New England Innocence Project

[Kat Kanning]

I found this through lewrockwell.

http://www.newenglandinnocence.org/site/content/contact.php

It's a bunch of stinkin lawyers, but I like the idea of helping people who are unjustly imprisoned, so I asked if they needed volunteers for anything.

The New England Innocence Project ("NEIP") provides pro bono legal assistance to inmates who are challenging their wrongful convictions. The organization's mission is to identify, investigate and exonerate wrongfully convicted individuals who are currently incarcerated in New England. NEIP currently focuses on the use of DNA evidence to achieve these goals. Over the past ten years, more than 150 individuals in the United States have had their convictions vacated after DNA testing established that they were innocent of the crimes for which they had been convicted and imprisoned. NEIP considers cases from Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Maine, Vermont, Connecticut and Rhode Island in which actual innocence is claimed.

In addition to its work on behalf of individual inmates, the NEIP also supports legal reform that will hasten the identification and release of innocent prisoners and ensure that wrongful convictions are, to the extent possible, prevented in the future. For instance, with corrective legislation and improved training for law enforcement, some of the most frequent causes of wrongful convictions, such as eyewitness misidentification, can be decreased.

[Michael Fisher]

Great idea!

[David]

There are several 'innocence projects' in the US.  There was even a short lived tv series called 'Injustice' about a fictional innocence project.  I believe several convicted death row inmates have been exonerated due to the good work of the groups.     Some of the states that put moratoriums on the death row, did so because of these groups. 

[David]

From  link from str and the times online:
A convicted murderer proved his innocence by investigating his own case from behind bars at a maximum-security prison and identifying the real killer. Roy Brown appeared before a judge last night to ask for a pardon after 16 years in jail for a crime he had proved conclusively that he did not commit.

Brown had always protested his innocence, denying that he stabbed and strangled a female social worker to death at a farmhouse in upstate New York in 1991, and he managed to investigate and solve the crime from his prison cell. Five days after he wrote a letter to the local fireman he had identified as the real murderer, the man killed himself by lying in front of an oncoming train.

?Witnesses can commit perjury, judges can be fooled and juries can make mistakes,? wrote Brown. ?When it comes to DNA testing, there?s no mistakes. DNA is God?s creation and God makes no mistakes.?