An unsolved murder of a 5-year-old girl in 1998 led to the wrongful conviction of 12-year-old Anthony Harris. He spent 10 years fighting to overturn his conviction due to police and prosecutorial misconduct. The document outlines the key events, including the murder of Devan Duniver, the search for her by 400 people, the discovery of her body, and Anthony Harris initially becoming a suspect despite having an alibi. It then describes his long legal battle to prove his innocence in the face of a flawed investigation and conviction.

1. 74 the american lawyer month year 75
An unsolved murder. A wrongfully convicted boy. And a ten-year battle
to hold police and prosecutors responsible for their actions. “It’s scary
how little it takes for people in power to screw things up,” says one
lawyer on the case. “And how much it takes to correct it.”
Devan Duniver was a little girl who lived in New Phil-
adelphia, Ohio, in the summer of 1998. She was 5 years old, Caucasian, with
blond hair and blue eyes. Devan lived in a modest two-story apartment com-
plex with her mother and older brother, and was supposed to enter kindergar-
ten in the fall. She liked it when her mom read books to her, especially Dr.
Seuss’s One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish.
In the summer of 1998, Anthony Harris was a 12-year-old boy who lived
with his mother and two brothers in the same apartment complex. Anthony was
supposed to enter the seventh grade in the fall. He liked playing with Legos
and toy trains and had a favorite stuffed monkey that he brought to sleepovers.
He was African American and tall for his age. His teachers considered him po-
lite and well-mannered.
New Philadelphia is a town of about 18,000 residents, located 80 miles south
of Cleveland. Much of the town has the look of a Norman Rockwell painting:
Stately homes from the 1800s and majestic old trees line the streets. In 1998,
African Americans made up 1 percent of the county’s population.
On the morning of Saturday, June 27, 1998, Anthony Harris and his best
friend went to Ernie’s Bicycle Shop. At 2 p.m. Anthony walked home to check in
with his mother, as she had told him to do. He ran into Devan Duniver’s mother,
Lori, who was looking for her daughter. Lori offered Anthony $5 to help her look.
Anthony searched with Lori Duniver for several hours, then went home. Later
he stayed over at his friend’s house and they watched television. At 8:11 p.m. Du-
niver called the police to report that her daughter was missing.
The town came out to look for the child. In the midst of heavy storms and
tornado warnings, roughly 400 people searched into the night. The next day,
around 2:30 p.m., two searchers found the little girl’s 40-pound body in a small
wooded area less than 150 feet from Devan’s home. She had been murdered—
stabbed in the throat.
By Susan Beck
SavingAnthony Harris
Anthony Harris says the
accusations and their
aftermath “stomped a
hole” in his life.
P h o t o g r a p h B y M a x S . G e r b e r

2. The American Lawyer | April 2015 4544 April 2015 | americanlawyer.com
IN NOVEMBER 2012, THE CORPORATE LAW GURU WHO IS MOST REVERED BY MANAGERS
faced off against the corporate law guru who is most feared by managers, at the Conference
Board think tank in New York, in a friendly debate that was about to turn hostile. Martin Lip-
ton has defended CEOs against all comers since forming Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz 50
years ago. Lucian Bebchuk, a Harvard Law School professor, champions the “activist” hedge
funds that assail CEOs in an intensifying struggle for control of America’s boardrooms.
Speaking with a thick Israeli accent (“Vock-tell is wrong”), Bebchuk argued that shareholder
activism helps companies in both the short and long term. Lipton, whose voice carries a trace
of Jersey City (“The bawd is right”), countered that activism is awful for companies and the
economy over the long run. “Nor do I accept [your] so-called statistics,” said Lipton fatefully.
“Your statistics are all based on things like ‘What was the price of the stock two days later?’”
As Lipton finished the thought, Bebchuk twitched his foot. He unfolded his right leg
over his left knee, and then reset his body. He licked his lips, pressed the button of an imagi-
nary pen with his thumb, then lunged for a pad and started scribbling with a real one. Thus
was born “The Long-Term Effects of Hedge Fund Activism,” the paper that turned a genial
debate into a nasty war over the direction of corporate America. (It’s to be published in June
by the Columbia Law Review.)
At 83, Lipton is a blue chip stock. He’s one of two people to make every list of the 100 Most
Influential Lawyers in America since it was launched by the National Law Journal 30 years ago.
(The other is Beltway legend Thomas Hale Boggs Jr., who died last September, just months
after ailing Patton Boggs merged with Squire Sanders.) Wachtell Lipton remains The Am Law
100’s runaway leader in profits per partner, as it has been for 15 of the past 16 years.
Lipton is most famous as the inventor in 1982 of the “poison pill” defense to corporate
takeovers, which enables a company to dilute the value of its shares when a hostile bidder draws
near. He’s also heavily identified with the “staggered
board,” which deters takeovers by spreading the elec-
tion of a board’s directors over several years. It’s often
forgotten that Lipton helped to pioneer the concept
of the corporation that undergirds corporate social re-
sponsibility. In his seminal 1979 work, “Takeover Bids
in the Target’s Boardroom,” Lipton argued that direc-
Marty Lipton’s War
In the battle for control of America’s boardrooms, activist investors are winning.
But not without a fight from Wachtell’s iconic co-founder.
BY MICHAEL D. GOLDHABER
For 50 years, Marty Lipton
and his firm have sought to
protect managers from hostile
takeovers and, increasingly,
activist campaigns.
P H O T O G R A P H B Y S T E V E N L A X T O N

3. 64 THE AMERICAN LAWYER MAY 2000 65
B Y A L I S O N F R A N K E L
P H O T O G R A P H S B Y J I M A L L E N
On the way to a Supreme Court
test case with the school voucher
litigation road show
CLINT BOLICK’S TRAVEL AGENT GOT HIM AN UPGRADE TO FIRST
class on the 1:50 P.M. Delta flight out of Tallahassee on February 24, which was
a good thing. Bolick needed a drink. The litigation director of the Institute for
Justice, Bolick had had a bad morning, arguing a summary judgment motion in
the courtroom of L. Ralph Smith, Jr., the state court judge presiding over Flori-
da’s school voucher litigation. Bolick had tried to make the speech he’s made in
so many school voucher cases over the last five years. “I represent the people
who have the most at stake,” he had told Smith (popularly known as Bubba), as
he gestured back to rows of parents wearing red, white, and blue “School
Choice” buttons. Judge Smith cut him off: “That’s irrelevant to the facial consti-
tutionality.” Bolick, 42, has the manner of a teacher coaxing along a student, but
the judge balked at all of Bolick’s attempts to persuade him that vouchers are
good for Florida’s public schools. Bolick mustered a smile for the television
cameras that surrounded him after the hearing, but by the time he got to the
airport for the trip back to Washington, he was looking glum.
Until Robert Chanin boarded the plane. Chanin, a 65-year-old Brooklyn-
born warrior with slicked-down gray hair, was the beneficiary of Judge Smith’s
rough treatment of Bolick. Chanin has represented the National Education As-
sociation (NEA) for more than 30 years, and he is the lead lawyer for the coali-
tion of groups that have opposed school vouchers in state after state. Chanin
Blackboard
Jungle
Free market meets
poverty law: Clint
Bolick’s genius for
PR shines through.

4. July 2005 3130 THE AMERICAN LAWYER STUDENT EDITION
The Accidental
N THE FALL OF 1992, JAMES BLANK, A 26-YEAR-OLD FIRST-YEAR ASSOCIATE AT NEW
York’s Mudge Rose Guthrie Alexander & Ferdon, got a call from partner Thomas Evans asking him to come by
and talk about a new client the firm had agreed to represent. Blank had done some work for Evans after joining
Mudge’s intellectual property litigation team following his graduation from the New York Law School. But Evans
didn’t want to talk to Blank about Nintendo Co., Ltd., or any of the firm’s other big IP clients. Rather, the new
case was representing Ernest Ray Willis, a man convicted of capital murder for setting a house fire in tiny Iraan,
Texas, that killed two women.
Blank was a little surprised. Though he’d always assumed he’d do pro bono work for the firm, he wasn’t espe-
cially interested in the death penalty, hadn’t done any clinic work on criminal cases in law school, and knew noth-
ing about Texas justice. Nonetheless, Blank soon found himself seated in a room reading through 30 volumes of
Willis’s trial transcripts.
So began an extraordinary legal journey that would consume Blank for much of the next 12 years. During that
time Mudge Rose blew up, and Blank—along with other firm lawyers—joined the New York office of Latham &
Watkins. Blank’s new firm would pour millions of dollars and thousands of hours of lawyer and staff time into rep-
resenting Willis, despite the long odds for a successful appeal. Since the death penalty was reinstated by the U.S. Supreme
Court in 1976, fewer than a dozen inmates have been freed from Texas’s swollen death row. Moreover, the Lone Star State’s
legal environment had become increasingly hostile. By the late 1990s Texas’s Court of Criminal Appeals (CCA), the state’s
highest criminal court, was composed of nine elected Republicans, most of whom were former prosecutors who ran on strong
law-and-order platforms. A study by Texas Monthly magazine found that between 1994 and 2002, the CCA reversed only
3 percent of death penalty convictions, the lowest percentage of any court of last resort in the nation. Additionally, after con-
gressional reforms in 1996, federal courts became much less amenable to reviewing capital convictions.
“To succeed on a death penalty case, postconviction, you need to change the factual picture,” says Austin solo practitioner
Robert Owen, a death penalty specialist who advised Latham on the Willis case. “You need to find documents never located, talk
to witnesses never interviewed, get your own forensic experts. . . . It costs a tremendous amount of money and time.” Latham spent
that capital, and, in the end, all that stood between Ernest Willis and lethal injection was a group of volunteer lawyers from a com-
mercial law firm, led by an associate who, by his own admission, started out knowing next to nothing about criminal law.
By the time the case made it to Blank, Willis seemed like a man out of chances. After being convicted in August 1987, he
lost his appeal to the Texas CCA, and his subsequent writ of certiorari to the Supreme Court was denied. Further, the record
bristled with what the prosecution claimed was overwhelming evidence that Willis had torched the house where he was tem-
I
P H O T O G R A P H B Y D A N W I N T E R S
DEFENDERSFor 17 years Ernest Ray Willis sat on death row in Texas for a crime he didn’t commit.
His last hope rested with a team of young lawyers from Latham & Watkins who knew
more about trademarks and copyrights than the death penalty.
By Douglas McCollam
Ernest Ray Willis says that when he
first met Blank, he was impressed but
thought, “This is just a young kid.”

5. 94 T H E A M E R I C A N L AW Y E R
By Alison Frankel
Photographs By Dana Smith
HOOD
Robinin the
Dream buster? Extortion fighter? Rhetoric is flying
as Phil Gramm attempts to dismember the Community
Reinvestment Act. Philadelphia s bitterly fought
CoreStates/First Union megabank merger reveals
why CRA is such a lightning rod for controversy.
J U N E 1999 95
As the former head of the PhiladelphiaAssociation of Community Develop-ment, Steven Culbertson now knows toget big-bank commitments in writing.But he learned the hard way.

6. CIVILInaction
MARCH 2001 8382 THE AMERICAN LAWYER
P H O T O G R A P H S B Y M I C H A E L J . N . B O W L E S
IS LITIGATION OVER A SUPERFUND SITE WORTH $500 MILLION—OR NOTHING?
IT DEPENDS WHICH SIDE OF THE TRACKS YOU LIVE ON.
B Y A L I S O N F R A N K E L
IT WASN’T UNTIL AFTER
THE EPA SHOWED UP
THAT MARGARET
WILLIAMS AND HER
NEIGHBORS STARTED
THINKING ABOUTTHE
BREATHING PROBLEMS,
BIRTH DEFECTS,AND
CANCERSTHEIR
FAMILIES HAD SUFFERED
FORYEARS.
SOMEONE FORGOT TO TELL THE SPINDLY
rose of Sharon sticking out of the front lawn at
104 Lansdowne Avenue: This house, like all of the
houses around it, is condemned. Nothing so pink
should be growing in the gray dust of these de-
serted streets in Florida’s Panhandle. Nothing at
all is supposed to be living here, where mailboxes
gape open and empty; where doors are marked
with oversized red-white-and-blue badges reading
U.S. PROPERTY. NO TRESPASSING; where a
small mountain of dioxin-contaminated soil looms
over the landscape.
Once this was a neighborhood, a decent, close-
knit neighborhood. Rosewood Terrace, Oak Park,
and the Goulding subdivision were about the best
places a black family could live in Pensacola in the
decades after World War II. People bought quar-
ter-acre lots, built little houses, planted gardens,
harvested pecans, and stayed for years and years. It
wasn’t paradise—thick tar from the nearby Escam-
bia Treating plant, which turned pine trees into
telephone poles, would bubble up from the sew-
ers when it rained hard; and clouds of ammonia
from the Agrico Chemical plant, a quarter-mile
away, blew over when the wind was up. But a lot
of people in the neighborhood needed jobs at

7. 124 THE AMERICAN LAWYER
Dot-Com Wars
APRIL 2000 125
IN DECEMBER 1997 IRA MAGAZINER HAD JUST FINISHED A SPEECH TO A UNIVERSITY
audience. He decided to snoop around campus before catching his return flight to the nation’s
capital. The president’s former health care policy adviser—who had subsequently been asked to
head up the administration’s study of Internet issues—knew that the campus was home to one of
the world’s 13 “root servers,” the computers that store domain names for the Internet. The servers
enable Internet computers worldwide to speak the same language, so that when a Web user types
in www.nytimes.com, her computer translates the name into the numerical language of the Internet.
To Magaziner’s shock, he found his way to the server simply by asking directions from a student.
The computer sat unguarded in an otherwise empty, unlocked room, even though tampering with it
could at least temporarily disrupt the Internet for many users. Magaziner was dumbfounded. “I could
By Laura Pearlman
Illustrations by
Brad Hamann
Justice
and the
Truth,
The record-breaking $17 billion that Network Solutions, Inc.,
fetched last month represented more than irrational exuberance
in the Internet marketplace—NSI captured the price tag through
years of hard-nosed lawyering.

9. AUGUST 2000 125
PHOTOGRAPHS BY DANA SMITH
124 THE AMERICAN LAWYER
What Ellen Reasonover’s lawyers learned while working
to free her from a Missouri prison is that the unthinkable
does happen—prosecutorial misconduct can produce
a conviction despite a complete lack of credible evidence.
But proving that can be ridiculously hard.
By Steve Weinberg
roaded
RAIL
Ellen Reasonover (right) and her
longtime defender, Cheryl Pilate,
outside the prison at Chillicothe,
Missouri: The system worked, but
only after failing for 16 years.