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Innocence Project Northwest |
Innocence Project Northwest (“IPNW”) was formed in 1997 as non-profit group of attorneys, professors, and students working to free innocent prisoners. The work of the organization is now carried out by the IPNW Clinic at the University of Washington School of Law.
The IPNW Clinic provides free legal help to inmates who:
- have been wrongly convicted of crimes in Washington;
- cannot afford counsel and who no longer have a right to appointed counsel;
- have already completed the appeals process;
- have a substantial amount of prison time remaining to be served; and
- have a cognizable claim of actual innocence that can be proven through DNA testing or other newly discovered evidence.
The efforts of IPNW attorneys and law students have helped to free 11 innocent prisoners since 1997. While IPNW has received noteworthy success for its work on the “Wenatchee Sex Ring” cases, the IPNW Clinic is always examining new and unrelated cases.
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| A 1996 National Institute of Justice Report concluded that private, state and the FBI crime laboratories excluded 25 percent of the primary suspects in sex assault cases during the period 1989 to 1996 using DNA testing. These were people who had been arrested or charged with sexual assault — mostly on the basis of eyewitness identifications. This involved about 20,000 cases. It seems unlikely that eyewitnesses to other crimes, where no DNA evidence was available to check the reliability of the eyewitness ID, would be any more accurate than in sex assault cases.
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