Plain Old Justice

By K. W. Locke

Here are some links to organizations working to help those harmed by the criminal justice system.  Neither I nor this blog is affiliated with any of these organizations and they do not pay us in any way for listing them here.  I haven't even informed most of them that they are being listed.

 

 

Law schools across the country, and elsewhere, have established innocence projects to exonerate those wrongfully convicted.  You can locate the innocence project near you using the Innocence Network's online directory.

 

The oldest organization working to exonerate those wrongly convicted may well be Centurion Ministries, founded not by a law school but by Princeton University divinity student Jim McCloskey.  You can read about it in McCloskey's memoir, When Truth Is All You Have.  Reportedly, writer John Grisham patterned the main character in his novel, The Guardians, after McCloskey.

 

 

After the McKinney, Texas SWAT team caused $50,000 to a woman's home and the city refused to compensate her, the Institute for Justice sued on her behalf.  When the Pasco County, Florida sheriff's department began using a computer to predict who would commit a crime, and then harassing those people until they moved away, the Institute for Justice sued the sheriff.  It also fights on behalf of victims of civil asset forfeiture, whose property has been taken by law enforcement even though they have not been convicted of any crime.

 

Laws schools at the University of California - Irvine, the University of Michigan, and Michigan State University have established the online National Registry of Exonerations.  It lists innocent people  who were convicted and sent to prison, but only later cleared.  It also provides information about each case.  So far, 2,932 innocent people, who together spent more than 25,600 years behind bars for crimes they didn't commit, appear on the list.

Banner photo by Juliescribbles (https://www.scribbler.com/) via Wikimedia Commons.