The U-M Innocence Clinic

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Soon afterward, the tests showed the gun found on Allen was the one that shot Gholston. Yet the Michigan Court of Appeals upheld the Reeds’ convictions, in an opinion that never mentioned the literal smoking gun. The state Supreme Court refused to review the case.

When the Reeds went to prison, Zoe Levine was in high school in Washington D.C., Matt Cronin was a junior at Shenendehowa High in upstate New York, and Katya Georgieva was a teenager in Bosnia.

All three are now U-M law students, and this past winter term, they enrolled in a new clinical course. Their biggest assignment: to get the Reeds out of jail.

On April Fool’s Day, Levine, Cronin, and Georgieva join the perps, punks, and pinstripes in the groaning elevators of Detroit’s Frank Murphy Hall of Justice. They’re headed for Wayne County Circuit Court judge Patricia Fresard’s eighth-floor courtroom to ask her to grant the Reeds a new trial.

The students will question the witnesses today, but they have heavy-duty backup: Bridget McCormack, the law school’s dean of clinical affairs, and David Moran, whom she hired away from Wayne State University last year to help her open the Michigan Innocence Clinic.