A bad day for the Innocence Project

Steven Avery – a man freed from prison by the Wisconsin Innocence Project – is back in jail now on various weapons charges, and the firearms found in his possession may be the least of the former inmate's problems: a burned corpse and bloody SUV have been found on his family's property. While murder charges are yet to be filed – and there is certainly no guarantee that they will be – it would seem that a man rightfully convicted of various felonies before being let of out jail on an apparently bum rape charge may well be the latest proof that the prison system, for some, is less of a correctional facility and more a detention mechanism.

Depending on the direction this case takes, serious questions may be raised about how former inmates are handled and whether or not the Innocence Project is really a group of overly-idealistic students living in a perverse state of fictitious utopia. While there seems to be little question that the charge they got him off of was indeed bogus, the reality is that they offered him an ethos perhaps too flattering in nature – and now his freedom may have cost another human being their's forever.

A couple of years ago, I had the privilege of attending the regional premiere of “Deadline,” a move about the Illinois death row commutations, in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. While there, I met one of the film's subjects, Gary Gauger, a southern Wisconsin man wrongfully convicted of murder. He had no wrap sheet to speak of – his case was ideal for the anti-death penalty movement insofar as his ethos truly were those of a genuine softy whose life was turned upside down by judicial error. And his case, frankly, was enough to make me believe that Antonin Scalia erred in once famously asserting that the hypothetical innocent death row inmate probably did something wrong anyway.

It is victories like that the Innocence Project should be proud of. But today, one of the celebratory champaign corks may well have lent the group a black eye.