Experiential learning is a core value behind the University of Cincinnati Donald P. Klekamp College of Law's offerings to students. One of the best examples of that from this academic year took shape this winter, with a result of opening the door for students from around the globe to impact policy discussions on the world stage at the United Nations.
In a partnership involving two units within the college - the Masters of Laws in U.S. Law (LLM) program for international lawyers and law students and the Ohio Innocence Project - students from the LLM program wrote legal reports filed with the UN Human Rights Committee examining wrongful conviction risks and remedies in six countries: Belgium, Canada, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Mexico and Senegal.
The work is in conjunction with the Wrongful Conviction International Law Task Force (WCILTF), an effort organized last year by leading voices in the innocence movement - including the Ohio Innocence Project - to advance the goal of seeing international law recognize the rights of innocent people in prison as a "universal human right."
"The University of Cincinnati hallmark is experiential learning-learning by doing," says Nora Burke Wagner, the director of the LLM program and the college's assistant dean for international and graduate programs. "As a new 'arm' of the Ohio Innocence Project, this project functions like an international human rights clinic."
"Being able to draw upon a resource like UC Law's LLM students, with their international backgrounds, was a perfect fit for this project," adds OIP Co-founder and Director Mark Godsey. "These filings are important in advancing towards the goal of securing the rights for all people wrongfully convicted internationally, and I am very proud of the work these students did on these reports."
Obviously, every country's justice system is unique, so a necessary first step for the UN Human Rights Committee to evaluate how wrongful conviction is viewed within an individual nation's legal framework is to establish a baseline of where they are now and what rights are guaranteed within current law.
Having advanced international students available to do the work is both necessary for the project, but also a great learning opportunity for the students.
"I feel really proud of this work," says Elsa Paindavoine, a UC LLM student from France who took part in the project. Her report detailed the legal system in Senegal. "It was a tough experience throughout the project to track down all the necessary information, but knowing that this was going to be sent to the United Nations brought home that it was important. As a student, I really felt seen and heard by the university (through this opportunity)."
Senegal is an ideal illustration of how tough this work can be for an outsider. Elsa's brief needed to be done by the first week in January, but as of the beginning of December, she still hadn't even found a lawyer within the country who would take her calls when the topic of "wrongful convictions" was mentioned.
Nearing desperation, she began seeking out lawyers through LinkedIn, and eventually found a Senegalese practitioner willing to walk her through a discussion about how wrongful convictions are viewed in his west African nation. A framework does exist within the nation's laws for those who are wrongfully convicted to seek to have their cases reviewed and possibly overturned. The country even has statutes providing for compensation to those who experience wrongful conviction.
But the reality is that those provisions are almost never applied in Senegal.
Quoting from the report that Elsa co-authored: "In practice, however, legal experts and scholars report that the criminal rules are so strictly construed that they do not properly function. Innocent inmates who have accumulated substantial evidence of innocence are typically provided no avenue in court for an unbiased review."
Representatives from 10 countries at the recent Innocence Network conference, where they held a session devoted to the Wrongful Conviction International Law Task Force and the ongoing international efforts on the innocence front.
Getting to a point where research results like this can be shared to an international audience is exactly the kind of impactful scholarship that Wagner hopes UC Law's LLM program can provide to all its students.
"Our LLM students are doing research and writing to support advocacy efforts that are shaping international law," she says. "Students are doing international human rights work, and we can see WCILTF efforts moving the needle on how the rights of wrongfully incarcerated individuals are viewed by the United Nations."
In addition to Elsa Paindavoine, who had previously studied at the University of Bordeaux, three other LLM students studying at UC Law this year also took part in the project. Andrea McNulty from Brazil crafted an overview of wrongful convictions within Canada's legal system, Mariana Raventos from Colombia looked at how the issue is dealt with in Belgium and Irene Monti from Italy researched the Hungarian system.
Just as each legal system to be looked at through the project is different, each international student who decides to study in UC's LLM program comes from a different system of legal training. Graduates earn a master's degree in law, develop a strong foundation in U.S. law to add to their existing legal training and go on to careers in law firms, multinational companies, NGOs, high-level government offices and universities around the world.
In the case of Andrea McNulty, she came to UC already a practicing attorney in her home country of Brazil. (More precisely, in the northern Brazilian city of Belém, which meant she had never seen snow firsthand until this winter in Cincinnati. She earned her degree from the university known as CESUPA.) Her experience, though, had been as a tax attorney, so exploring human rights law as part of the overview of the U.S. system taught within the LLM program opened new opportunities for learning.
Reporting on the status of wrongful conviction law in Canada was made easier because Canada is already home to Innocence Canada, a national non-profit organization that dates back more than 30 years and is similar to U.S.-based innocence projects. With long-established contacts, OIP's Godsey was able to put Andrea in touch with an expert source in Jerome Kennedy, a member of Innocence Canada's board of directors and a former cabinet-level official in the Canadian government, including serving as the country's minister of justice from 2007-2008.
Canada has a strong legal tradition, and obviously with Innocence Canada's history, they have been seriously examining issues with wrongful convictions for a longer time than many other countries. Still, there are issues.
"When talking to Mr. Kennedy, he felt that Canada's main problem was with DNA evidence," Andrea said. "A question I asked was does Canada have a law to allow for an automatic provision of retaining evidence for post-conviction DNA testing? It turns out they don't have clear rules for who preserves DNA evidence and for how long."
Even so, the legacy of having Innocence Canada as a force for reform for so long has made an impact on Canada's approach to wrongful convictions. The project itself has had success in getting 34 client cases recognized as wrongful convictions. Still, the system struggles with factors like needing the support of the minister of justice's office to have an investigation into a case formally recognized as a potential wrongful conviction.
There is also great variance nationally on the subject of compensation. In the report Andrea helped prepare for WCILTF, the reality was described as "fragmented, discretionary and ad hoc." Fewer than 50 percent of those clients whose wrongful conviction cases were handled successfully by Innocence Canada have received any compensation.
"The absence of uniform laws or guidelines means that eligibility for compensation, the amounts awarded, and the processes for obtaining compensation vary widely depending on the province, the level of government involved, and the particular circumstances of the exoneration," reads the report Andrea contributed to. "This ad hoc approach highlights a systemic gap in the Canadian criminal justice system with respect to ensuring fairness and support for individuals who have suffered the severe consequences of wrongful conviction."
Mariana Raventos of Colombia has spent the previous four years studying at Pontificia Universidad Javeriana in Bogota, and will have fulfilled her legal education requirements with the fifth year of studies she is doing in UC Law's LLM program. Her assignment had her look at wrongful convictions and the Belgium legal system.
Belgium has provisions within the law that allow for addressing wrongful convictions, but the reality is that the system makes the process quite difficult and much can depend on the quality of legal representation the wrongfully convicted person can afford to retain, according to Mariana. The most encouraging recent development has been the establishment of an advisory commission to assist the Court of Cassation in evaluating new material that could undermine a conviction. The Court of Cassation is Belgium's highest court for appeals based on points of law.
Whether this will change the realities in the Belgian system remains to be seen, but to this point, successful wrongful conviction challenges are almost unheard of.
"We still have a lot to work on to improve our criminal legal systems, whether that's in Colombia, in Belgium or in the United States," explains Mariana. "It's very satisfying to know we are helping to build that structure."
Irene Monti is finishing the final year of her legal education this year at UC, one of six students who came over for the LLM degree opportunity from the University of Trento in northern Italy. She looked at the treatment of wrongful convictions in Hungary, a country only about 300 miles away from where she has been studying, but one with considerable differences in their legal system.
Andrea McNulty (LLM'26) and Elsa Paindavoine (LLM '26) talk about their UC experiences.
Hungary's legal foundation is out of the civil law system, which is quite different from the common law tradition familiar to Americans and that originated in Great Britain. Civil law is based on a codified system, with judges rather than juries as the deciders of facts in a case. From one point of view, though, this actually opens the door wider for consideration of wrongful convictions in Hungary.
"Hungary does have a concept of a retrial. A criminal case can be reopened if particular facts emerge" that could lead to a different outcome, Irene says. Unlike many other legal systems around the world, no time limit or statute of limitations exists that stands in the way of a reconsideration of justice. In a small number of instances, this has actually happened in Hungary, but these have been exceptional circumstances, she adds.
Generally, Hungary is another nation where wrongful convictions are a legal possibility, but occur infrequently. Important measures like statutory rights to post-conviction DNA testing are not guaranteed.
Diving into this project did have a personal impact on Irene, though. She previously had seen herself with a future in corporate law, but the breadth of topics and the variety of ideas she has been exposed to through the UC LLM program, including by volunteering for this WCILTF project, has her rethinking things.
"This project has relit the spark I had for international law," she says. "It's more risky in terms of career prospects, but for now, I'm looking at what the options could be."
An outcome like that is exactly why Wagner thought it could be such an excellent addition to the educational opportunities offered to the international students in the LLM program.
"It's relatively easy to bring a group of passionate lawyers, law students and advocates together around an issue of importance, but that group becomes exceptional and exponentially more creative and more powerful when it includes brilliant minds from a wide variety of backgrounds and trained in various legal traditions," she says. "The WICLTF team itself is a perfect example of this already, and we simply expanded that model by including our LLM students."
In 2025, the WCILTF filed reports against 25 countries, of which the LLM program participated in six. Going forward, many more reports against additional countries will be filed in future years, and Godsey envisions the LLM program playing an even larger role.
Efforts by the WCILTF have already begun to produce results in countries such as Malaysia and South Korea, where the UN Human Rights Committee is advocating for certain interests of innocents in prison as "universal human rights" derived from the right to a fair trial because of previous WCILTF reporting. Examples of recurring themes identified by WCILTF across multiple countries include ensuring the right to DNA testing of crime scene evidence, the right to legal mechanisms to reopen a case if new evidence of innocence surfaces after conviction and the right for exonerees to receive compensation.
This summer, members of WCILTF will convene in The Netherlands. Godsey and Wagner plan to discuss expansion of UC Law's LLM involvement, as well as additional ways for international lawyers and law students to train alongside the Ohio Innocence Project at Cincinnati Law.
"The door is wide open," Godsey says, "We're excited to welcome more international lawyers and law students to join us in Cincinnati for real-world experiences in innocence work and to contribute to this important initiative."
Lead photo: (L to R): Class of 2026 LLM graduates: Andrea McNulty, Elsa Paindavoine, Mariana Raventos, Irene Monti
Writer: Carey Hoffman; photos: Joey Yerace
