Today on Midday, a discussion about a far-too-common injustice in this country – the wrongful imprisonment of men and women who are innocent of the crimes for which they’ve been convicted.
Experts say between 6- and 15% of the people sentenced to prison time in the United States are wrongly convicted. With approximately 2.3 million people currently behind bars in America, that works out to between 138,000 and 354,200 people who may have been wrongly imprisoned at any given time.
Since 1992, a non-profit organization called the Innocence Project has been working to address these miscarriages of justice by working to free or exonerate hundreds of wrongfully convicted people, and to advocate for a more equitable system of justice.
Erica Suter joins Tom in the studio. She is a practicing attorney who has been actively supporting the Innocence Project’s mission here in Maryland. Recently, she represented Adnan Syed in his successful bid for freedom from a life-sentence for a 1999 murder he says he didn’t commit. Ms. Suter serves as an assistant public defender with the Maryland Office of the Public Defender, and she has directed the MOPD-sponsored Innocence Project clinic at the University of Baltimore Law school, where law students are getting hands-on training in how to pursue justice for the wrongly convicted.
On Wednesday, a second Innocence Project clinic, under Ms. Suter’s direction, is being launched at University of Maryland’s Carey Law School, with a screening of "Sixteen Years" – a moving documentary about Jeffrey Deskovic, a New York man who was wrongly convicted of rape and murder at the age of 17 despite evidence of his innocence, and who was finally exonerated with the help of the Innocence Project after 16 years in prison.
Jia Rizvi, the documentary’s filmmaker, also joins Tom in the studio.
We welcome your comments or questions. Send us an email to [email protected], or you can call us at 410.662.8780
(Audio of this conversation will be posted early this afternoon)
