Exoneration Initiative

The Exoneration Initiative (EXI) is a pioneering not-for-profit organization that provides free legal assistance to wrongfully convicted people in New York. EXI's mission is to Fight to Free the Forgotten: Non-DNA Innocence. The organization provides free legal services to indigent prisoners in New York State with compelling claims of innocence; conducts impact litigation to advance legal precedent favorable to potentially wrongfully convicted people; informs and educates the public, the legal profession and the judiciary about the causes of wrongful convictions and the fallibility of the criminal justice system. They focus on the most challenging cases, those that lack DNA evidence. The primary criterion for selecting cases is compelling evidence of innocence. When reviewing convictions, EXI focuses on the forms of weak evidence which have been proven unreliable over the past few decades – such as mistaken eyewitness identifications, false confessions, and bad forensics. They ferret out prosecutorial and police misconduct, and perjury, which also plays significant roles in wrongful convictions.