Barry Scheck Guilty Of Buying Sag Harbor Home

For residents of Sag Harbor plagued by guilt feelings or who have been feeling unfairly persecuted lately, relief is on the way. A new neighbor, having purchased a property on Widgeon Lane on the edge of the village, is Barry Scheck, the attorney who is the director of the Innocence Project.

The 2,000-square-foot saltbox on just more than a half-acre, which went for $1.15 million, is guilty of having 3 bedrooms, 2 baths, a living room with both a fireplace and a pot belly stove, a family room with a high-beamed ceiling, an office, and an eat-in kitchen. The grounds have been sentenced to include an in-ground pool, brick patio, outdoor shower, and a two-car garage.

Mr. Scheck is a native of Queens who grew up on Long Island, in Port Washington. He graduated with degrees from Yale University and the University at Berkeley School of Law. He first attained prominence as an attorney when he represented Hedda Nussbaum in 1987 in the notorious Joel Steinberg case arising from the death of his daughter, Lisa. Eight years later, Mr. Scheck was a member of the team that won an acquittal for O.J. Simpson. While there have been other high-profile cases, he has mostly been known the past two decades for the Innocence Project.

Mr. Scheck founded it with Peter Neufeld in 1992. The two attorneys grasped the potential of DNA evidence to exonerate as well as convict. In the 24 years of the project’s existence, almost 350 wrongful convictions have been overturned because of the results of DNA testing. Participants in the Innocence Project have stressed that convictions have not been tossed based on legal technicalities but, as the name indicates, only when scientific evidence proves a person is innocent.

Presumably, Mr. Scheck will do some commuting between his new Sag Harbor digs and his day job, which is as a professor at Yeshiva University’s Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in Manhattan, where the Innocence Project was begun. By the way, sharp-eyed viewers may have caught Mr. Scheck appearing in episodes in the second and fifth seasons of “The Good Wife” on CBS, and he was portrayed by Peter Gallagher in the 2010 feature film “Conviction,” which also starred Hilary Swank, Minnie Driver, and Melissa Leo, who hails from East Hampton.