ABSTRACT
Green’s hope for getting out of prison depended on finding the washcloth that the rapist had dropped after cleaning himself. For a year and a half, the sixty-one-year-old Mandell looked for it without any encouragement. When he finally found it in a storage box in the old Cuyahoga County Courthouse,6 Mandell immediately called Vanessa Potkin at the Innocence Project in New York City. She took the steps necessary to secure the evidence. The Innocence Project hired a Cleveland lawyer to file motions and stay on the effort. But it would still take two years for the Innocence Project to be granted the washcloth for testing.7
