Clinic Prof Is a Life Saver as She Runs Death Penalty College

In late May, the University of Michigan Law School hosted its sixth Clarence Darrow Death Penalty Defense College, which is designed to help defense attorneys hone their skills through hands-on workshops that focus on the attorneys' current death penalty cases.

Associate Professor Andrea Lyon is the college's founder and director. Lyon directs the DePaul Center for Justice in Capital Cases and supervises that DePaul Law School’s Death Penalty Legal Clinic. Lyon explains that the college is "not about innocence. It’s about saving people’s lives." And the program has been successful in that goal. Since 2000 when the college was started, attorneys have brought more than 120 capital cases to the college. Lyon knows of only one case among the 120 that did not result in a plea bargain or life instead of a death sentence. That one exception was a case in which the defendant dismissed his attorney and asked to be executed.