Did Orange County put an innocent man on death row? One private investigator takes on the justice system.

• Author: Weissmueller, Zach
• Position: Private investigator C.J. Ford, Jr., client Kenneth Clair - Reason TV

C.J. Ford Jr. is a private investigator. He runs a one-man shop in a sparsely furnished office in the same Orange County, California, church where he serves as an usher during Saturday night services. By day he works on behalf of people who can't afford to pay for help--those most likely to be overwhelmed by the legal system. One such client is Kenneth Clair, who has spent more than 30 years in prison despite the dubiousness of the evidence linking him to the crime for which he was convicted.

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Ford's early career was spent tailing cheating spouses and insurance frauds, much like Jim Rockford of the 1970s TV series that Ford says sparked his interest in becoming a private eye. "I guess my business when I first started off sort of went like The Rockford Files--I'd have clients who didn't pay me," he says congenially.

All that changed in the 1990s, when Ford became involved in an investigation of the Los Angeles Police Department. Revelations of widespread corruption, which collectively became known as the "Rampart scandal," included officers who would steal drugs and money, beat detainees without provocation, and plant false evidence on suspects.

That last tactic took on personal significance when Ford was pulled over for driving a car with improperly tinted windows. The cops demanded to search his vehicle, and he realized how easy it would be for them to frame him of a crime. "This is what these guys [in the Rampart cases] were telling me: that they'd get stopped, and all of the sudden they'd go inside their trunk and they'd find all these drugs and stuff," he says. It was then that Ford changed the focus of his business to assisting those wrongfully accused or convicted. "I told myself after that day that I'm going to devote my life to looking into criminal justice [abuses], because there was something wrong."

Which brings us back to Kenneth Clair, a black man sentenced to be executed for the alleged rape and...