Innocence Project

The Innocence Project is a legal clinic at Benjamin Cardozo Law School in New York. It was founded in 1992, by lawyers Barry C. Scheck and Peter J. Neufeld, to represent prisoners who could be proved, by DNA testing, innocent of the crimes of which they were convicted and for which they were serving, or had served, time in prison. Of the first 194 prisoners exonerated by the Project, 14 had been on death row, sentenced to be executed, and the average length of time the 194 had been wrongly incarcerated was 12 years.

The U.S. news magazine Time reported in its issue dated April 23, 2007, that from its first reversal of a conviction in 1989 to its 198th in April 2007, the Innocence Project had exonerated current or former prisoners in 32 states. In 72 of those cases, the DNA evidence not only cleared the wrongly convicted person but also identified the real perpetrator. Time reported in its June 18, 2007, issue that the first 202 convicts freed by the Innocence Project had served a total of 2,496 years in prison and estimated that 45% of them had been compensated by the governments that wrongly convicted them, in amounts from $25,000 to $12.2 million.

External links

• Webpage @ innocenceproject.org