The official blog of the WVU Clinical Law Program

A West Virginia University student who wants to assist veterans who may have been wrongly discharged from service has been named a 2017 Newman Civic Fellow by the Campus Compact, a national non-profit organization that advances the public purpose of higher education to educate students for civic and social responsibility.

Garrett Burgess is a junior from Clendenin majoring in both political science and world languages, literature and linguistics with a concentration in Russian Studies in the Eberly College of Arts and Sciences. He is also an Air Force Reserve Officers' Training Corps flight commander and a student in the Honors College.

Director Katherine Garvey, Associate Professor Jesse Richardson, Staff Attorneys Nathan Fetty, Jason Walls, Jared Anderson, and Land Use Planner Christy DeMuth present on their work in the Land Use and Sustainable Development Clinic at WVU Law, including their recent assistance to flood-impacted communities.  You can read more about the LUSD Clinic’s work before and after West Virginia’s devastating flooding in Summer 2016 here: http://landuse.law.wvu.edu/files/d/595bfc45-4c25-40e3-882d-0457e40c208d/when-the-flood-came-wvu-law-magazine.pdf.

HUNTINGTON - The West Virginia Supreme Court heard arguments from Cabell County attorneys on Tuesday pleading for a new trial for a man sentenced to life without mercy after a jury found he killed a man over a lost dice game in Huntington in 2007.

Of the eight errors attorneys Connor Robertson and Todd Meadows argued, two essential arguments detail what they allege was suppressed and possibly exonerating testimony and disputable footwear forensic analysis, as detailed in a brief filed by the West Virginia Innocence Project.

On Thursday, February 16, 2017, a small group of students from the West Virginia University College of Law Clinical Law Program traveled to the Federal Correctional Institution-Hazelton, a federal medium security men’s prison facility, to offer programming to incarcerated veterans. Included in the group were student attorneys Michelle Schaller and Bradley Wright from the West Virginia Innocence Project, student attorneys Kirsten Lilly and C.J. Reid from the Veterans Advocacy Clinic, undergraduate social work student Tatum Storey, as well as Professors Valena Beety (WVIP Director) and Jennifer Oliva (VAC Director).

Programming comes in all shapes and sizes, but its importance speaks volumes for the future of inmates. With the decline in prison programming, the West Virginia Innocence Project and the Veterans Advocacy Clinic recognized that programing to help incarcerated veterans with Veterans Administration (VA) benefits, such as disability compensation and discharge upgrades, was one thing the clinics could do to help fill this void by aiding specific inmates with their issues and by providing inmates with the resources and knowledge necessary to help themselves. 

The state of Arkansas plans to execute eight people across ten days this April. Arkansas will attempt to execute two people per day on four days in order to use up their stock of execution drug, midazolam, before its expiration date.

Until now, Arkansas's mark in death penalty history was its execution of Rickey Ray Rector: a man so unable to comprehend his surroundings that he ate his final meal and saved his slice of pecan pie for later. Rector had shot himself in the head after committing his crime, but survived. Legally, the state may not execute a person who does not understand they are about to die. Yet the courts ducked the issue, and another famous Arkansas Governor—Bill Clinton—made sure to be present for Rector's execution even while campaigning for the presidency in 1992.