Innocence Project, Inc. is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit legal organization that is committed to exonerating individuals who have been wrongly convicted, through the use of DNA testing and working to reform the criminal justice system to prevent future injustice. The group cites various studies estimating that in the United States between 1% and 10% of all prisoners are innocent. The Innocence Project was founded in 1992 by Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld who gained national attention in the mid-1990s as part of the "Dream Team" of lawyers who formed part of the defense in the O. J. Simpson murder case.
A miscarriage of justice occurs when an unfair outcome occurs in a criminal or civil proceeding, such as the conviction and punishment of a person for a crime they did not commit. Miscarriages are also known as wrongful convictions. Innocent people have sometimes ended up in prison for years before their conviction has eventually been overturned. They may be exonerated if new evidence comes to light or it is determined that the police or prosecutor committed some kind of misconduct at the original trial. In some jurisdictions this leads to the payment of compensation.
Alice Sebold is an American author. She is known for her novels The Lovely Bones and The Almost Moon, and a memoir, Lucky. The Lovely Bones was on The New York Times Best Seller list and was adapted into a film by the same name in 2009.
Lucky is a 1999 memoir by the American novelist Alice Sebold, best known as the author of the 2002 novel The Lovely Bones.Lucky describes her experience of being raped and beaten when she was eighteen in a tunnel near Syracuse University where she was a student, and how this traumatic experience shaped the rest of her life. Sebold has stated that her reason for writing the book was to bring more awareness to rape and rape survivors. The memoir sold over one million copies.
Mistaken identity is a defense in criminal law which claims the actual innocence of the criminal defendant, and attempts to undermine evidence of guilt by asserting that any eyewitness to the crime incorrectly thought that they saw the defendant, when in fact the person seen by the witness was someone else. The defendant may question both the memory of the witness, and the perception of the witness.
Darryl Hunt was an African-American man from Winston-Salem, North Carolina, who, in 1984, was wrongfully convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment for the rape and the murder of Deborah Sykes, a young white newspaper copy editor. After being convicted in that case, Hunt was tried in 1987 for the 1983 murder of Arthur Wilson, a 57-year-old black man of Winston-Salem. Both convictions were overturned on appeal in 1989. Hunt was tried again in the Wilson case in 1990; he was acquitted by an all-white jury. He was tried again on the Sykes charges in 1991; he was convicted.
Wrongful execution is a miscarriage of justice occurring when an innocent person is put to death by capital punishment. Cases of wrongful execution are cited as an argument by opponents of capital punishment, while proponents say that the argument of innocence concerns the credibility of the justice system as a whole and does not solely undermine the use of the death penalty.
Richard Alexander is an Indiana man who was wrongfully convicted of rape and later exonerated by DNA evidence. Years later, on September 17, 2020, Alexander was charged with the murder of Catherine Minix, who was found stabbed to death. Minix had previously filed a protective order against Alexander for domestic violence.
This is a list of notable overturned convictions in the United States.
Clarence Arnold Elkins Sr. is an American man who was wrongfully convicted of the 1998 rape and murder of his mother-in-law, Judith Johnson, and the rape and assault of his wife's niece, Brooke Sutton. He was convicted solely on the basis of the testimony of his wife's six-year-old niece who testified that Elkins was the perpetrator.
This is a list of notable overturned convictions in Canada.
The innocent prisoner's dilemma, or parole deal, is a detrimental effect of a legal system in which admission of guilt can result in reduced sentences or early parole. When an innocent person is wrongly convicted of a crime, legal systems which need the individual to admit guilt — as, for example, a prerequisite step leading to parole — punish an innocent person for their integrity, and reward a person lacking in integrity. There have been cases where innocent prisoners were given the choice between freedom, in exchange for claiming guilt, and remaining imprisoned and telling the truth. Individuals have died in prison rather than admit to crimes that they did not commit.
Thomas Haynesworth is a resident of Richmond, Virginia, who served 27 years in state prison as a result of four wrongful convictions for crimes for which he was exonerated in 2011.
The Illinois Innocence Project, a member of the national Innocence Project network, is a non-profit legal organization that works to exonerate wrongfully convicted people and reform the criminal justice system to prevent future injustice.
The California Innocence Project is a non-profit based at California Western School of Law in San Diego, California, United States, which provides pro bono legal services to individuals who maintain their factual innocence of crime(s) for which they have been convicted. It is an independent chapter of the Innocence Project. Its mission is to exonerate wrongly convicted inmates through the use of DNA and other evidences.
Louis N. Scarcella is a retired detective from the New York City Police Department (NYPD) who earned frequent commendations during the "crack epidemic" of the 1980s and 1990s, before many convictions resulting from his investigations were overturned during his retirement. As a member of the Brooklyn North Homicide Squad, he and his longtime partner Stephen Chmil built a reputation for obtaining convictions in difficult cases. Since 2013, Scarcella has received extensive and sustained publicity for multiple allegations of investigative misconduct that resulted in false testimony against crime suspects, leading to innocent parties serving long prison terms and guilty individuals going free.
Alissa Leanne Bjerkhoel is an American litigation coordinator at the California Innocence Project (CIP), a law school clinic that investigates cases of factual innocence while training law students. Bjerkhoel was born in Truckee, California, and later graduated from California Western School of Law (CWSL) after previously obtaining a B.A. degree She has been an attorney with CIP since 2008. Bjerkhoel has served as counsel for CIP on numerous criminal cases, and achieved the legal exoneration of a number of convicted prisoners. Bjerkhoel serves as CIP's in-house DNA expert and also serves as a panel attorney with the nonprofit law firms Appellate Defenders, Inc. (ADI) and Sixth District Appellate Program (SDAP). She is a member of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences. Bjerkhoel has won a number of awards.
Robert Lee Stinson is an innocent Wisconsin man who was charged with the rape and murder of a 63-year-old woman, Ione Cychosz. Cychosz’ body was discovered in a vacant lot close to Stinson's backyard. Bite marks that were left on the body were analyzed by Lowell T. Johnson, a forensic dentist, who advised that the bites were left by someone missing their front tooth. Due to Richard Lee Stinson's proximity and Johnson's testimony, which was later analyzed by Raymond Rawson, he was sentenced to life in prison.
Blind Injustice is a nonfiction book by lawyer Mark Godsey. Godsey is the co-founder of the Ohio Innocence Project (OIP), which seeks to exonerate and overturn the convictions of people who have been wrongfully convicted. Drawing on Godsey's experience as a prosecutor for the Southern District of New York prior to his work at OIP, the book examines how the culture of the justice system is complicit in wrongful convictions. It was published in 2017 by the University of California Press.
