PRESENTATION OUTLINE
The innocence project is a national litigation and public policy organization dedicated to exonerating wrongfully convicted individuals through DNA TESTING and reforming the criminal justice system to prevent futures injustice
Required: the Innocence Project only takes cases where DNA testing can prove innocence
The innocence project was founded in 1992
The people who discovered the Innocence Project were Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld
Barry C. Scheck is an American lawyer. He received national media attention while serving on O.J. Simpson's defense team, helping to win an acquittal in the highly publicized murder case.
Born: September 19, 1949 (age 65), Queens, New York City, NY
Children: Olivia Morgan Scheck…
Scheck was born in Queens, New York. He graduated from the Horace Mann School i…
Peter Neufeld is an American lawyer and is most famous as a cofounder, with Barry Scheck, of the Innocence Project. With Scheck and Jim Dwyer he co-authored Actual Innocence; with Scheck and Taryn Simon he co-authored The Innocents.
Education: University of Wisconsin-Madison, New York University School of Law
Early in his legal career, Neufeld worked for several years with the Legal Aid Society in the Bronx. He taught trial advocacy for many years at Fordham University Law School. [1]
As of June 2014, 316 people previously convicted of serious crimes in the United States had been exonerated by DNA testing since 1989, 18 of whom had been sentenced to death.
In 2004, Darryl Hunt was exonerated after serving 19 and a half years in prison of a life sentence for the rape and murder of a newspaper copy editor, Deborah Sykes.
In 2007, after an investigation begun by The Innocence Project, James Calvin Tillman was exonerated after serving 16.5 years in prison for a rape he did not commit. His sentence was 45 years.
In 2007, Lynn DeJac's 1994 conviction was reversed on the basis of DNA evidence. She had been convicted of murdering her daughter Crystallynn Girard on February 13, 1993. She was the first woman to be exonerated of murder on the basis of DNA evidence.[12]
