Second Chances

How Judges for Justice turns wrongful convictions into exonerations

BY COLIN RIGLEY

Karl Willis was just 19 years old when he was arrested in connection with the murder of a 13-year-old boy in Ohio. The problem is that he was innocent, but after getting caught in a spurious investigation based on flimsy evidence, he was ultimately convicted and spent 23 years in prison as he waited to be released.

“I always had faith and belief that one day this case would be overturned,” Willis said. “I know I wasn’t guilty of the charges that they had imprisoned me for.”

But Willis also knew that his innocence wasn’t enough to ensure his release from wrongful imprisonment—he needed help from as many places as were willing to offer it.

“It takes more than just your family; it takes the will of God, first you gotta believe that the Lord can do it,” he said.

Who can say for sure if divine intervention played a role, but the way Willis’ 23-year nightmare ended has a miraculous connotation. A small team of out-of-state judges turned advocates for the wrongfully imprisoned could see that Ohio law enforcement had the wrong man. In 2021, the Washington-based nonprofit Judges for Justice got involved.

“No one person, or organization, ever gets someone out of prison alone,” said Judges for Justice Founder Mike Heavey, “it takes a bucket brigade.”

To understand why and what that means, you first need to know what it means for Judges for Justice to get involved in a case.

“We say we are supporting the justice system because nothing undermines it more than a wrongful conviction,” Heavey said.

Heavey is a retired King County judge. He also served on the Washington State Legislature from 1987 to 2000, in both the House and Senate, and was later appointed King County Superior Court judge in 2000 by Gov. Gary Locke. He retired from the bench in 2013 and co-founded Judges for Justice with Judge Peter Deegan (ret.) of Michigan.¹1 www.judgesforjustice.org/about/.

The thing that put Heavey on a path from impartial judge to legal advocate was, in fact, one of the most infamous cases of wrongful conviction: Amanda Knox. Heavey referred to Knox as “a neighbor girl,” someone he knew through his daughter, who had carpooled with Knox for several years. As news of the Knox case saturated U.S. media, Heavey asked his daughter about her friend.

“She said, ‘Amanda is the most genuinely kind person I know, she does not have a mean bone in her body’” Heavey recalls. “And that was so contra to what I’d been hearing in the press and everything else.”

From there, Heavey got in contact with Knox’s parents and friends in the hopes of finding a way to get her free: “We had to turn around the supertanker of misinformation and lies about Amanda Knox.”

That experience served as the first blueprint for what would eventually become Judges for Justice.

“That, I think, created a switch,” said Carol Schapira, another retired King County judge who joined Judges for Justice. “It didn’t turn it on, it created a switch so that when he retired, he felt like, ‘This is what I’m going to do.’ … Thank goodness he has because it has opened up many people’s eyes to quite a number of things.”

After the Knox case, Heavey caught the bug to exonerate wrongly imprisoned individuals. Then, in 2012, Heavey saw a story on Dateline about Christopher Tapp in Idaho Falls, Idaho. Tapp was convicted in 1998 of rape and murder despite the fact that his DNA didn’t match DNA at the crime scene. In 2017, Judges for Justice’s work helped get Tapp out of prison. Two years later, according to Heavey, investigative genetic genealogy identified the real killer, who pleaded guilty and received 20 years to life. All it took was a cursory glance at Tapp’s case and Heavey said to himself, “Hmm, that looks like a wrongful conviction.”

“In that case Chris Tapp had nine interrogations, and in the ninth interrogation he said he stabbed [the victim] and that’s what led to conviction,” Heavey said. But Heavey only had to watch one of the polygraph videos to figure out what had really happened. Over about 3 1/2 weeks, Heavey said, Tapp was interrogated nine times, but also underwent seven polygraphs, which hadn’t yet been scrutinized, and after which Tapp’s story would change. In those polygraphs, the examiner convinced Tapp that the machine could tell exactly what he was thinking, Heavey said. “The rest is jaw-dropping; literally brainwashing happened with this poor kid. They really messed with his mind in these polygraphs. Essentially, [Tapp] comes to believe that the polygraph is an all-knowing scientific instrument that can read his mind.”

In other words, according to Heavey, Tapp was bamboozled into confessing to something he didn’t do because after enough time with overly zealous interrogators, he began to distrust himself and place his trust in his accusers. This scenario is a common one with the cases Judges for Justice takes on.

Heavey said that in “every wrongful conviction we’ve been involved with, behind the scenes” is often a law enforcement officer engaging in “noble-cause corruption.” In other words, there is someone who is bound and determined to convict someone despite the evidence pointing elsewhere.

False confessions like the one in Tapp’s case are unfortunately not uncommon. A 2025 report from the National Registry of Exonerations states that 22 (15 percent) of the 147 exonerations in the U.S. in 2024 involved a false confession.²2 2024 Annual Report, The National Registry of Exonerations, available at https://exonerationregistry.org/sites/exonerationregistry.org/files/documents/2024_Annual_Report.pdf. The reasons for such confessions can be complex, but much of the data points to interrogation tactics, as Heavey alludes to.³3 Scott M. Mourtgos and Ian T. Adams, “Recalibrating the risk of false confession wrongful convictions: Interrogation tactics and inverse probability,” Journal of Criminal Justice 103 (March-April 2026), available at www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0047235226000073. Recent reform in this area includes mandatory audiovisual recording, replacing more aggressive interrogation tactics with information gathering, and putting restrictions on other strategies like deception. But as Heavey and others know, these reforms have not halted false confessions altogether. One recent study suggests that even in legally acceptable interrogations, false confessions may occur in about 1 percent of cases.⁴4 Id.

The types of cases in which Judges for Justice involves itself often involve grisly murders that shake a community to its core—which is also how innocent people get dragged into the mess.

“That generates fear in the community, because their security instinct is being threatened,” Heavey explained. “And then the press reports that the police aren’t making any headway. That puts pressure on the police and prosecutors, and that, often in these horrific cases, creates what’s called tunnel vision. The cops [feel] pressure, they focus too early on one suspect, and that has … a perverse byproduct: ‘noble cause corruption.’”⁵5 Judges for Justice even has a video focusing on such issues, “Episode 3 “Noble Cause Corruption” – IS PATTY RORRER INNOCENT?” www.youtube.com/watch?v=J9p57vYlbZs.

In Tapp’s case, once Heavey recognized that police had extracted a false confession, he started pulling at more strings to see if the conviction would continue to unravel. He contacted Tapp’s mother and explained he was a retired judge who was in the beginnings of a project called Judges for Justice. Then he met with the public defender in the case, pored over case files, and watched all the police interrogations of Tapp.

“You only learn the reasons [why someone was wrongly convicted] when you do a deep dive—and not the trial transcripts because that’s the dog and pony show, what they want you to see,” he said.

In interviews with Bar News, Heavey and Schapira spoke to the way that a high-profile murder can create a sort of feeding frenzy. People in the community are both scared and screaming for justice. Police become caught up in the frenzy to make an arrest. From that wobbly start, when prosecutors take the baton, it can turn a false confession into a lifetime of false imprisonment.

“If a killing is sensational … it does cause a sense of panic among the police and prosecutors that ‘We’ve got to solve this problem,’” Schapira said.

False confessions extracted from aggressive interrogations are a running theme for Judges for Justice, which to date has helped exonerate four people in three states.

“Make sure that the investigation from the arrest all the way to the interrogation and all the proceedings and documentation is handled correctly,” Willis said. “Do not settle a case because you feel the person is a candidate [for a plea deal] and there won’t be too much of a struggle because you want to shut the case. A lot of cases that are shut are not properly shut, and they know they’re not properly shut.”

When I spoke with Heavey and Schapira, I had a recurring question: How the hell does this work? Judges for Justice isn’t filing appeals, it has little actual power, but it has found power in the court of public opinion. The mini documentaries it posts to YouTube are Judges for Justice’s bread and butter. The videos themselves are hardly viral—for the most part, gathering a few hundred to a few thousand views apiece—but they still work. In combination with the other tactics Judges for Justice has developed, a group of determined out-of-state judges can have a huge impact. In the case of Patricia Rorrer in Pennsylvania, Judges for Justice sent out 596 letters and asked judges in the area to watch the Rorrer videos. Rorrer is currently serving two life sentences after being convicted of the murder of Joann Katrinak and her infant son, Alex. One of the bases of her multiple appeals has been what she claims is inaccurate DNA evidence, including rootless hairs found at the scene, and additional DNA evidence that remains untested.

“It was interesting, we sent that letter Nov. 3, and the appellate court on Dec. 22 ruled against Patty Rorrer but on a whole new reason,” Heavey said. “I think that the letter we sent to every judge in Pennsylvania and justice on the Supreme Court, it basically queued them to go watch [our documentaries].”⁶6 “Episode 6: Constitutional Rights – Due Process and the Writ of Habeas Corpus.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GtFMvj70TJw.

If you’re wondering whether retired judges who descend on a community and call into question the actions of the local police, prosecutors, and courts might ruffle a few feathers, it does. In one case, after creating a series of videos and other materials, Judges for Justice received a letter to their P.O. Box that contained one of their postcards and a sticky note saying, “stay on the West Coast; go f*** yourself,” Heavey said.

The letter was anonymous, but the handwriting looked familiar. Heavey hired a handwriting expert who analyzed the note in comparison to similar writing in the case documents and determined that it was likely a match to the handwriting of one of the detectives.

“I wrote him a letter and said, ‘Hey, I know you wrote this,’” Heavey recalled. “He never responded.”

If you’re a judge presiding over a murder case, it seems natural to be resistant when a group of judges from another state start casting doubt about the very case you’re presiding over. But for Judges for Justice, the point isn’t to criticize the local courts and law enforcement.

When Judges for Justice takes on a case, there’s typically a three-phase rollout:

1. Spend time, sometimes upward of two years, doing a deep dive into the particular case and confirming that the available evidence points to innocence.
2. Start picking apart where the investigation went wrong. Most of these types of cases come down to a rogue person or persons in law enforcement, Heavey said. The concept is called noble cause corruption—cops are on a noble cause to get the bad guy locked up and make the community safe, and then when they are so convinced in their noble cause they end up resorting to overly aggressive interrogation tactics. In the early days, Judges for Justice would create a lengthy report. Soon, its founders transitioned to mini documentaries trickled out as a series of YouTube videos, which proved better at grabbing attention in the community.
3. Make sure people watch the videos. In the final push to change the court of public opinion, Judges for Justice might unleash a number of promotional tools in the community where the crime took place, including newspaper ads, billboards, postcards, and ads on social media. “Once people see the documentary and then they start telling their friends and family in the community, you get this critical mass … and each case is a little bit different in how the person gets out of prison,” Heavey said.

At the time of our interview, Heavey said Judges for Justice was currently in Phase 3 with Patricia Rorrer’s case in Pennsylvania. There, the group purchased five billboards in various parts of the county, which for about three months would display a simple message: “Is Patty Rorrer innocent? You decide,” with a link to the latest episode of their documentary series on Rorrer.

“Our documentaries don’t do any good in the community unless people watch them,” Heavey said. “We cannot tap into that force unless we can get people to watch our documentary.”

With Judges for Justice, these retired judges are on the outside looking in. So has this type of advocacy work caused them to reflect differently on their time behind the bench?

“It’s always good to have things that keep your mind open to your own fallibility to weaknesses in the system to listening carefully to overcome your own assumptions and biases—and that’s true long after a case has left a courtroom,” Schapira said.

“People have written to me and they’ve told me this and that, and it’s not as though I’ve realized I was completely wrong, but I certainly have been able—I believed in this before—to recognize that people can change,” Schapira said.

The momentum of a high-profile case can influence the behavior of not just police and prosecutors, but judges, too, Heavey said. Such a case builds up a perception that’s difficult to reverse—“Surrounding a wrongful conviction in that community is ice a mile thick that the person is guilty,” Heavey said. “And we have to start chipping away at that ice.”

Think of Judges for Justice’s process like a small kickstart to begin a process of self-examination in a community that was previously convinced of someone’s guilt.

“When we leave there’s suddenly a realization that the person is innocent; once they’ve got an innocent person in their midst the public won’t tolerate it,” Heavey said.

He added, “When we go into every single case we’ve gone into … the prevailing mindset for people who’ve paid attention is the defendant is a cold-blooded killer, lucky they didn’t get the death penalty. When we leave, the public opinion is changed to, ‘Oh my God, he’s an innocent person that was wrongfully convicted.’ And when you get that public mindset to change you set in motion what Victor Hugo said: ‘No power on earth can stop an idea whose time has come.’ And that’s been our experience. People will not tolerate a wrongful conviction in their midst; they just need to be educated about it.”

NOTES

1. www.judgesforjustice.org/about/.

2. 2024 Annual Report, The National Registry of Exonerations, available at https://exonerationregistry.org/sites/exonerationregistry.org/files/documents/2024_Annual_Report.pdf.

3. Scott M. Mourtgos and Ian T. Adams, “Recalibrating the risk of false confession wrongful convictions: Interrogation tactics and inverse probability,” Journal of Criminal Justice 103 (March-April 2026), available at www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0047235226000073.

4. Id.

5. Judges for Justice even has a video focusing on such issues, “Episode 3 “Noble Cause Corruption” – IS PATTY RORRER INNOCENT?” www.youtube.com/watch?v=J9p57vYlbZs.

6. “Episode 6: Constitutional Rights – Due Process and the Writ of Habeas Corpus.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GtFMvj70TJw.