Lampert Smith: Somber reflection at Project Innocence

Susan Lampert Smith

Steven Avery haunts the offices of the UW-Madison Law School's Innocence Project.

The school removed Avery's photo and story from its Web site Friday morning in deference to the family of Teresa Halbach.

But the walls still hold photos of the brushy-bearded Avery posing in his plaid shirt with UW students after their legal work released him from prison in 2003.

As details of Halbach's apparent rape and murder became public last week, the mood at the project offices was somber.

Avery is charged with raping and killing the 25-year-old Halbach at his family's Manitowoc County junkyard in October 2005. His 16-year-old nephew was charged Thursday with participating and told police details about Halbach's death that were so shocking that I, like a lot of people, wish I hadn't read them.

John Pray, a professor who directs the Innocence Project, felt much the same way.

"The details were horrifying, and we feel awful for her family," he said. "It's shocking what happened to Teresa Halbach, and shocking that he (Avery) has been implicated in it.

"Everyone is depressed about it."

The project, which helped free Avery from prison for a 1985 rape he didn't commit, has received a slew of nasty phone calls and e-mails from people upset by the Avery case. By Friday afternoon, the staff had mostly stopped returning phone calls.

Pray looked tired as he showed his response to e-mailers who blamed the Innocence Project for Halbach's murder.

His response points out that because Avery was wrongly imprisoned for the 1985 rape, Gregory Allen, the real rapist in that case, was free to commit more crimes until he was eventually arrested for kidnapping and raping a Brown County woman in 1995.

"Not everyone understands that Avery wasn't released from prison on a legal technicality," Pray said.

Avery was released because a male pubic hair found in the pubic hair of the victim after the attack matched Allen's DNA when a test was finally done in 2003. It was a "cold hit," meaning the scientists weren't looking for Allen, who was by then in prison on the 1995 rape.

It later turned out that Allen was a known sex offender, that he was convicted of a similar attack near the spot of the rape in the Avery case, and that some Manitowoc law enforcement people suspected him at that time.

"We have to remind ourselves of the mission of the program," Pray said. "It's not only to make sure that innocent people aren't in prison, it's also to make sure that guilty people are convicted."

In our anger at Avery that's a fact that we can't overlook.

It's easy to say that Avery should never have been released.

Easy, until you consider that another woman was brutally raped by Allen in 1995, because the police went after Avery, and Allen went free. That second woman told Green Bay television station WBAY in 2003 that Avery wasn't the only victim of the false conviction. Her life, too, was ruined by Allen being on the loose between 1985 and 1985.

"He had 10 years of terror," she said. "Had they caught him back then, a lot of things would be different."

Obviously, if Avery had never been released, things might be different in the Halbach case, too. But if you go down that line of thinking, then you have to wonder what 18 years in prison did to Avery, and if life would have turned out differently for him, too.

The law students involved in freeing Avery have learned a hard and awful lesson about real life law. While there are DNA tests and all kinds of forensic science available today, there's no test that allows you to look into a man's heart and see what's there.

But while they've lost their innocence, I hope Avery doesn't cause the Innocence Project law students to lose their passion for justice.

If they do, all of us become his victims.