By Jesse Dolojan, Staff Writer
On April 20, Xavier’s chapter of the Ohio Innocence Project (OIP) hosted a cornhole tournament to raise funds for the Berry-Godsey Phoenix Initiative, a fund dedicated to supporting OIP exonerees upon release from wrongful imprisonment.
The Ohio Innocence Project is a nonprofit organization made up of lawyers, law students and volunteers working to help reform the justice system and get wrongfully convicted inmates out of prison.
The idea for the cornhole tournament was introduced by exoneree, Robert McClendon. McClendon gained a passion for cornhole after being released from prison and has become one of the top amateur cornhole players in Ohio.
The tournament is meant to not only raise funds for exonerees, but also to celebrate McClendon and all wrongfully convicted exonerees.
In 1991, McClendon was wrongfully convicted and was sentenced to 15 years in prison.
“While I was in prison, I filed for DNA testing three times and was turned down by the courts. The Ohio Innocence Project, and the Columbus Dispatch were working on a joint effort called test of convictions,” McClendon said. “They wanted to know why a lot of people were filing for DNA testing, and were just totally being turned down by the board.”
The work of the Ohio Innocence Project is to not only correct wrongdoings within the justice system but to also bring awareness to the realities of wrongful convictions.
One of the ways they achieve this is through a series of collegiate chapters called OIP-u, a network of undergraduate students across Ohio dedicated to advocating and educating people on the issue of wrongful convictions and the justice system. The President of Xavier’s OIP-u chapter, senior Psychology and Criminal Justice major Jared Vornhagen, emphasized the importance of educating people about the criminal justice system.
“The education piece is important to the organization because a lot of students, if they’re not going to be going into the criminal justice system, they might be jurors, or at least voters,” Vornhagen said.
Xavier’s OIP-u chapter focuses on hosting exonerees because they believe that one of the most effective ways of educating someone on these stories is to hear from the exonerees themselves.
“And really, in all seriousness, they’re getting to see that in some cases, it’s just pure, you know, human error. There’s no malice,” Vornhagen said. “And so getting to hear those stories, I think is probably one of the most important pieces of it.”
McClendon says playing cornhole is one of the main tools he used to adjust to life outside of prison, and which allowed him to reconnect with people again.
“Cornhole saved my life. I used to go to bars. I haven’t been to a bar for seven years since I’ve been playing cornhole. It’s a fun game. It’s a game that gives back. It’s a game that as much as you put into it, as much as you’ll get out of it,” McClendon said.
“I have a set in my house. I’ve taught 78 people since COVID who have never ever played before. Introduce me to a class and a group of people I probably would have never met.”
Vornhagen stressed that Xavier’s OIP-u chapter is open to any students regardless of their major and encourages students to come to events.
“It’s not a club that really is restricted to certain majors. I think we often do like to hold speaker events and so it might seem like it’s a professional tennis club, but I mean, it can be as social as people want it to be,” Vornhagen said. “Sometimes not a lot of people know about the Innocence Project. So it’s hard to see our club name, it’s not really easy to know what we’re doing.”
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