Week 3: So, What's an Innocence Project?

It's week three already! This week, I thought it'd be nice to give more of an explanation of what an Innocence Project looks like and what the Innocence Movement is. The MOOC also explores that subject this week, so I'll be referencing the course throughout.

Essentially, Innocence Projects are pro-bono student-staffed legal clinics that operate throughout the U.S. and the world to overturn wrongful convictions and thus right the wrongs done by the criminal justice system. The original Innocence Project is headquartered at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University and was created by Barry C. Scheck and Peter J. Neufeld in 1992. Since then, similar clinics have formed across the country and the globe; these clinics together make up the Innocence Network, which was officially established in 2005 and now has 65 members. Many of these Projects function in different ways, with different organizational structures and criteria for accepting cases. The Arizona Innocence Project is unique because it is headquartered at Northern Arizona University, which doesn't have a law school. At most other clinics, law students conduct case research, but at AIP a select group of undergraduate students perform case research. AIP investigates both DNA and non-DNA cases with claims of actual innocence. 

The Innocence Project over time has also grown to become a policy advocacy organization, advocating to reform the criminal justice system to prevent wrongful convictions. 

Resources provided by Innocence Projects include: experts, investigators, legal representation, money required to conduct DNA testing, etc. 

Many independent attorneys work with Innocence Projects to litigate cases. 

In 2004, Congress passed the Justice for All Act. Title IV of this Act is an Innocence Protection Act, which provides some federal grants for innocence work through the National Institute of Justice. These grants, even in combination with state grants and community donations, are not long term sources of funding nor are they sufficient. This means that many Projects are forced to spend vast amounts of time scrambling for funding rather than performing innocence work.

Every time someone is exonerated, it saves the government $40,000-60,000 a year in housing costs. 

Innocence Projects give students hands-on experience with case investigation and allow them to gain a greater understanding of the ins-and-outs of the criminal justice system. 

The cases litigated by Projects highlight flaws within the criminal justice system and can provide powerful platforms for systematic reform. 

It should be clear that the work performed by Innocence Projects is absolutely critical and life-saving. A recent study published by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences estimates that one in twenty-five death row convicts were convicted wrongfully:
"The rate of erroneous conviction of innocent criminal defendants is often described as not merely unknown but unknowable. There is no systematic method to determine the accuracy of a criminal conviction; if there were, these errors would not occur in the first place. As a result, very few false convictions are ever discovered, and those that are discovered are not representative of the group as a whole. In the United States, however, a high proportion of false convictions that do come to light and produce exonerations are concentrated among the tiny minority of cases in which defendants are sentenced to death. This makes it possible to use data on death row exonerations to estimate the overall rate of false conviction among death sentences. The high rate of exoneration among death-sentenced defendants appears to be driven by the threat of execution, but most death-sentenced defendants are removed from death row and resentenced to life imprisonment, after which the likelihood of exoneration drops sharply. We use survival analysis to model this effect, and estimate that if all death-sentenced defendants remained under sentence of death indefinitely, at least 4.1% would be exonerated. We conclude that this is a conservative estimate of the proportion of false conviction among death sentences in the United States." 

I hope that gives more information about what Innocence Projects are, what they do, and why they're so important. Look for another post soon!