Stealth reform via innocence projects and the universities supporting them

Innocence projects are nearly invisible to most people in the cities where those innocence projects maintain headquarters. Yet without innocence projects–almost all with tiny budgets, lots of community volunteers, students working for academic credit, and law professors supervising–hundreds of men and women would still be imprisoned for crimes they never committed.

Many of the innocence projects reside in law schools on university campuses, and the host university provides real cash or cash in kind. The arrangements do universities proud–the administrators are allocating resources in financially troubled times to make a positive difference.

The Midwestern Innocence Project, which I helped establish, has its primary headquarters at the law school of the University of Missouri Kansas City campus. The main campus, about 120 miles to the east in Columbia, offers support through another law school plus the journalism school. On the St. Louis campus, another 120 miles east of Columbia, the criminology department devotes resources to the endeavor.

Someday, somebody will write the definitive book about how in the past 25 years, the innocence project movement gained momentum and changed the way innocent inmates win their freedom. It would be wonderful if nobody needed innocence projects. But the criminal justice system is frequently not self-correcting; police, prosecutors and judges allow wrongful convictions to occur, and then close their minds to allegations of error.

Thank goodness that university administrators across the nation open their minds to the need for innocence projects, providing a home even if state legislators and other critics who can adversely affect budgets grumble about radical reformers.