Korey Wise Innocence Project Grows Staff, Impact

A growing team that includes a veteran litigator and two postgraduate racial justice fellows is amplifying the Korey Wise Innocence Project's efforts to effect change for the wrongfully convicted in Colorado and across the nation.

Kathleen Lord, whose decades of experience includes positions with the Colorado State Public Defender and Federal Public Defender’s Office, joined the project as a full-time legal fellow last September.

Since 2013, Lord has run her own law firm specializing in criminal defense, appeals, and postconviction proceedings in the state and federal courts. Before that, she was a deputy state public defender and chief appellate defender in the Appellate Division of the Colorado State Public Defender. In 2010, she joined the Federal Public Defender’s Office.

Lord is the project’s second full-time staff member. Among her duties are working with volunteer law and undergraduate students in screening applications submitted by incarcerated people and representing the project’s clients in Colorado courts. She also assists Executive Director Anne-Marie Moyes with working with the state legislature and others to improve the criminal justice system, part of the project’s efforts to avoid wrongful convictions.

"Kathleen Lord is one of the top appellate litigators in the state. Her expertise and depth of legal knowledge in Colorado, specifically, will add tremendous value to the Korey Wise Innocence Project’s work," Moyes said. "We couldn’t have dreamed up a better candidate."

Lord earned a JD from the University of South Carolina School of Law. She began her legal career as a litigation associate at Calkins, Kramer, Grimshaw & Harring, P.C.

Cynthia Sánchez ('20) and Da'Shaun Parker joined the project in March as postgraduate racial justice fellows. They will help supervise law student and undergraduate volunteers as they screen cases, work on cases in litigation, and create a new racial justice component of the program. The racial justice component, launched as part of Dean Anaya’s Anti-Racism and Representation Initiative, aims to bring the lessons learned from innocence cases in Colorado and nationally back to our CU community, explained Clinical Professor and the project’s Faculty Director Ann England.

Sánchez and Parker will also work to create relationships across campus and throughout the community to increase and strengthen the project’s policy work. 

Sánchez is a 2020 graduate of Colorado Law. During law school, she worked for several nonprofits, including Earthjustice and the Northwest Justice Project. She also worked in civil rights at Killmer, Lane & Newman, LLP and most recently was a law clerk at the Colorado Attorney General’s Office. Before law school, she worked as a paralegal at an immigration law firm after graduating from the University of Washington. She is excited to join the growing Korey Wise Innocence Project, help develop the racial justice component, and learn the world of wrongful convictions. 

Parker earned his JD from the University of Mississippi School of Law. After hearing about Curtis Flowers' wrongful conviction case, he began volunteering with the Mississippi Innocence Project, where he continued to work throughout law school, first as a volunteer and then as a paid intern. He also interned with the Capital Appeals Project in New Orleans, working on death penalty cases at the postconviction stage.

He received his undergraduate degree from East Carolina University and served in the National Guard for six years. He looks forward to diving into the project’s casework and helping broaden its reach.

"We are so excited with the energy and hope Cynthia and Da’Shaun will bring to the project," England said.

The project will soon have a new home in the law school, thanks to a grant from the Fred & Jean Allegretti Foundation that will finance a full renovation of the project’s new office space on the second floor of the law school. The larger space will allow the project to accommodate its growing staff and better serve the growing number of volunteer law students and community members who investigate cases of possible wrongful conviction in Colorado. It will also allow for a collaborative workspace that provides a hub for student learning and engagement.