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The Innocence Project is committed to freeing the staggering number of innocent people who remain incarcerated, and to bring reform to the system responsible for their unjust imprisonment. Founded in 1992 by Peter Neufeld and Barry Scheck, it exonerates the wrongly convicted and reforms the criminal legal system to prevent future injustice.

To date, 367 people in the United States have been exonerated by DNA testing, including 21 who served time on death row. The Innocence Project has provided direct representation or critical assistance in the majority of these cases. Using policy reform and strategic litigation, the organization works through the courts, academia, and legal and legislative systems to address and eliminate the leading causes of wrongful conviction, such as flawed forensics, false confessions, eyewitness misidentification, unreliable jailhouse informant testimony, government misconduct, inadequate defense, and implicit and explicit bias throughout the criminal legal system. The Innocence Project also advocates for laws that compensate innocent people for the harm experienced by wrongful conviction and incarceration and works to meet the varied and individualized needs of each of our clients upon their release.

The Innocence Project is the headquarters of the Innocence Network, a group of 68 independent organizations dedicated to providing pro bono legal and investigative services to individuals seeking to prove innocence of crimes for which they have been convicted and working to redress the causes of wrongful convictions. Currently, the Innocence Network consists of 56 U.S. based and 12 non-U.S. based organizations.