Innocence Project
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The Innocence Project is a non-profit legal clinic based at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law of Yeshiva University. It directly serves only defendants who can conclusively be proven innocent by genetic fingerprinting of evidence done after their convictions.
The clinic was founded in 1992 by Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld. In addition to services to individual defendants, it performs research and advocacy related to the incidence and causes of wrongful convictions.
As of August 2004, it claims to have exonerated 146 defendants previously convicted of a serious crime in the United States. Almost all of these convictions involved some form of sexual assault and approximately 25% involved murder.
Wrongful Convictions
The Innocence Project was established in the wake of a landmark study by the United States Department of Justice and the United States Senate, in conjunction with Columbia Law School. [1] (http://www2.law.columbia.edu/instructionalservices/liebman/index.html) Among the study's estimates are a 5% failure rate in the U.S. justice system, which suggests as many as 100,000 falsely convicted prisoners. [2] (http://www.acs.ohio-state.edu/units/research/archive/ronhuff.htm) Other reports place the estimate as high as 10%. [3] (http://www.wcl.american.edu/innocenceproject/fact.htm)
See also
External links
- The Innocence Project Home (http://www.innocenceproject.org/)
- Copy of the aforementioned study (http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/nij/pubs-sum/161258.htm)
- The study in text file format (http://www.ncjrs.org/txtfiles/dnaevid.txt)