Donations spotlight: Support the Innocence Project in its work to free wrongfully convicted people

Note from the CREDO Mobile team: This December, the Innocence Project is among three amazing groups that will receive a share of our monthly grant. Funding from the CREDO Mobile community will be vital to the nonprofit as it campaigns to free the innocent, prevent wrongful convictions and create fair, compassionate and equitable systems of justice for everyone.

 Read this important blog post from the Innocence Project, then visit CREDODonations.com and cast your vote to help send much-needed grant money to the group to assist its efforts—and the efforts of our other outstanding December grantees.

Election cycles cause many of us to reflect on the meaning and promise of democracy. Issues like voting rights, election integrity and the freedom of the press are high in the public consciousness. Reform of the legal system should be too.

The Innocence Project (IP) advocates for more fair, equitable and compassionate systems of justice that are accessible to everyone. In doing this work, we uphold fundamental democratic values. Since our founding in 1992, we’ve used DNA and other scientific advancements to help free or exonerate more than 250 people who, collectively, spent almost 4,000 years behind bars. Our efforts have also led to the passage of more than 250 transformative state laws and federal reforms.

Last year, IP won seven exonerations in New York, Oklahoma, Texas and Virginia. Collectively, these seven clients spent 182 years in jail after being wrongfully convicted. In several cases, we partnered with elected prosecutors from across the political spectrum to secure our clients’ freedom. With our Innocence Network colleagues, we passed more than 15 critical reforms in state legislatures to prevent wrongful convictions and ensure the system operates more fairly and effectively.

In 2025, we’ll expand our efforts to pass new laws to reveal, prevent and rectify wrongful convictions. Our initiatives include improving access to post-conviction courts, strengthening police and prosecutorial accountability to prevent wrongful convictions, compensating wrongfully convicted people, as well as a range of other efforts, such as reforming practices that enable eyewitness misidentifications, unreliable informant testimony, coerced guilty pleas and false confessions.

The following list highlights a few of our priorities for the coming year.

Eyewitness misidentification

Eyewitnesses are often expected to identify perpetrators of crimes based on memory, which is incredibly malleable. Common law-enforcement practices, including the administration of lineups and photo arrays, can also contribute to misidentification. Eyewitness misidentification played a role in 63% of our exonerated clients’ wrongful convictions.

To improve the reliability of eyewitness identification, we advocate for reforms in state legislatures and courts that include the following provisions:

• Double-blind or blinded administration: A “double-blind” lineup is one in which neither the administrator nor the eyewitness knows the identity of the suspect at a given time. This prevents the administrator from providing inadvertent or intentional cues to influence the eyewitness to pick the suspect.
• Instructions: Lineup administrators can instruct eyewitnesses to deter them from feeling compelled to identify a suspect. One recommended instruction includes the directive that the suspect may or may not be present in the lineup.
• Composing the lineup: Non-suspect photographs and/or live lineup members (fillers) should be selected based on their resemblance to the description provided by the eyewitness—as opposed to their resemblance to the police suspect. In addition, the suspect should not noticeably stand out from the other fillers.

 Use of police deception in juvenile interrogations

Young people are especially vulnerable to making false confessions because the parts of the brain responsible for future planning, judgment and decision-making are not fully developed until we reach our mid-20s. Of the 268 exonerees who were wrongly convicted as children, 34% falsely confessed, whereas just 10% of exonerees who were wrongly convicted after the age of 18 falsely confessed, according to the National Registry of Exonerations. Coercive and deceptive interrogation methods, coupled with the recognized vulnerabilities and susceptibilities of children as a group, have led to an unacceptably high rate of false confessions among juvenile suspects.

IP works to pass legislation and administrative reforms that ban the use of police deception in the interrogation of juveniles, allow false-confession experts to testify in court and convince judges to hold pretrial reliability hearings before a confession is admitted. We also advocate for state legislatures to pass laws that make a child’s statements inadmissible in court if police used deception during the interrogation. By supporting these efforts, we aim to ensure fairer outcomes for adolescents and reduce the risk of wrongful convictions among one of the most vulnerable groups in the criminal legal system.

Coerced pleas—or the trial penalty

Coercive plea deals often pressure innocent people to plead guilty to crimes they didn’t commit. More than 95% of felony convictions in the U.S. are obtained through this method and an estimated 11% of exonerations are innocent individuals who were pressured to plead guilty.

 Often prosecutors use the threat of the “trial penalty”: a sentence that will be more severe if an individual refuses a plea deal and insists on a trial instead. Even innocent people may be coerced into accepting a plea deal. The goal is to discourage innocent people from exercising their constitutional right to a trial and encourage them to admit to a crime they did not commit, while waiving fundamental rights critical to a fair criminal legal process.

As a member of the End the Trial Penalty Coalition, IP is working to enact policies that reduce the disparity between plea-deal sentences and potential trial sentences and restore fundamental rights, including the right to a jury trial.

Police and prosecutorial accountability

Police and prosecutorial misconduct has contributed to many exoneration cases since 1989. We advocate for policy reforms to address the issue, focusing on implementing state-level oversight measures that encourage transparency and accountability without impeding the work of conscientious law enforcement professionals.

Police misconduct has disproportionately contributed to the wrongful conviction of people of color, many of whom live in communities that are more heavily policed. In some cases, police officers have abused their authority and violated people’s constitutional rights by using coercive interrogation techniques, lying on the stand, failing to turn over exculpatory evidence, working with unreliable informants, displaying outright prejudice and more. Prosecutorial misconduct occurs when a prosecutor seriously violates the law or a code of ethics while prosecuting a case. This includes making improper arguments at trial, purposely withholding evidence of innocence or other favorable evidence in what is known as a Brady violation.

For these reasons, addressing police and prosecutorial accountability is essential to preventing wrongful convictions. IP advances reform efforts, including strengthening discovery rules, ending qualified immunity, and creating public databases and rigorous certification and decertification systems to prevent official misconduct.

At the forefront of criminal justice reform

For 32 years, we’ve worked to free the innocent, prevent wrongful convictions and create fair, compassionate and equitable systems of justice for everyone. Our work has been and will always be guided by science and grounded in anti-racism. As we look to the future, we’ll continue to collaborate with a broad range of actors at the community, local, state and federal levels, as well as in the public and private sectors, to drive the transformational reforms we seek.

For more information on the Innocence Project’s local and state advocacy efforts, visit InnocenceProject.org or contact our team to learn how to support our initiatives in your community.