By TaRessa Stovall

What hope is there for innocent people who are found guilty and wrongly imprisoned, sometimes sentenced to Death Row?

Today, as never before, there is new hope for freedom. Thanks to the Innocence Project, which, since 1992, has used post-conviction DNA testing to exonerate more than 241 U.S. prisoners, including 16 who had been sentenced to death.

That use of DNA technology, the Innocence Project states on their Web site, “provided irrefutable proof that wrongful convictions are not isolated or rare events but instead arise from systemic defects.

Marvin Anderson, pardoned on August 21, 2002 by Virginia Gov. Mark Warner after serving 15 years for a rape he didn't commit, was exonerated thanks to the post-conviction DNA work of The Innocence Project

“Over the last 15 years, there has been a major shift in criminal justice legislation as a result of DNA exonerations … The Innocence Project works with people from across the criminal justice system—including prosecutors, victims, law enforcement agencies and defense advocates—to enact meaningful reform.”

This independent national litigation and public policy organization was established at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University in New York City, to free the wrongfully convicted and reform the criminal justice system.

In many of the 241 exonerations to date, the Innocence Project either acted as the attorney of record, or as consultants to the defendant’s attorneys. Their full-time staff attorneys, working with Cardozo clinic students, are working, as their site states, to fulfill a “mission [that] is nothing less than to free the staggering numbers of innocent people who remain incarcerated and to bring substantial reform to the system responsible for their unjust imprisonment.”

The Innocence Project was co-founded and is co-directed by Barry C. Schneck, well-known for serving on the defense team in O.J. Simpson’s notorious murder trial and as attorney for the wrongly-accused Duke University lacrosse player, Reade Seligmann; and Peter J. Neufeld, an expert in civil rights and criminal appeals. They authored the 2000 book, Actual Innocence: Five Days to Execution, and Other Dispatches From the Wrongly Convicted, with Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times reporter Jim Dwyer. Their work has shaped the course of case work nationwide and helped lead to a vital study on forensic DNA testing by the National Academy of Sciences, as well as federal and state legislation that set the standards for the use of DNA testing.

With Neufeld and Schneck, the Innocence Project has six full-time attorneys handling more than 250 active cases. They receive an average of 250 letters each month, requesting their assistance. It can take from one year to ten to complete litigation, depending on how quickly evidence is found and secured, the length of time required to test the evidence, and whether any prosecutorial objections exist before or after the testing takes place. They accept cases on post-conviction appeal, where conclusive

Many celebrities work with the Innocence Project Artists’ Committee, a group of writers, directors, actors, visual artists and musicians who provide support and help to raise awareness about wrongful convictions. Committee members include Stephen Colbert, Nia Long, Susan Sarandon, Sarah Jessica Parker, John Grisham, Zooey Deschanel, Dave Eggers, Aidan Quinn, Joan Baez, Amy Brennerman, John Singleton, and the Blue Man Group.

The work of the Innocence Project has helped inspire the establishment of many of the over 30 other organizations doing innocence work throughout the U.S., and the Innocence Network.

While the Innocence Project serves a diverse mix of clients from many ethnic, racial and socio-economic backgrounds, most are African-American or Latino. The cost of defending their innocence has left many indigent.

Five years after he was exonerated after serving 11 years in an Illinois prison for a rape he did not commit, Lafonso Rollins has donated part of his proceeds in a $9 million settlement from a suit he filed against the City of Chicago for violating his civil rights. Rollins has used portions of his settlement money to help free the innocent and prevent wrongful convictions, through a foundation he formed, Right the Wrong Complications, whose gifts include $10,000 to the Northern Illinois University Law School’s Innocence Project, which had provided him pro bono legal services during his incarceration.

Some of the Innocence Project’s greatest challenges include the time and effort to find evidence; the issues with degraded evidence, which cannot be accurately tested; evidence that is lost or destroyed; and prosecutorial objections, which can lengthen the time of litigation.

Texas, Illinois and New York lead all states in having the most wrongful convictions overturned by DNA testing, according to “Lessons Not Learned,” a report released in June by the Innocence Project.

A current Innocence Project case involves Steven Brooks, a New Jersey man who has been requested DNA testing that he says will provide his innocence of the rape charge for which he was convicted 22 yeas ago. Prosecutors say they shouldn’t have to search for the evidence in Brooks’ case—which seems to have been lost between the prosecutor’s office and the East Orange Police Department—because eyewitness testimony linked Brooks to the crime. Eyewitness misidentification contributed to wrong convictions in  75 percent of the wrongful convictions overturned with DNA testing.

According to www.innocenceproject.org, “The Innocence Project has forged a national program of sweeping and sustained initiatives to affect legislation and policy at the local, state and national levels. The Innocence Project advocates for access to DNA testing and preservations of evidence; independent audits of crime labs and the establishment of professional standards; reform in eyewitness identification techniques; and legislation to compensate the wrongfully convicted.”

Many exonerees face challenges after being released from incarceration without anywhere to go. Some states have more services for parolees than exonerees. Most leave prison to struggle to find housing and work, and often it takes years to clear their records of the wrongful convictions.

The stories of how seven wrongly convicted men struggled to adjust to freedom are told in the documentary, “After Innocence,”

Source: www.innocenceproject.org