Ellen Reasonover | California | Lawyer | St. Louis

Today, the paid staff is made up of five full-time salaried employees, four part-time salaried employees, and 15 volunteers. McCloskey has also assembled a national network of forensic scientists, but money is always tight, and there is never enough time or manpower to devote to all the cases­ that come to his attention. Sometimes dispirited by the financial shortfalls despite Centurion's remarkable results, McCloskey­ says that it took a California group two years to raise $7 million to rescue Keiko the famous killer whale - more money than Centurion has received in nearly 25 years. During 2005, Centurion's operating deficit ballooned to $500,000, its largest ever. McCloskey refuses to ask lawyers and forensic experts to work pro bono, knowing it is easy for them to push unpaid cases to the back of the queue. Instead, he usually negotiates a reduced rate with committed professionals who absorb the rest of the costs.

Finding the right lawyer in a locale can be arduous. For example, in 1993 McCloskey accepted the case of Ellen Reasonover, a single mother in St. Louis convicted of murdering a service station attendant in 1983. By then, Reasonover had spent more than a decade in prison while relatives did their best to raise her daughter. Police and prosecutors never produced physical evidence linking Reasonover to the murder, never produced an eyewitness, never located the murder weapon, never charged anybody besides Reasonover despite believing she worked with two accomplices, used unreliable jailhouse-snitch testimony as the basis of their case, and made deals with the snitches that were never disclosed to the defendant.