Peter Neufeld Alum Story

We interviewed Peter Neufeld, Encampment alum and co-founder of the Innocence Project. He told us about his lifelong work for justice and how “the Encampment was one of the most defining experiences of my youth.”

What are you up to now? About 35 years ago, I co-founded the Innocence Project, which does two things primarily: It helps people who claim that they were wrongly convicted prove their actual innocence — to date, we’ve exonerated more than 260 people serving ridiculously long sentences or languishing on death row. We also deconstruct all the cases and try to figure out the causes of the wrongful convictions and which causes are most prominent.

Our policy department develops model statutes and works with local innocence organizations and other criminal justice advocates to press for the enactment of reforms in the 50 states to reduce the risk of future wrongful convictions. We use the hard data we have collected and the powerful narratives of the exonerated to educate the bench, bar, and public about the factors that contribute to miscarriages of justice and the reforms that will make our criminal legal system more accurate, equitable, and empathetic.

Just today, after a multi-year struggle, our lawyers exonerated a woman serving a life sentence in Texas. A few days ago, we submitted a brief to help prevent the execution of a factually innocent man in Alabama who has been housed on death row for more than three decades. Recent post-conviction DNA testing excluded him and matched and identified another man who had committed a similar crime several years later, for which he was serving a life sentence. Given that, we knew that in almost any state but Alabama, the prosecutors would have joined in a motion to throw out the conviction, but evidently, not in Alabama.

This being the season that most part-time state legislatures are in session, our advocates are spread across the country this week to secure bipartisan support for our reforms. When you describe what I do, it’s important not to say that I work in the criminal justice system, but that our work is in the criminal legal system. After toiling in this mess for 50 years, I can regrettably say there’s very little justice in the system.

My brother, who was also an Encamper (three years before me at Berkeley_, just retired, but at one point, he was the head of the Criminal Defense Division of the Legal Aid Society in New York City and ran the first office to defend people charged with capital crimes in New York. Much of his work time is currently focused on writing about his experiences in the anti-war and social justice movement, and his encounters with other advocates and adversaries as a national leader of SDS in the late 1960s. He is also collaborating with other organizations to file and pursue ethics complaints against prosecutors whose misconduct, although palpable, was never held accountable. His efforts call attention to both recent transgressions and historical gross misconduct responsible for the lynching and burning at the stake of innocent Black men and women when New York was still a colony.

My partner in life, Adele Bernhard, started handling post-conviction claims of innocence 20 years ago at Pace University Law School and is currently the founder and co-director of the Post Conviction Innocence Clinic at the New York Law School. Adele started her project at a time when our Innocence Project focused exclusively on cases that could be cleared with DNA testing. She correctly noted that the same factors that contributed to our cases applied equally to cases for which the silver bullet of DNA was unavailable. The only difference is that without DNA, winning is much harder. My brother’s wife, Sue Jacobs, founded the Center for Family Representation 20 years ago to support lawyers and social workers who represent the parents of kids the state is trying to remove from the family, for either alleged criminal conduct or domestic problems. The four of us share a close bond, although at larger family gatherings, some may find our conversation too much “inside baseball.”

What did you learn at the Encampment? That summer at the Encampment was one of the most defining experiences of my youth. It was the first time in my life that that I lived in a small community in which a significant number of people were either Black or Latinx. Encampers came from disparate parts of the country and had very different life experiences from mine. We were living in a part of southeastern Kentucky that was predominantly poor, white, and rural, but abundantly creative. We were an integrated group of teenagers encountering racist hatred and harassment. On one occasion, as we walked home from town, a rifle was extended through the open window of a passing vehicle and a shot rang out. No one was hurt; it was “just” a warning.

I spent time with several families who lived in “hollers” back in the Appalachian woods, far from town. I stayed with a family that lacked a working outhouse. We just went off into the woods. I also spent a few days down in another family’s coal mine, where the man who worked the family mine died in a small cave-in a week after I was there with him. There were lots of things about the world that you didn’t learn in suburban Long Island that you learned in the Encampment. I think it was the first time in my life that I heard the word “Honky” applied to me and understood what that was all about.

I had to confront a lot of things about my own upbringing — race, gender, and relative affluence — and it committed me much more to wanting change. That became a very, very big deal. I was already part of the high school anti-war movement at that time, but most of the people in that movement were white. The Encampment expanded my view of social and racial justice in a lot of ways that hadn’t been appreciated before.

I was involved somewhat in other kinds of civil rights stuff because my parents were activists. My mom had been the national secretary to Ethical Culture’s national organization, the American Ethical Union, and its part-time assistant NGO rep to the United Nations. When certain schools in the South refused to integrate and instead shut down, white kids went to these private academies and some of the Black churches set up freedom schools. Mom was involved in collecting books for the freedom schools. When there were sit-ins at lunch counters in the South, Mom organized support demonstrations at a Woolworth “five and dime” store on Long Island. It wasn’t something I was unused to, but it was more intellectual and through my parents as opposed dealing with those issues myself.

For instance, there was a guy at my Encampment from south-central Los Angeles. The year before our summer in Kentucky, he participated in the Watts Uprising — huge disturbances protesting the racist and abusive LA police and discriminatory practices more broadly. He had “liberated” several beautiful suits from a department store. We were all wearing shorts and T-shirts, but this fellow frequently wore these really gorgeous and expensive suits. Once, I made a critical remark about the suits, and he went right back in my face and explained why he had them and what it meant to him, and that I had no business saying what I was saying. There were lots of moments like that.

How has the Encampment influenced your life? My summer in Kentucky played a significant role in my expanding involvement in social and racial justice work in high school, college, and beyond. Most of my efforts were peaceful, but it’s fair to say that on occasion, my participation was more aggressive. I was suspended from high school for demonstrations against the war. I was suspended from the University of Wisconsin due to my activities during the Black student strike and suspended a second time (and arrested) for incidents in response to the 1970 U.S. invasion of Cambodia. The only school I wasn’t thrown out of was law school. One could infer I had a problem with authority figures.

As a public defender in the south Bronx, I was very much in control of my own caseload. As co-founder of the Innocence Project and our civil rights law firm (Cochran, Neufeld and Scheck), I did not have a boss or supervisor to contend with. I guess the challenge of being managed is one of my weaknesses.

To go back to your earlier statement, at the Encampment, you had a lived experience of something that was different from the experiences of social justice you’d had before. It was my first time living in a racially and culturally diverse community. I grew up in a suburb that was largely middle- and working-class. A lot of New York City civil servants, including cops and firefighters who didn’t want to live in the city, lived in our affordable town, which was overwhelmingly Irish and Italian Catholic. The borders of our village were carefully drawn to make it all-white. The three adjacent towns, with different schools, had large Black populations. They used to say that communities like ours were set up for “white flight.”

We lived in an affordable development built after the Second World War. My parents were activists and so I learned stuff. I went to Ethical Cultural Sunday School for nine or 10 years. I went out on demonstrations with my parents. But it was more intellectual, more remote, and more secondhand. It was very different from living in the Encampment’s diverse community and meeting and boarding with folks who didn’t even have an outhouse. People who had to go down into a deep, dark hole every day to earn enough to put food on the family’s table. It was not what I was used to.

What was your experience when you first got to the Encampment? I can’t remember a particular experience. I just remember, suddenly meeting people who very quickly confronted me about the fact that I didn’t really understand their life experiences; that I may have thought I did, but I didn’t. They let me know that quickly. Also, being able to accept people on their own terms and hear them out; understanding much more about all the privileges that I had in life that they didn’t — that was something that I had to face right away. Also, facing the reality that once you’re in that kind of racially diverse community, people in the larger outside community may not be particularly fond of all of us and dealing with that.

How did you deal with it? Mostly by trying to learn how to listen better to what other people had to say, and try to be more respectful of other people’s lives and life experiences, and to learn more about how a lot of the problems that required change were systemic, were institutionalized, and couldn’t be improved by willing it.

Is there a topic that you spent the most time on at the Encampment? Probably learning about how there was still much, much, much more to do to eliminate the badges of slavery and Jim Crow than I ever imagined — that despite the passage of more than 100 years since the Civil War, not a whole lot had been accomplished. I didn’t really appreciate that until that summer.

Do you have a favorite memory? There’s no single memory. We had people from the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party who came to speak with us, which was very inspiring. By the end of it, the sense of camaraderie — it was one of these things where we all had to mature very, very quickly and be mutually supportive. It was that kind of maturing experience, which I had never experienced any place else, and certainly not even since, as fast as we had to do it that summer. It was a rapid understanding that the world is much more complicated than I had imagined, and that it would take a lot more collective activity to change peoples’ hearts and minds than I ever thought. I don’t think it’s a moment; it’s more a takeaway.

Why is the Encampment important now? I know what it did for me, so I know what it can do for others. Probably, as bad as 1966 was in America, in terms of race, domestically, and wars our leaders pursued globally, things are much worse now. I was incredibly naïve. I erroneously believed this country and the entire world were on a trajectory where things were going to be slowly getting better. Then suddenly, we fell off a cliff. It’s hard for me now to fathom just how awful things are for people in this country and around the world.

We need more people to go through the Encampment experience who can perhaps become leaders of a movement to challenge what’s going on now and move us in a much healthier direction.

Coming Soon:

Look for more information in your Inbox in the coming weeks.

Peter is a longtime Encampment supporter and you’ll be hearing more from him soon as we launch our annual Spring Sponsorship Campaign. This is your chance to join Peter in contributing to make diversity at the Encampment possible.
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