The Innocence Project, founded in 1992 by Peter Neufeld and Barry Scheck at Cardozo School of Law, exonerates the wrongly convicted through DNA testing and reforms the criminal justice system to prevent future injustice.
This year marks the second annual “National Wrongful Conviction Day“. This day draws awareness to the thousands that have been wrongfully convicted and the thousands that have been convicted of crimes that they haven’t committed by then later exonerated.
October 2 is Wrongful Conviction Day. Today is the second annual Wrongful Conviction Day, which was launched internationally by the Association of Defence of the Wrongfully Convicted (AIDWYC) on October 2 last year.
he Innocence Project was established in the wake of a study by the United States Department of Justice and United States Senate, in conjunction with the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, which found that incorrect identification by eyewitnesses was a factor in over 70% of wrongful convictions.[7] The original Innocence Project was founded in 1992 by Scheck and Neufeld as part of the Cardozo School of Law of Yeshiva University in New York City. It became an independent 501(c)(3) non-profit organization in 2003 but maintains institutional connections with Cardozo. As of September 5, 2018 the executive director of the Innocence Project is Madeline deLone. The Innocence Project has become widespread as countries are using scientific data to overturn wrongful convictions and in turn freeing those wrongly convicted. One such example exists in the Republic of Ireland wherein 2009 a project was set up at Griffith College, Dublin.
Innocence Project – Help us put an end to wrongful convictions!
PBS did a report on wrongful convictions today October 2nd 2018
Ricky Jackson became a free man after 39 years in prison when Judge Richard McMonagle threw out his conviction on a 1975 murder at a Cleveland grocery store based on a lie by then 12-year-old Eddie Vernon. Vernon recanted his story this week to setIn the US, state laws governing compensation for wrongfully convicted people vary significantly. While some states offer sizable packages for the exonerated, at least 20 offer nothing. And even for those that do, it may not be enough to make up for the emotional damage on those who’ve been wrongfully convicted. Hari Sreenivasan reports.
With the advent of scientific testing such as DNA matching, wrongfully convicted convicts are seeing their day in court and justice being served as over 1600 US Citizens have been exonerated of crimes that they have not committed, and just in 2018, over 51 suspects have been exonerated this year alone.
The crime itself is often horrible, from murder, to robbery to rape. But to spend years in prison from a conviction on a crime that one has not committed has to be absolutely torturous, and to add insult to injury many states offer no compensation what-so-ever for wrongful convictions.
These are my thoughts on wrongful convictions in the USA on the following youtube video.
