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Trial by Jury[/caption]Carol Forsloff---The Innocence Project is suing New Orleans and its Police Chief Ronal Serpas for requiring $1800 for the release of public records on about a dozen arrest reports. The Innocence Project was organized to help prisoners investigate and prove cases of wrongful conviction and to assist by providing information from sources like public records.
Louisiana statute provides for this information to be given free of charge, the attorneys for the Innocence Project maintain.
On a slideshow on its website the Innocence Project shows the names and faces of people who have been exonerated as a result of the organization’s work.
But there are conflicts with respect to the behavior and attitudes related to the Innocence Project. Criticisms levied against it include the summation that the Project is directed more towards advocacy and reform as opposed to the situation regarding any given individual’s guilt or innocence. There have been many discussions referencing In Praise of the Guilty Project: A Criminal Defense Lawyer’s Growing Anxiety about Innocence Projects, a treatise in the University of Pennsylvania Journal of Law and Social Change (2010)). In it Georgetown Law Center Professor Abbe Smith states his concerns about the innocence work, summed up by one writer as indicating “A House Divided” when it comes to the defense of those who may be wrongfully convicted of a crime that says those in the Project have an – “arrogance of purpose, the change of focus from prejudice to innocence as the currency of reform, and a focus on innocence clinics as opposed to traditional criminal defense clinics – are at odds with, and even threaten, core values of indigent defense. "
The Innocence Project, however, has won high praise for its work. An example is in one of the student academic journals where a speaker, Clarence Elkins, spoke as a free man and his experience with the Project and their helping him to gain his freedom.
