Growing up without a father was hard for me. It hurts every time I talk about it. Because I miss my father, I miss him dearly.

— Edward Lee Smith

“The legal system has to correct its errors, especially its fatal errors, and that is exactly what this case is,” says Professor Margaret Burnham, founder and director of the law school’s Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project (CRRJ), who served as co-counsel to Smith and argued the case before the commissioners court. “Our courts have to take a look at these cases and figure out what measure of justice can be afforded at this moment for thousands of African Americans across the country. As with many of our cases, this investigation involved reverse engineering a travesty.”

The engineers, it turns out, were law students.

As a co-op student with CRRJ, Sindhu Iyengar ’27 was looking for social justice experience to complement her corporate law career aspirations. She expected to do what lawyers do: research and write. And she did, making significant contributions to the 150-page brief submitted by CRRJ and its partner in this case, the Innocence Project. By the time she joined the case in summer 2025, much of the investigative groundwork had already been laid, but the brief still needed what Burnham called “narrative strength.”

That meant finding Tommy Lee Walker inside the documents.

Iyengar and fellow co-op student Maya Quirk ’26 combed through newspaper accounts — biased, they knew — and police reports signed by a lead prosecutor they knew had coerced Walker’s confession. Then Iyengar found an interview with Walker conducted by an investigator for the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles. Among the many questions: What did he like about school? What were his favorite subjects?

Biology, Walker told the investigator, was his favorite subject.

Reading those words was “completely jarring for me,” says Iyengar, just a handful of years older than Walker was at the time of his death. “It made me realize this happened to someone who was so unbelievably young that he had a favorite school subject. I pulled out little nuggets like that from many pages. One line mentioned that he really liked music, so I pulled that out for the brief.”

Most law students spend their education learning how the system works. In this case, CRRJ students learned how the system fails — and what it costs when it does.

For Burnham, that distinction is the point. Working a case like Walker’s requires students to move through the entire arc of a prosecution — from the night of the crime to the moment of execution. They must reconstruct not just what happened but why. “They’re trying to figure out the thinking of the prosecutor, the investigators,” she says. “They have to put themselves in each one of those peoples’ shoes to see what went wrong, and how, and why.”

That kind of thinking, Burnham argues, can’t be found in a casebook. “Students are working on an unusual case, often one of first impression, where the outcome is in the hands of the advocates, and they’re critical members of that team.” The students aren’t witnessing the law; they’re practicing it, with real consequences for a real family.

Burnham credits more than a dozen law students and CRRJ Elizabeth Zitrin Justice Fellows with thousands of hours of research that turned up both what they expected and some surprises. “A member of our CRRJ team made the critical discovery that the investigator who obtained false confessions from Tommy Lee Walker had been a member of the Ku Klux Klan,” explains Burnham. “In our research, we turned over every stone. And that find — that the lead investigator had been in the Klan — underscored the authorities’ antipathy towards Walker in this racially charged case.”

Alex Stein ’19, CRRJ’s program director and staff attorney, who supervises co-op students and research assistants and himself participated in the clinic as a student, describes the work as cultivating a particular kind of legal mind: one that is both creative and relentless. There are questions upon questions to be answered, he says: “What’s the next layer down? And what’s the next layer after that? What else was happening at the time? What bias might the person who wrote this report have had?”

“We really emphasize the importance of being precise and being thorough, because that is what it takes to win one of these cases,” says Stein.

Even so, the Walker case demanded more than tenacity. It required students to hold two kinds of knowledge simultaneously: the forensic and the historical. “We need to have a really good understanding of how the science works,” Stein says. “We also have to have a really good understanding of what the social environment was like in Dallas at the time. If you have one without the other, the argument isn’t going to be as effective.”

Working alongside the Innocence Project — which specializes in forensic and legal wrongful conviction claims — allowed CRRJ to contribute what it does best: The deep historical and racial context that turns a legal argument into a coherent and human story.

Among the lessons Burnham most wants students to absorb: these cases are never just history. Walker’s execution, she explains, “not only robbed him of his life but also enacted a kind of posthumous punishment so long as his legacy was that of a murderer. Posthumous relief could not bring him back, but it was a way to mitigate that dishonor, not just for his living relatives but also for history. Students need to grasp how legal tools, creatively employed, can help us as a nation to see ourselves in relation to the past.”

Talia Lanckton ’26, a former research assistant with CRRJ, says the experience reshaped how they think about what the law can actually do. “Acknowledgment isn’t necessarily just a gesture or a statement,” says Lanckton. “It can be the first step of a process that actually has a real, material impact in people’s lives. This experience has given me an appreciation for that.”

The Walker case is the newest front in a body of work CRRJ has been building since its founding in 2007. Students in the CRRJ Clinic have long investigated lynchings in the Jim Crow South and compiled the Burnham-Nobles Digital Archive, one of the most comprehensive digital records of racial homicides in existence. The Wrongful Execution Project, through which the Walker case was investigated, is CRRJ’s most recent initiative, focusing on cases where the legal system didn’t just fail but also killed.

In 2022, Ben Weinberg ’90, pro bono partner at Dentons and co-founder of the Law Firm Antiracism Alliance (LFAA) — a coalition of more than 300 law firms providing pro bono hours to legal services organizations challenging racial inequity — launched a partnership with Burnham to take on what she calls legal lynchings: cases where the machinery of the courts was used to accomplish what a mob might have done outside them.

“I first approached Margaret Burnham in 2022 after reading her book, By Hands Now Known, to see how LFAA could help CRRJ,” said Weinberg. “Margaret asked us to do a 50-state survey of the laws of posthumous pardons to assess whether posthumous pardons, with a specific focus on wrongful executions, could be a logical extension of CRRJ’s work. Based on that research, LFAA is now working with CRRJ on multiple wrongful executions.”

CRRJ has many other cases like this across the country, dating back to the Jim Crow era. Our courts need to determine what measure of justice can be afforded…

— Margaret Burnham

Burnham is clear-eyed about what posthumous exoneration can and cannot do. It cannot give Tommy Lee Walker his life back. It cannot undo what his execution meant for his son or for the hundreds of people in Dallas who knew Walker was innocent and said so loudly at the time. But it can change what his death means — legally, historically and for his family.

“CRRJ has many other cases like this across the country, dating back to the Jim Crow era,” she says. “Our courts need to examine these cases and determine what measure of justice can now be afforded to the families of the wrongly executed.”

For the students who work these cases, the measure of what they gain is harder to quantify — but no less real. Iyengar came to CRRJ expecting to build legal research and writing skills, which she did. She also came away with something she didn’t expect: the story of a 19-year-old boy who liked biology and music, pulled from the margins of a file that had spent 70 years waiting to be read. “It was clearly a labor of years and years of very principled work,” she says of the brief she helped write, “by people who really cared about the project.”

Tommy Lee Walker said he was innocent. It took law faculty and students years of archival work, a partnership with the Innocence Project and the unanimous vote of a Texas commissioners court to make the record agree.

For Edward Lee Smith, finally, his father’s name is restored.

For the students who helped restore it, the work is over. The lessons carry on.

Deborah Feldman is editor of Northeastern Law magazine.