LINCOLN — A national authority on wrongful convictions said he was immediately puzzled by the case of Earnest Jackson, an Omaha man found guilty of first-degree murder as an accomplice to two other men who were acquitted of the crime.

It’s exceedingly rare, said Northeastern University law professor Daniel Medwed, that an accomplice could be found guilty when the suspected main actors are not.

But Jackson’s case — which is the subject of a bill in the Nebraska Legislature — illustrates what Medwed sees as a flaw in the American judicial system, one billed as the fairest on earth.

“What’s shocking is how easy it is to convict an innocent person, but what’s equally shocking is how hard it is to exonerate someone at the back end,” he said.

Medwed, whose wife is from Nebraska, gave lectures Monday and Tuesday at the University of Nebraska College of Law and the Creighton University School of Law on wrongful convictions and the difficulty of proving someone innocent.

While there’s an assumption of innocence when someone goes to trial, once a person is convicted, it flips to an assumption of guilt, Medwed told the law students.

And, unlike popular belief, he said, there are obstacles to proving someone innocent. Appeals, Medwed said, are more aimed at finding judicial errors or ineffective legal counsel.

For instance, to obtain a pardon, a convicted person has to beg forgiveness and admit remorse for their crime, he said, but someone who maintains their innocence can’t do that.

Last year, Medwed published his third book, this one on the procedural barriers facing those wrongfully convicted called “Barred: Why the Innocent Can’t Get Out of Prison.”

He told the students that the U.S. could benefit by adopting programs launched in the United Kingdom and the State of North Carolina to review some criminal convictions to determine whether an innocent person was found guilty. A review office in North Carolina has led to 15 exonerations in that state since 2006.

“No one benefits by having an innocent person in prison,” Medwed told NU law students on Monday. “It’s not just an injustice to the person behind bars, it costs society money and the true perpetrator is still out there.”

Medwed said he’s now working with the Midwest Innocence Project to form a legal team to investigate the Earnest Jackson case to determine whether there are new options to appeal his conviction.

Jackson, now 41, was found guilty by a jury of  being an accessory to first-degree murder in the 1999 slaying of Larry Perry in Omaha.

Jackson, then 17, was arrested along with two other men, but Jackson’s case went to trial first. He was found guilty despite his insistence that he was not present at the gun fight.

Later, another man charged, Shalamar Cooperrider, was acquitted after a jury found that he had acted in self-defense. A third man charged, Dante Chillous, was also acquitted.

Since then, Jackson’s appeals have failed, as did his request for a pardon last year from the Nebraska Pardons Board.

Then-Gov. Pete Ricketts, a member of the Pardons Board, cited dozens of disciplinary reports filed against Jackson during his 23 years in prison. Another board member, then-Attorney General Doug Peterson, said that eyewitnesses had placed Jackson at the scene of the shooting and that bullets from three different guns had killed Perry.

State Sen. Justin Wayne of Omaha has introduced bills to allow a convicted person to file a motion for a retrial based on newly discovered evidence. That would allow Jackson to introduce information gleaned during the Cooperider and Chillous trials, testimony he didn’t have when he went to trial.

But Wayne’s bills have failed to advance.

Medwed said he felt that Jackson was convicted on “threadbare” evidence, basically the testimony of one witness, which piqued his interest in the case.

The law professor, who used to run an innocence project in New York State, said he got even more interested after meeting with Jackson on Monday at the Nebraska State Penitentiary.

“I’m planning on being involved,” Medwed said.

He described a case in New York in which an innocent man was convicted of an armed robbery based on mistaken testimony by an eyewitness. After the professor and his students investigated, it was discovered that a key alibi witness was not called to testify and that evidence about a serial robber — convicted of several robberies about the same time — was not admitted at the trial. Ironically, Medwed said, that new information led to his client being released due to ineffective counsel, not because he was shown to be innocent.

“People need to understand more generally that some convictions are shaky and there are innocent people in prison,” Medwed said. “We don’t know the number. But all systems designed by humans are fallible.”

Daniel Gutman, Jackson’s attorney, said Tuesday that the help of Medwed and the Innocence Project is good news for his client’s case. It might uncover a new avenue for an appeal, he said.

“We have to go through the record and see what we’ve got,” Gutman said.

This story was originally published by Nebraska Examiner, an editorially independent newsroom providing a hard-hitting, daily flow of news. It is part of the national nonprofit States Newsroom. Find more at nebraskaexaminer.com.