Linda C. Starr

Santa Clara University School of Law

Santa Clara

Practice type: appellate litigation

Speciality: inmate post-conviction relief

Starr had one of the worst days of her life, she said, in 2007 when an Eastern District trial judge refused to hear prison inmate client's claims of actual innocence because his lawyers had filed his habeas petition five days late.

A state court jury had convicted George A. Souliotes, a Modesto landlord, of murdering three tenants he was evicting by setting the residential fire that killed them. Since his 1997 trial, new scientific techniques had been developed that disproved key evidence presented in court apparently matching accelerant on Souliotes' shoes to chemicals at the fire scene.

Starr, a co-founder in 2001 of the Northern California Innocence Project, had been battling for years in a pro-bono partnership with Orrick Herrington & Sutcliffe LLP to spring Souliotes from life without parole at Salinas Valley State Prison. But a mistaken state court docket entry led Souliotes' post-conviction lawyers to calculate they had more time than was actually on the one-year statute of limitations clock for filing the petition.

The court found there were no exceptions to the one-year deadline, even when absolute innocence claims were on the line.

"It's just obsessed me," Starr, 53, said recently. "It's been my life. This is a man 70-some years old, innocent, sitting in prison because of bad arson science. Because we filed late. This is the kind of thing people kill themselves over."

Then, in a dramatic turnabout in August 2011, the panel reversed itself due to a change in circuit precedent that lets actual innocence claims trump procedural errors. It ordered an expedited evidentiary hearing to focus on Souliotes' claims.

"Fabulous," a relieved Starr said. "This will be a huge hearing, and we'll win."

- JOHN ROEMER