Audience members at the xBk venue looked to the stage on Sept. 30, intently listening as Erica Nichols Cook, director of the Wrongful Conviction Unit of the Iowa State Public Defender, detailed the case of Annette Cahill. Within the audience, community members and Drake students were joined by the family of Cahill, present for a lecture to bring awareness to her story and International Wrongful Convictions Day on Oct. 2.
“Annette Cahill, as you can see from her artwork, is a kind, loving, talented woman,” Nichols Cook said, gesturing to images of a smiling woman on screen with a baby and child in each of her arms. “We want you to learn about Annette’s case because we are going to trial soon. And it is a tragic injustice that she is sitting in prison right now instead of being with her family for a crime she didn’t commit.”
The event also went into more depth on the reality of wrongful convictions across Iowa, and offered community members time to linger and discuss their questions with staff after the lecture. Heidi Wessel, experiential education paralegal at the Drake Legal Clinic, was an organizer and the first speaker of the event. She extended recognition for the success of the event to the many staff and Drake University students behind the work of the clinic and Innocence Project, xBk staff and designers of 818 Iowa who brought Cahill’s art to life in promotional media.
With every table filled on the ground floor and upstairs on the balcony, the event was a packed house.
“This is a first for us, and for this is work in Iowa to have this many people in the same room talking and thinking about wrongful convictions in Iowa,” Nichols Cook said.
Nichols Cook has been the director of the Wrongful Conviction Unit since December 2016. The unit is the only organization in Iowa that is a member of the International Innocence Network. In January 2020, she brought the work to Drake Law School, founding the inaugural Wrongful Convictions Clinic in partnership with the Iowa State Public Defender.
With only three attorneys who work on instance cases for the entire state of Iowa, Clark described how she and her colleagues spend a lot of time on the road.
“We seek DNA testing, where testing could answer the question of who did it. But as we’ll talk about more, DNA testing isn’t always available,” Nichols Cook said. “We investigate changes in science, official misconduct — whether somebody lied, somebody hid evidence or maybe just forgot to turn it over. And we look at the failures of the legal system, false testimony and other types of misconduct.”
Data shows it takes an average of six to 10 years to correct a wrongful conviction, but Iowa is not average, Nichols Cook said.
“It is proving much more difficult than anyone thought when we started this effort in 2015 and 2016 to correct an injustice and to correct the wrongful conviction,” Nichols Cook said. “The National Registry of Exonerations has only documented 17 exonerations in Iowa since 1989. And we don’t have a single exoneration attributed to DNA evidence.”
DNA has been a catalyst for change in the criminal justice system, where 636 of the national total of 3,735 exonerations were attributed to DNA, but that’s far from the case in Iowa.
On Oct. 13, 1992, in a rural Muscatine County town, Cahill’s “best friend and sometimes boyfriend,” Corey Wieneke, was found dead in his bedroom by his live-in fiancée, Jody Hotz. Wieneke had been beaten to death with signs of blunt force trauma. The only primary evidence found was a bloody baseball bat down the gravel road.
“[Investigators] looked at possible motives or scenarios,” Nichols Cook said. “Who would want to kill Corey Weineke? Corey was your all-American hometown kid. He was the quarterback of the football team in high school. He was the small-town family bar bartender. He was also your cocaine and marijuana drug dealer. And Corey had a lot of girlfriends. He had a lot of friends. He was living with his fiancée at the time. [The investigators] did interviews. They polygraphed a couple of people, and they sent evidence to the crime lab. But the case went cold.”
It wasn’t until 2018 that Jessica Becker went to the police and told the investigators that 26 years ago, when she was 9 years old, she heard Cahill confess to killing Weineke. Cahill had moved on with her life; she still lived in the area, working for the Police Law Institute.
“She was married. She was a grandma. I’ve heard that she’s a great baker,” Nichols Cook said. “And had a nice, normal, quiet life with Corey’s murder never being solved.”
The first jury, Nichols Cook said, couldn’t come to a decision.
“They tried Annette again,” Nichols Cook said. “This time, they found another witness with a shady background and many things that we probably can’t talk about. Based on those statements alone, Annette was convicted of what we call murder two. … She received a 50-year sentence for Corey Weineke’s murder. She’s currently in prison serving that sentence. The Iowa Supreme Court denied her appeal. There’s no physical evidence.”
During the Drake Wrongful Convictions Clinic’s investigation, Nichols Cook said they discovered the prosecutor lied to the jury, telling them they couldn’t do DNA testing on the baseball bat.
“They didn’t consider alternate suspects,” Nichols Cook said. “They had a box of documents and evidence that they didn’t turn over to Annette’s trial counsel.”
So the clinic took the case and filed for DNA testing. They found the baseball bat had neither Weineke’s nor Cahill’s DNA on it, but there is both male and female DNA on it.
“But the state doesn’t want to know who, and the state won’t compare it to any of the alternate suspects they had previously identified,” Nichols Cook said. “So tonight, Annette’s in prison. We are preparing for a 10-day evidentiary hearing that begins in January … And we are asking the court for a new trial.”
Junior Cooper Reece and senior Isaiah Hulshof, both studying law, politics and society, attended the lecture as students of Nichols Cook’s lawful convictions class.
As a senior, Hulshof does more of the student-led work behind the scenes of the Wrongful Convictions Clinic for cases that law school students screen and open a review process for. He does scanning, filing, interview summaries and so on. The work has shifted his perspective a lot, he says.
“You see how the law is not always cookie-cutter correct,” Hulshof said. “There’s so many different levels. There’s wrongful convictions, but there’s also people who are correctly convicted. … The overlapping nature of when someone is truly facing a life challenge, all the things that stack against them is just, it’s unfathomable.”
Reece believes the event is ultimately important for getting people engaged and involved.
“It’s hard to, I think, fully understand what’s going on if you’re not really in the legal sphere of academia in general,” Reece said. “This is definitely a good way to get the community behind this. In order to have actual change, you need more than just the people that are working on this. To get involved, you need actual community support, because there needs to be change on the legislative platform.”
