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.
Innocence Canada, is a Canadian legal non-profit organization. Based in Toronto, Innocence Canada identifies, advocates for, and helps exonerate wrongly convicted individuals. The organization is also dedicated to preventing future wrongful convictions through education and criminal justice reform. Since its founding in 1993, Innocence Canada has helped to exonerate twenty-nine individuals.
Peter J. Neufeld is an American attorney, co-founder, with Barry Scheck of the Innocence Project, and a founding partner in the civil rights law firm Neufeld Scheck & Brustin. Starting from his earliest years as an attorney representing clients at New York's Legal Aid Society, and teaching trial advocacy at Fordham School of Law from 1988 to 1991, he has focused on civil rights and the intersection of science and criminal justice.
Rob Warden is a Chicago legal affairs journalist and co-founder of three organizations dedicated to exonerating the innocent and reforming criminal justice: the Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law, the National Registry of Exonerations at the University of California-Irvine, and Injustice Watch, a non-partisan, not-for-profit, journalism organization that conducts in-depth research exposing institutional failures that obstruct justice and equality. As an investigative journalist in the 1970s, he began focusing on death penalty cases, which led to a career exposing and publicizing the injustices and misconduct in the legal system. Warden's work was instrumental in the blanket commutation of death row cases in Illinois in 2003 and in the abolition of the Illinois death penalty in 2011.
Exoneration occurs when the conviction for a crime is reversed, either through demonstration of innocence, a flaw in the conviction, or otherwise. Attempts to exonerate individuals are particularly controversial in death penalty cases, especially where new evidence is put forth after the execution has taken place. The transitive verb, "to exonerate" can also mean to informally absolve one from blame.
The Innocence Project is a television drama series created by BBC Northern Ireland and first broadcast on BBC One on 9 November 2006. The series follows the work of Professor Jon Ford, who sets up The Innocence Project, peopled entirely by a hand-picked group of law students. They take on cases pro bono that no one else will handle, or those that have been forgotten or given up on, working for clients that would otherwise have no hope, and who have possibly been wrongly convicted. The series is based on a British version of the Innocence Project, a non-profit legal clinic in the United States.
This is a list of notable overturned convictions in the United States.
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, including in the face of a plausible chance at release.
The National Registry of Exonerations is a project of the University of Michigan Law School, Michigan State University College of Law and the University of California Irvine Newkirk Center for Science and Society. The Registry was co-founded in 2012 with the Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern University School of Law to provide detailed information about known exonerations in the United States since 1989. As of February 6, 2020, the Registry has 2,551 known exonerations in the United States since 1989. The National Registry does not include more than 1,800 defendants cleared in 15 large-scale police scandals that came to light between 1989 and March 7, 2017, in which officers systematically framed innocent defendants.
James Earl Coleman Jr. is an American attorney. He currently serves as the John S. Bradway Professor of Law and Director of the Center for Criminal Justice and Professional Responsibility at the Duke University School of Law. He was the primary member of the last defense team of serial killer Ted Bundy.
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 was 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.
The Nebraska Innocence Project was a member organization Nebraska-based chapter of a U.S non-profit organization called the Innocence Project, located in Omaha, Nebraska. In 2019, the Nebraska Innocence Project folded into the Midwest Innocence Project. The Midwest Innocence Project's mission is to educate about, advocate for, and obtain and support the exoneration and release of wrongfully convicted people in Nebraska, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, and Arkansas. The Nebraska chapter was founded in 2005 by a group of volunteers who were inspired by the work of Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld, founders of the Innocence Project in 1992. The Midwest Innocence Project (MIP) was founded in 2001 through the UMKC School of Law and is also part of the national Innocence Network.
The Center on Wrongful Convictions youth clinic, part of the Center on Wrongful Convictions within Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law's Bluhm Legal Clinic, is a non-profit legal clinic that represents children thought to have been convicted of crimes they did not commit. Co-founded by Northwestern Law Professor Steven Drizin and directed by Professor Laura Nirider, it was the first organization in the world to focus exclusively on wrongfully convicted children. Through its research, scholarship, teaching, and advocacy, the Center has developed expertise in the problem of false confessions, police interrogation practices, and constitutional doctrine governing the interrogation room.
Steven A. Drizin is an American lawyer and academic. He is a Clinical Professor of Law at the Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law in Chicago, where he has been on the faculty since 1991. At Northwestern, Drizin teaches courses on Wrongful Convictions and Juvenile Justice. He has written extensively on the topics of police interrogations and false confessions. Among the general public, Drizin is known for his ongoing representation of Brendan Dassey, one of the protagonists in the Netflix documentary series, Making a Murderer.
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.
Lara Bazelon is an American academic and journalist. She is a law professor at the University of San Francisco School of Law where she holds the Barnett Chair in Trial Advocacy and directs the Criminal & Juvenile and Racial Justice Clinics. She is the former director of the Loyola Law School Project for the Innocent in Los Angeles. Her clinical work as a law professor focuses on the exoneration of the wrongfully convicted.
