Troy Davis, convicted in the 1989 slaying of Savannah, Ga., police officer Mark MacPhail. AFP/Getty Images.

Lara Takenaga said the best day of her investigation was when the star witness admitted to doing heroin before witnessing the crime. Takenaga and a classmate met the woman on a Chicago street and took her to the White Castle where they often held their interviews.

“I think we had built her trust over multiple interviews we had done before,” she said.

Takenaga, who now works as managing editor for youswoop.com, was part of a group of students who investigated alleged wrongful convictions as part of the investigative journalism class at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism.

While Troy Davis’ execution Wednesday has led many to question the justice system, undergraduate students like Takenaga have been working for years to investigate wrongful convictions through participation in collegiate innocence projects.

The Medill Innocence Project in which Takenaga participated is one of the few where undergraduate students serve as investigators. While most projects are based in law schools and use graduate and law students, Medill’s is run solely by undergraduates with the help of a private investigator.

“We have incredible undergraduate students,’ said director Alec Klein. “They are capable of unbelievable journalism.”

The Medill Innocence Project was founded in 1999. Since then student investigations have led to the exoneration of 12 inmates, including five who were on death row, Klein said. Even so, the goal of the program is not to exonerate inmates or even to advocate.

“We are looking for the truth whatever that truth is,” Klein said. “The goal is not to prove someone is innocent.”

Darlene Natale, graduate assistant at Point Park University’s Innocence Institute echoed Klein’s sentiment.

“It’s not our role to adjudicate matters,” she said. “But it is our role to present facts.”

The Innocence Institute is affiliated to the university’s Department of Journalism and Mass Communication. Participating students are either enrolled in a course taught by Director Bill Moushey or doing work study. They work under two graduate assistants, reading letters received from inmates, evaluating them and creating a priority list of cases to look into.

“He teaches classes in a unique way. You’re not sitting in a class taking notes. You are actually doing journalism,” she said.

Natale said the Innocence Institute has been involved in 17 cases that have either been reopened or reversed since 2001.

In the United States history, there have been 273 post-conviction DNA exonerations, according to the Innocence Project in New York City. Seventy percent of those exonerated by DNA testing belong to minority groups.

Centurion Ministries, founded in 1983 by Jim McCloskey, is one of the first innocence projects in the United States. Yet the Innocence Project in New York City is the more well-known pioneer. Featured in the movie “Conviction,” it was founded by Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld in 1992. It has since participated in about 250 exonerations, all of which made use of DNA testing.

It is also a member of the Innocence Network, an affiliation of 63 organizations that offer pro bono legal and investigative services to individuals seeking to prove their innocence worldwide. In 2010, these organizations helped exonerate 29 people who served a combined 426 years in jail.

At Brandeis University, the Justice Brandeis Innocence Project at The Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism hires students to do the investigative work. Students can apply beginning their sophomore year and are paid above minimum wage to work as research assistants.

“We use undergraduate students because Brandeis was founded with social justice as a pillar in education,” said Assistant Director Lindsay Markel. “Our undergrads really have that sensibility of wanting to be involved in public interest work.”

Eight students are currently working on two cases that were originally evaluated by the New England Innocence Project and passed on to Brandeis due to lack of DNA.

“Reading through entire trial transcripts and pages upon pages of criminal records can be very tedious,” said Joanna Nix, one of the student researchers. “But when you do have that ‘Aha!’ moment, it is so satisfying.”

Yet not all undergraduate innocence projects are journalism-based.

At Northern Arizona University, 24 undergraduate and graduate students from the Department of Criminology are currently working on 27 cases. In total, the Northern Arizona Justice Project has investigated well over 400 cases and had no exonerations to date. Executive Director Robert Schehr said students do work similar to that of a lawyer.

“It takes a special kind of student willing to take on that pressure,” he said.

Medill’s Monica Kim is that kind of student.

“Oh my gosh, I have no idea, so many hours,” Kim said when asked how many hours a week she put into the investigation. “It was like a full time job.”

Kim, who now works as an assistant editor at Conde Nast’s Traveler, said her friends teased her because the investigative journalism class was the only one she took that quarter.

At the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, where there isn’t an undergraduate innocence project, four undergraduates are looking to get just as involved.

Advocates for Innocence for the Wrongly Convicted became a student organization last spring. President and Founder Emily Patoray said one of the organization’s goals is to try to get the North Carolina crime lab to operate as an independent entity.

Meanwhile wrongful convictions continue to make the news. On Thursday two North Carolina inmates who spent 10 years in jail for murder charges were set free after a panel of judges ruled they were innocent.

As for the Troy Davis case, these student researchers said they were upset by his execution.

“I think it was a travesty I don’t think he should have ever been executed,” Patoray said. “I definitely think that there is a chance that the state of Georgia executed an innocent man.”

Kim agreed.

“I was appalled, I was horrified because I found a lot of similarities between this case and the one I worked on,” Kim said. “There is a very good example of how the judicial system can fail, and does fail regularly.”

You might also be interested in:

1. Watch what you tweet: Weiner scandal is a social media wake-up call
2. 7 classes you would wake up at 8 a.m. for
3. In the wake of a campus tragedy, is it good to be naive?
4. Washington State University hit with fine after 2007 rape case