Molly Cooke is the latest attorney to join MIP as a yearlong fellow, thanks to a long-standing partnership with Bryan Cave Leighton Paisner. 

Over the course of a year (Oct. 2025 to Oct. 2026), Molly will split her hours between her work at BCLP and work on MIP cases.

And while Molly is no stranger to MIP (she interned here in 2024), her journey to innocence work actually started years ago—during a family road trip in middle school.  

An early intro to wrongful conviction issues

When Molly was 13, her dad turned on the recently released Serial podcast in the car on the way to vacation. After one episode, Molly made them binge the entire series. That first season told the story of Adnan Syed, who was convicted of murder in 2000 in Baltimore after being arrested at 17. Syed always maintained his innocence, and was freed from prison in early 2025. 

After hearing Syed’s story, even at such a young age, Molly was inspired to learn more. She dug into more spinoff podcasts about his specific case, and also picked up several books that other wrongfully incarcerated people had written.

The more that Molly learned, the more she realized Syed’s case was not just a blip on the radar. Wrongful conviction was a trend in the U.S. legal system. 

“When I first heard his story, I didn’t realize the issue was so systemic,” Molly said. “I thought, ‘Wow, the fact that this could happen is so crazy. What are the chances?’ Then you dig a little deeper and you realize this is happening every single day. It’s not a one-in-a-million case.” 

Molly still had to finish high school. But by the time she got to undergrad at the University of Kentucky, she knew she wanted to pursue law — and wanted to help out with innocence work wherever she could find the opportunity.

During undergrad, she finished a senior thesis about plea bargaining and the conditions in which someone might admit guilt, even if they were innocent. Then in law school at Washington University in St. Louis, Molly took an MIP internship during her second-year summer. That was her first chance to be hands-on with innocence cases. 

She traveled to Kansas City to conduct investigation work and also got to participate in a full internal case screen. Each year, MIP receives many applications for assistance. The case screening process evaluates a person’s innocence claims, the post-conviction laws that exist in that specific state, and the potential route to exoneration that exists. It is critical to moving cases through MIP’s process.

“I think a lot of cases in the media talk about situations where there’s a smoking gun or one singular thing that’s glaringly obvious, and that’s all there is to it,” Molly said. “But coming into these cases and seeing the immense amount of stuff that points to their innocence is crazy. It’s never just one thing.”

During her last year of law-school, Molly also participated in the Wrongful Conviction Clinic at Washington University. She was able to continue working on an MIP case she’d been involved with as an intern the previous summer. 

Now, she’s come even more full-circle: thanks to her position as a BCLP fellow this year, Molly is now an attorney on that same case.

“The amount of responsibility we can take on as fellows with these cases, because there are so few resources and it’s all-hands-on-deck, is really amazing,” Molly said. “This fellowship is such a unique opportunity to get to be a professional litigator and represent clients in all ways, shapes, and forms. Not a lot of attorneys get such a varied education as this early in their careers, and I’m just excited to soak up as much experience as I can during this year.”

Long-term partnership helps expand MIP’s resources — and ability to take on cases

The MIP-Bryan Cave Fellowship started back in 2021, and five  attorneys have completed the program. The fellowship provides a special chance for young attorneys to gain experience within a firm at the beginning of their career — while also doing important pro bono work and working hands-on with criminal cases. 

“The BCLP Fellowship has been absolutely invaluable to MIP,” said MIP Legal Director Rachel Wester. “We have limited resources and a small staff, and we’ve been blessed to have such fantastic fellows come through the program since the beginning. Fellowship attorneys allow us to expand our docket and to ensure we are giving clients the attention and representation they deserve. Molly is the latest in an incredible group of attorneys we’ve been able to work with, and we are thrilled to have her back at MIP.”

As Molly continues digging even deeper into an area of the law that first sparked her interest at 13 years old, she hopes others in the legal field will recognize wrongful conviction for the massive problem it is. When everyone in the ecosystem — prosecutors, public defenders, post-conviction attorneys, legislators — can work together proactively, she hopes wrongful convictions can be prevented before they even happen. 

Until then, she’ll use the opportunity with BCLP to keep doing whatever on-the-ground work she can to help those who have already been impacted. 

“I wish people understood how systemic wrongful conviction is,” Molly said. “I think if people understood how widespread of a problem this was, there would be way more resources devoted to it, way less pushback, and hopefully some actual changes to proactively stop people from being wrongfully convicted in the first place.”