Marc M. Howard has known his Georgetown University colleague Marty Tankleff since they were 3 years old. In their teenage years, their lives went in different directions: Howard went to college, and then to graduate school to become a professor. Tankleff went to prison.
In 1990, Tankleff was convicted of killing his parents in their Long Island home. Howard was convinced that his friend was innocent. He thought the evidence against Tankleff was dodgy. But as a teenager himself, Howard didn’t know what to do, other than write editorials in support of him in the school newspaper, The Purple Parrot.
The two lost touch, then reconnected in the early 2000s, while Tankleff was serving his prison sentence and Howard got involved in his friend’s case. At the time a scholar of European politics, Howard shifted his focus and attended law school at Georgetown while still working as a professor. He’s now a professor of government and law. In 2007, after Tankleff had been locked up for nearly 18 years, his conviction was overturned.
For the last two years these longtime friends have taught a course in which students produce documentaries about incarcerated people who may have been wrongfully convicted. Howard spoke with The Chronicle about the class, his friendship with Tankleff, and why he thinks America’s criminal-justice system is rotten to its core.
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How did your friendship with Marty factor into your decision to go back to law school while teaching at Georgetown?
Over those years, I became very involved with his legal team. I was meeting regularly with his lawyers. I was part of his kind of communications team. I was so, my wife called it — somewhat charitably — obsessed. My obsession was just getting Marty out of prison. That’s when I made the decision that I was going to go to law school.
He was exonerated just before I started. But by then, I couldn’t go back. Through my involvement in his case, I became aware of so many of the problems in our criminal-justice system that I hadn’t known about before.
What kinds of problems?
One general point is that wrongful convictions are very common in the United States. It’s something that is very hard for people to understand, especially if they watch shows like Law and Order that tie things up neatly with a bow. You see a bad person and good prosecutors putting somebody away to keep the streets safe. What I started to realize is that our system of justice is based on a model that’s very different from what we see on TV, where there’s supposedly a fair fight between prosecution and defense, and a mutual arbiter, a judge, and a fact-finding jury that decides if there’s guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.
The reality is very different. The prosecutor holds all the cards, makes all the decisions, and is driven by a goal that is not justice, as it’s stated in their mission statement, but by actually winning a conviction.
It’s a system that I found — regrettably, I say this — completely rotten to the core.
Did these realizations hit you all at once?
It was a slow build. There was an “aha!” moment when I learned that I could get a law degree at Georgetown for free. That made me think, “Wow, that would be wild, wouldn’t it?” That’s when I spoke with my closest family, my wife and my parents. I thought they were going to say, “Are you crazy?” They all said, “You should do this.”
How did your wrongful-convictions course come about?
In the spring of 2016, I started teaching a course called the “Prison Reform Project.” The first version of that course met in a maximum-security prison. Students worked side by side with incarcerated students.
Wrongful convictions are very common in the United States. It’s something that is very hard for people to understand, especially if they watch shows like ‘Law and Order.’
The next year I taught another version of it that was slightly different, about returning citizens. I had the students create documentaries that were about six returning citizens and their struggles and their achievements after long periods of incarceration. That was a step in a new direction. Pedagogically, it was actually more valuable than writing papers, which they’re not always excited to write and I’m not always excited to read.
Then I was thinking about a new topic or theme, and that’s when I came up with the idea of bringing Marty down to teach a class together. So he was hired as an adjunct professor. The class meets for five hours on Fridays. The students do a tremendous amount of work outside of class. They travel and they research cases and visit someone in prison, and they create a documentary that presents their case for the innocence of the person they believe was wrongfully convicted.
That’s the course that in the spring of 2018 led to the exoneration of Valentino Dixon. He served 27 years. This past year, we had six cases. No one has yet been exonerated — obviously, it takes a long time — but we are optimistic about a few of them.
When you set up the course, did you expect to actually exonerate someone?
Honestly, I thought it was very much of a long shot. I knew that it was possible. But I also know that it’s incredibly difficult. Being actually innocent is not enough. So many people who have compelling evidence just get denied. Marty had been denied for his first 18 appeals before finally being successful on the 19th. I believed and I wanted our students to believe and to give it their all. But when [Dixon’s exoneration] happened, just four months after the course had ended, it was kind of a miracle. This time I wanted to set the students’ expectations straight by saying, “Don’t think that if you don’t have someone out four months after the semester that you failed.”
At the same time, it made them also believe that it was possible. It made them do their best to research every angle, to read every page of the thousands of pages of trial transcripts and appeals, to track people down for every interview that they could. To have Valentino come to Georgetown — which he did twice this year — really brought home to the students what this is all about. This is about actually saving a person’s life.
What’s it like to teach with Marty?
It’s amazing to co-teach with Marty because we go back to our early childhood — elementary school, middle school, high school. And especially given the subject matter that we’re teaching about — wrongful convictions. We’re up there having been through this journey ourselves.
For our students, we can just see in their eyes that they understand how important this is, because neither one of us would be there today if we hadn’t gone through the difficult journey of working to overturn a wrongful conviction.
Marty was his own best advocate, and I was one of a group of people who helped to get his exoneration. But I think that, for the students, having us both there just brings home how important this is — that this isn’t just a little exercise or a drill or a project. It’s about real life.
Do you think that colleges have an obligation to engage, in some way, with the incarcerated people in their communities?
Yeah, I do. Education is clearly a skill that has tremendous positive benefits for people’s lives. While I understand that schools need to be exclusive and have very selective admissions processes, I think sometimes they tend to create these walls around them that are counterproductive for society.
At Georgetown, without in any way diminishing Georgetown’s stature, we’re trying to engage with our city, which happens to be a city that has a lot of inequality and problems and actually has an incarceration rate higher than any state in the country.
So I think that universities in general do have a moral obligation to connect more with their communities, particularly when there are issues of returning citizens. Universities owe it to themselves, to their neighbors, to their communities to play a role in helping support that process.
This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
