Justice Brandeis Innocence Project
Institute Associate Director Pamela Cytrynbaum with Innocence Project student researchers Alex Perloe, Kyle Turner, Rebecca Gedalius, Micheline Frias, Carol Ortenberg, and David Pepose.
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The Justice Brandeis Innocence Project addresses an ethical crisis in the United States: the incarceration of thousands of innocent people. Most are poor and nonwhite; class and race make them more vulnerable to arrest and conviction and least able to afford effective legal representation.
We use investigative reporting techniques to probe cases in which inmates may have been wrongfully convicted, in large part because of race and class—and which have no DNA evidence to test. Most innocence projects pursue cases with DNA—but experts say that more than 80 percent of wrongful convictions have no available DNA evidence.
A 2004 University of Michigan study found that between 1989 and 2004, 328 inmates have been exonerated. The author concludes there are likely thousands of innocent inmates in prison today. A 1996 National Institute of Justice Report indicated that 10 percent of America's two million prisoners may have been wrongly convicted. Innocence projects around the country, primarily based at law schools, can collectively examine relatively few cases, primarily those with testable DNA. The Justice Brandeis Innocence Project, only the third journalism-based project in the U.S., will increase the number of cases being examined. Journalism projects like ours use “gumshoe” investigative techniques to pursue non-DNA cases.
The law-based New England Innocence Project refers vetted non-DNA cases of likely innocence—in which lawyers have already reviewed the record and concluded that these people might be innocent. We investigate those cases.
Justice Brandeis Innocence Project
student researchers Rebecca Gedalius
and David Pepose analyze court documents as part of their investigation
of the case of a Massachusetts man serving life in prison for a murder
he says he did not commit.
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The Institute is investigating the case of a Massachusetts man serving life in prison for a homicide he says he did not commit. The case was referred to the Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism by the New England Innocence Project.
The work of the Institute's journalists and students will shine a greatly needed spotlight on the increasing inequities between the powerful and the powerless, finding and exposing wrongdoing where it exists in the legal and court systems.
Institute Founding Director Florence Graves
and Brandeis alumna and attorney Frayla Schoenfeld work with student researchers on the Innocence Project case.
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