The Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project was joined this fall by Aimee Clesi, CRRJ visiting researcher and Rhodes Scholar (Class of 2022) at Balliol College, University of Oxford.
Studying for her doctoral degree in Criminology and Criminal Justice, Clesi spent five weeks researching cases for CRRJ’s posthumous exonerations project.
“I want to be a civil rights lawyer in the South, address wrongful convictions, fight against the death penalty, and this was a terrific opportunity to get involved in that,” said Clesi, who is from the small town of Branford, Florida.
CRRJ is engaged with attorneys and firms through the Law Firm Antiracism Alliance (LFAA), and with The Innocence Project to pursue posthumous exonerations for several men executed in five states. Many of the cases for which CRRJ is seeking posthumous pardons were extensively litigated, many in the United States Supreme Court and set historic legal precedents.
During her time at CRRJ, Clesi was involved with several projects, including CRRJ’s Donated Bodies project, which examines the ethical questions surrounding the donation of prisoners’ bodies to science, medicine or archival purposes, and research for CRRJ Director Professor Margaret Burnham. But, Clesi said in recent interview with CRRJ that most of her time was spent developing a procedural history for the case of Clyde Brown, a Black man from Winston-Salem, North Carolina, executed in 1953 for the rape of a white teenager, despite scant evidence of any crime.
“I’ve worked at every level of the state court system in Florida so I can understand what happened and how exceptional Mr. Brown’s case is,” said Clesi, who interned at Florida’s State Supreme Court during her undergraduate studies at the University of Florida.
Clyde Brown, 19 years old at the time of the alleged assault, was executed by the state in 1953. His case, although part of a long pattern of judicial executions of Black men for sexual assault — a practice that has since been ruled unconstitutional — was unique in its legal history. Brown’s lawyers took the case up to the United States Supreme Court, alleging that his constitutional rights had been violated due to racially-biased jury selection. In Brown v. Allen (1953) the Supreme Court determined that the jury selection was not unconstitutional, but in considering the issue set a landmark precedent that federal courts could review state court decisions in similar types of cases.
CRRJ is now in the process of seeking long-delayed justice in Brown’s case and Clesi’s analysis forms an important pillar in this work.
“Aimee’s background in examining death penalty cases, habeas corpus litigation, and Supreme Court trends gave us a greater understanding of how Brown’s case resulted in such significant jurisprudence,” said Alex Stein, CRRJ Staff Attorney and Program Director. “Her work was invaluable in helping to make the case for Brown’s posthumous exoneration.”
Clesi’s own research seeks to identify the driving forces behind death penalty abolition in states across the U.S. and what galvanizes legislatures to reject capital punishment by explicitly prohibiting it. Her work and CRRJ’s efforts are closely intertwined. “The history that CRRJ uncovers and explores, the history of racialized violence in the Jim Crow South, underpins the entire death penalty system,” she said.
Currently a research student in the Death Penalty Research Unit at Oxford’s Faculty of Law, Clesi presented her research on Abolitionist De Facto (ADF) states, to CRRJ colleagues and Northeastern Law, faculty, including Elizabeth Zitrin and Professors Margaret Burnham, Daniel Medwed and Michael Meltsner – whose pioneering work led the Supreme Court, in Furman v. Georgia (1972), to ban the death penalty for several years.
This presentation was based on the 30,000 word dissertation Clesi wrote as part of her studies at Oxford. Clesi spoke about what she described as the “phenomenon” of Abolitionist De Facto states. These are states in which the death penalty has not been enforced for over a decade, but where it remains enshrined in law.
During her presentation, Clesi also elaborated on her research into Virginia’s abolition of capital punishment in 2021. Her thesis, which tracked the judicial history of the death penalty in Virginia and examined how the former capital of the confederacy became the first Southern state to abolish it, was published in Loyola Law Review with an introduction from Michael Radelet, Professor Emeritus, sociology, at the University of Colorado.
“One of the principal arguments that drove abolition in Virginia is the state’s history of discrimination, the legacy that [state officials] want to remedy,” said Clesi. “They sincerely believed that getting rid of the death penalty, in law, was one thing they could do to remedy the past.”
It was her research on Virginia that led Clesi to CRRJ, she said.
Radelet shared Clesi’s research with Northeastern Law alumna Elizabeth Zitrin, who supports CRRJ’s Elizabeth Zitrin Justice Fellowship, and eventually Clesi’s work made its way to Burnham’s desk at Northeastern. “The death penalty community and the people who want to fight for abolition are very much connected,” Clesi noted.” “It’s a small world.”
In an email exchange with Burnham, Clesi expressed her wish to work with CRRJ. “I’d read about the Burnham-Nobles Digital Archive and I wanted to get involved with CRRJ because it felt like it was an important step in my career,” she said.
As CRRJ Fellow, Clesi also attended Professor Carol Steiker’s Harvard Law School class on capital punishment. Outside of the classroom, Clesi attended the Supreme Court argument in the death penalty case of Glossip v. Oklahoma, an experience Clesi described as “once in a lifetime.”
Clesi’s next step is law school.
I’m going in to law school with a good sense about what I want to do, which is return and work in the South.”
“I want to work on behalf of communities who have been historically disenfranchised, who have been wronged and where wrongful conviction is prevalent. For me that’s in Jacksonville Florida,” she said.
Clesi observed that she’s part of the CRRJ family now. “Once you’re a part of CRRJ, you’re always a part of CRRJ.”
Read more...
Join our mailing list
Receive the latest news about CRRJ's work, events and programs.
By submitting this form, you are consenting to receive email communications from The Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project https://crrj.org. You can unsubscribe any time by using the SafeUnsubscribe link found at the bottom of every email. Serviced by Constant Contact.