James Earl Coleman

Coleman was born in Charlotte, North Carolina in 1946. After graduating from a local public school in 1965, he attended a post-graduate year at Phillips Exeter Academy. He went on to attend Harvard University and Columbia Law School. Coleman clerked for the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan.[1]

After a year of private practice in New York, Coleman spent the next 15 years at the Washington, D.C. law firm of Wilmer Cutler and Pickering, the last 12 as a partner. Coleman also served as chief counsel for the U.S. House Committee on Standards of Official Conduct (Ethics Committee), and as deputy general counsel for the U.S. Department of Education.[1]

In 1986, Coleman and his associate, Polly Nelson, joined the defense team of serial killer Ted Bundy.[2] They were able to secure three stays before Bundy was finally executed on January 24, 1989.[9] Coleman was featured in the Netflix series, Conversations with a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes, and the Amazon Prime Video series, Ted Bundy: Falling for a Killer.

In 2006, Duke University president Richard H. Brodhead appointed Coleman to chair one of five investigative committees formed in the wake of the Duke lacrosse case. The ad-hoc lacrosse review committee assessed the university's lacrosse team's culture, amid rape allegations, to determine whether the team's actions formed a pattern. Coleman stated that they would examine the team's conduct during the previous five years, across a three week period, before submitting a report.[10] The Coleman report surmised that the players who had been charged "treated Duke staffers with respect... and had no record of sexist, racist, or other forms of anti-social behavior."[11][12]

In interviews with 60 Minutes and CBS, and in an article he wrote for the Huffington Post, Coleman voiced his concerns about the justice system on display throughout the Duke lacrosse case.[13][14][15]

Coleman said that former district attorney Mike Nifong had committed serious prosecutorial misconduct, and if defendants were convicted, there "would be a basis to have the conviction overturned based on his conduct."[16]

As a professor at the Duke University School of Law, Coleman is the co-director of the Wrongful Convictions Clinic and the faculty advisor for the Innocence Project. Both programs work to exonerate wrongfully convicted inmates primarily in North Carolina. In recent years Coleman and the Wrongful Convictions Clinic have succeeded in exonerating former inmates including LaMonte Armstrong and Shawn Massey.[17][18][19]