Since its creation in 1992, The Innocence Project has helped exonerate more than 240 people across the U.S., including 17 on death row. The Innocence Project of Florida (IPF) opened its doors in 2003 with a mission to find and free the innocent in Florida prisons. It’s done primarily through DNA testing, although those cases make up only about 10% of the total. Most cases involve things like eyewitness misidentification, false confession and just plain bad lawyering, according to Executive Director Seth Miller, which are a lot harder to prove. "[B]ecause our non-DNA cases represent the largest group of cases in the criminal justice systems that need review, they’re really the most important, and that’s why our office is working with the folks at Stetson to begin to work on those cases so we can expand the reach of the Innocence work in Florida.”
This article appears in Nov 11-17, 2009.
