Formation | 1992[1] |
---|---|
Founder | |
Type | Nonprofit organization |
32-0077563 [2] | |
Legal status | 501(c)(3) [2] |
Purpose | |
Headquarters | 40 Worth Street, New York, NY 10013 |
Region | United States |
Executive Director | Christina Swarns [3] |
Jack Taylor [4] | |
Affiliations | The Innocence Network |
Revenue (2020) | $21,373,256 [5] : 1 |
Expenses (2020) | $15,944,005 [5] : 1 |
Endowment | $21,620,304 (2020) [5] : 33 |
Employees (2020) | 91 [5] : 1 |
Volunteers (2020) | 22 [5] : 1 |
Website | innocenceproject |
Innocence Project, Inc. is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit legal organization that works to exonerate the wrongly convicted through DNA testing and other forms of post-conviction relief, as well as advocate for criminal justice reform to prevent future injustice. [1] [6] The group cites various studies estimating that in the United States between 1% and 10% of all prisoners are innocent. [7] [8] [9] [10] 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. [11]
As of 2021 [update] , the Innocence Project has helped to successfully overturn over 300 convictions through DNA-based exonerations. [12] [13] In 2021, Innocence Project received the biennial Milton Friedman Prize for Advancing Liberty by Cato Institute, awarded in recognition and gratitude for its work to ensure liberty and justice for all. [14] In March 2022, The Innocence Project won two Webby Awards for its Happiest Moments video, winning the Best Humanitarian & Services campaign in both the brand and non-profit categories. Happiest Moments was the organization's first-ever public service announcement that premiered in June 2021 and was produced by Hayden5. [15] [16]
The Innocence Project was established in the wake of a study by the U.S. Department of Justice and U.S. Senate, in conjunction with Yeshiva University's Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, which claimed that incorrect identification by eyewitnesses was a factor in over 70% of wrongful convictions. [17] [18] [19] The Innocence Project was founded in 1992 by Scheck and Neufeld as part of a law clinic at Cardozo. It became an independent 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization on January 28, 2003, [20] but it maintains institutional connections with Cardozo. [21] [22] Madeline deLone was the executive director from 2004 until 2020, [23] [24] succeeded by Christina Swarns on September 8, 2020. [25] [26]
The Innocence Project is the headquarters of the Innocence Network, a group of nearly 70 independent innocence organizations worldwide. [27] One such example exists in the Republic of Ireland where in 2009 a project was set up at Griffith College Dublin. [28] [29]
The Innocence Project's mission is "to free the staggering number of innocent people who remain incarcerated, and to bring reform to the system responsible for their unjust imprisonment." [1] [30]
The Innocence Project focuses exclusively on post-conviction appeals in which DNA evidence is available to be tested or retested. [31] [32] DNA testing is possible in 5–10% of criminal cases. [33] [34] Other members of the Innocence Network also help to exonerate those in whose cases DNA testing is not possible. [35]
In addition to working on behalf of those who may have been wrongfully convicted of crimes throughout the United States, those working for the Innocence Project perform research and advocacy related to the causes of wrongful convictions. [11] [36]
Some of the Innocence Project's successes have resulted in releasing people from death row. The successes of the project have fueled American opposition to the death penalty and have likely been a factor in the decision by some American states to institute moratoria on criminal executions. [37]
In District Attorney's Office v. Osborne (2009), US Supreme Court Chief Justice Roberts wrote that post-conviction challenge "poses questions to our criminal justice systems and our traditional notions of finality better left to elected officials than federal judges." In the opinion, another justice wrote that forensic science has "serious deficiencies". Roberts also said that post-conviction DNA testing risks "unnecessarily overthrowing the established system of criminal justice." Law professor Kevin Jon Heller wrote: "It might lead to a reasonably accurate one." [38]
The Innocence Project, as of June 2018, receives 55% of its funding from individual contributions, 16% from foundations, 16% from events, 8% from investments, and the remaining 5% from corporations, Yeshiva University, and other sources. [39]
The Innocence Project originated in New York City but accepts cases from other parts of the country. [40] The majority of clients helped are of low socio-economic status and have used all possible legal options for justice. Many clients hope that DNA evidence will prove their innocence, as the emergence of DNA testing allows those who have been wrongly convicted of crimes to challenge their cases. The Innocence Project also works with the local, state and federal levels of law enforcement, legislators, and other programs to prevent further wrongful convictions. [1] [41] [42] [43]
All potential clients go through an extensive screening process to determine whether or not they are likely to be innocent. If they pass the process, the Innocence Project takes up their case, resources permitting. About 2,400 prisoners write to the Innocence Project annually, and at any given time the Innocence Project is evaluating 6,000 to 8,000 potential cases. In addition to their co-directors and a managing attorney, the Innocence Project has six full-time staff attorneys and nearly 300 active cases. [44] [45]
In almost half of the cases that the Innocence Project takes on, the clients' guilt is reconfirmed by DNA testing. Of all the cases taken on by the Innocence Project so far, about 43% of clients were proven innocent, 42% were confirmed guilty, and evidence was inconclusive and not probative in 15% of cases. In about 40% of all DNA exoneration cases, law enforcement officials identified the actual perpetrator based on the same DNA test results that led to an exoneration. [46] [47]
As of January 2022 [update] , 375 people previously convicted of serious crimes in the United States had been exonerated by DNA testing since 1989, 21 of whom had been sentenced to death. [13] [48] Almost all (99%) of the wrongful convictions were males, [49] [50] with minority groups constituting approximately 70% (61% African American and 8% Latino). [13] [51] [52] The National Registry of Exonerations lists 2,939 convicted defendants who were exonerated through DNA and non-DNA evidence from January, 1989 through January, 2022 with more than 25,600 years imprisoned. [53]
According to a study published in 2014, at least 4.1% of persons overall sentenced to death from 1973 to 2004 are probably innocent. [54] The following are some examples of exonerations they helped bring about:
The Innocence Project is a founding member of the Innocence Network, a coalition of independent organizations and advocates, including law schools, journalism schools, and public defense offices that collaborate to help convicted felons prove their innocence. [82] [83] As of 2021 [update] , there were 68 organizations in the network, operating in all 50 US states and 12 other countries, and had helped exonerate 625 people. [84] [85]
In South Africa, the Wits Justice Project investigates South African incarcerations. In partnership with the Wits Law Clinic, the Julia Mashele Trust, the Legal Resources Centre (LRC), the Open Democracy Advice Centre (ODAC), the US Innocence Project, and the Justice Project investigate individual cases of prisoners wrongly convicted or awaiting trial. [86] [87]
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.
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.
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.
Kirk Noble Bloodsworth is a former Maryland waterman and the first American sentenced to death to be exonerated post-conviction by DNA testing.
The Innocent Man: Murder and Injustice in a Small Town is a 2006 true crime book by John Grisham, his only nonfiction title as of 2020. The book tells the story of Ronald 'Ron' Keith Williamson of Ada, Oklahoma, a former minor league baseball player who was wrongly convicted in 1988 of the rape and murder of Debra Sue Carter in Ada and was sentenced to death. After serving 11 years on death row, he was exonerated by DNA evidence and other material introduced by the Innocence Project and was released in 1999.
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.
Jeffrey Mark Deskovic is an American attorney from Peekskill, New York known for freeing the wrongly convicted. In 1990, at the age of 17, he was convicted of raping, beating, and strangling his Peekskill High School classmate, Angela Correa, who was 15 at the time of the murder.
This is a list of notable overturned convictions in the United States.
Earl Washington Jr. is a former Virginia death-row inmate, who was fully exonerated of murder charges against him in 2000. He had been wrongfully convicted and sentenced to death in 1984 for the 1982 rape and murder of Rebecca Lyn Williams in Culpeper, Virginia. Washington has an IQ estimated at 69, which classifies him as intellectually disabled. He was coerced into confessing to the crime when arrested on an unrelated charge a year later. He narrowly escaped being executed in 1985 and 1994.
Cornelius Dupree Jr. is an American who was declared innocent of a 1980 conviction for aggravated robbery, which was alleged to have been committed during a rape in 1979. He was paroled in July 2010 after serving 30 years of a 75-year prison sentence in Texas. Prosecutors cleared him of the crime after a test of his DNA profile did not match traces of semen evidence from the case. Dupree, who was represented by the Innocence Project, spent more time in prison in Texas than any other inmate who was eventually exonerated by DNA evidence.
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.
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.
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 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.
Nicholas James Yarris is an American writer and storyteller who spent 22 years on death row in Pennsylvania after being wrongfully convicted of rape and murder.
Michael "Mike" Semanchik is the Executive Director of The Innocence Center (TIC) and former Managing Attorney at the California Innocence Project (CIP). As part of his work with CIP, he has been involved in many cases involving the exoneration of previously convicted prisoners, working closely with the organization's director, Justin Brooks, and also preparing petitions for many of CIP's clients. After working at CIP while still a law student at California Western School of Law, following graduation in 2010 he became an investigator and then a staff attorney there.
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.
Bill Clutter is an American private investigator, wrongful conviction advocate, and author. He is the co-founder of the Illinois Innocence Project and founder of the national wrongful conviction organization Investigating Innocence. His work on the Donaldson v. Central Illinois Public Service Company case led him to write the book Coal Tar: How Corrupt Politics and Corporate Greed Are Killing America's Children, which is the story of an epidemic of neuroblastoma in Taylorville, Illinois, caused by exposure to coal tar.
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