Innocence Project New Orleans

Innocence Project New Orleans (IPNO) is a free-standing, non-profit law office attorney and investigators working on exoneration cases. Law school students support the project and undergraduate student volunteers, all of whom help make it possible for them to provide the very best representation to innocent incarcerated people at no cost to the clients. IPNO devotes the majority of its time and resources to freeing poor people who will otherwise die in prison for crimes they did not commit. The organization also advocates for change such as mass incarceration and racial oppression. IPNO uses their cases to work toward changing laws, policies, and cultures that cause poor defendants to be wrongly convicted. The accepting criteria are that the person claims they are factually innocent of the crime for which they are in prison; the person was convicted in Louisiana or south Mississippi; the person is serving a life sentence or a near-life sentence with at least 10 years left to be served; the person’s direct appeal has been denied; the person cannot afford an attorney; the person is not serving a sentence on another, unrelated charge that will mean he or she will not be released if the conviction at issue is overturned.