wofford, the center will still receive the initial claims and send follow-up questions to inmates — such as details about the trial and the nature of the claim — but responses and all other relevant information about the case will be sent to Wofford for students to review.
“What we’re supposed to do is look through hundreds of pages of material and highlight things — new pieces of evidence, information that was not brought to light, things like that,” says Ellie DiPrima ’26, an economics and philosophy double major on the pre-law track from Easley, South Carolina.
“It’s a very high bar for an innocence claim to see the light of day. There are a lot of reasons that a person might have been wrongly convicted that we can’t necessarily pursue, but if they do meet a standard, then we will summarize everything and send it back to the Center for Actual Innocence with a recommendation for how they should proceed.”
DiPrima, the South Carolina Innocence Initiative’s inaugural case review student coordinator, says it is easy to blame bureaucrats and lawyers for the slow nature of freeing wrongfully convicted people, but there are not enough hands on deck to do the work. Wofford students are ready to help accelerate this process.
“It’s so much work, so much material, and it’s tedious. But it’s something you don’t have to go to law school to be able to do. So, getting undergraduates involved is the best of both worlds,” she says.
McQuiston has exposed Wofford students to the complex issues surrounding wrongful conviction and criminal justice reform since she began teaching at Wofford in 2013, and she created the South Carolina Innocence Initiative in 2022. The initiative has hosted discussions and events with exonerees, lawyers and nonprofit leaders in the innocence space. Students have attended the national Innocence Network Conference as one of the few undergraduate contingents represented.
McQuiston says the inaugural South Carolina Innocence and Justice Conference held at Wofford in May 2024 signaled to people in the region that the college was ready to lend a hand.
“This new work will provide students with a way to turn knowledge into practice,” McQuiston says. “We have spent a couple of years laying the foundation for this work by teaching students the causes and consequences of wrongful conviction and through meeting exonerees and lawyers, and now students get the opportunity to take action by assisting in real cases of potential innocence.”