The Record/Entry 3.03/One technique, and what it can and cannot carry
The Innocence Project
Post-conviction testing has overturned a documented and countable number of convictions.
Post-conviction DNA testing has produced a countable record of wrongful convictions — and made that count impossible to ignore.
What the Project Is and What It Found
The Innocence Project was founded in 1992 at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in New York by attorneys Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld. Its work is specific: identifying convicted people whose cases include biological evidence that was never tested by DNA methods, or was tested by an earlier and less discriminating technique, and then securing and running those tests. The results go to court. The organisation does not claim that every conviction it challenges is wrongful; it claims that the biological evidence, examined properly, says something different from what the jury heard.
By the time of writing, more than 375 people in the United States ↗ have been exonerated through post-conviction DNA testing. The earliest exonerations were possible because evidence from cases tried before forensic DNA existed had simply been retained — swabs, stained clothing, slides — and could be retrieved and profiled using DNA methods that did not exist at the time of the original trial. In a number of those cases, the correct contributor was identified through a database search, sometimes linking the same individual to multiple offences.
From the register
The count in context
- 01More than 375 DNA exonerations in the United States — the documented figure as of writing
- 02Founded 1992, Cardozo School of Law, New York — by Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld
- 03National Registry of Exonerations (University of Michigan Law School) — the broader dataset alongside which DNA exonerations sit as a defined subset
The wrongful conviction data that accumulates from this work is not anecdote. It is a structured dataset, and scholars at the National Registry of Exonerations ↗, hosted at the University of Michigan Law School, maintain it alongside exonerations achieved by other means. DNA exonerations constitute a subset of that record — technically distinguished from exonerations resting on witness recantation or newly discovered non-biological evidence — and that distinction matters for what the data can tell forensic science about itself.
What the Record Shows About the Technique's Limits
The value of the Innocence Project's accumulated cases is not only the number of exonerations. It is what the cases document about how wrongful convictions happened. Across the body of DNA exonerations, several contributing factors appear repeatedly: eyewitness misidentification, false or coerced confession, informant testimony, and — critically for a forensic science audience — the misapplication of other forensic disciplines at trial. Bite-mark evidence, hair microscopy comparison and blood-typing testimony feature in the trial records of cases that DNA later resolved differently. The President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology noted in its 2016 report that several pattern-comparison disciplines lacked the foundational validity studies that DNA analysis had been subjected to; the Innocence Project's case files provided much of the empirical ground for that conclusion.
DNA itself is not absent from the problem. A handful of exonerations have involved cases where DNA testing was performed at trial, but the sample was a mixture interpreted under older, less rigorous methods, or where transfer and contamination were not adequately considered. The science of secondary transfer — the documented movement of DNA from a surface to an item without any direct contact between the contributor and that item — means that the presence of a profile at a scene is not, by itself, proof of presence at the scene. Courts have not always heard that clearly explained.
From the register
Contributing factors across DNA exoneration cases
- Eyewitness misidentification
- the most frequently documented factor
- False or coerced confession
- appears in a substantial portion of cases
- Informant testimony
- recurs across the record
- Invalidated or misapplied forensic disciplines
- bite marks, hair microscopy, blood typing feature in trial records later overturned by DNA
- Mixture interpretation under older methods
- some DNA cases involved earlier, less rigorous statistical handling
The Innocence Project has also contributed to the argument for improving the conditions under which biological evidence is stored. Evidence that has been poorly preserved — frozen and thawed repeatedly, exposed to humidity or contamination — may be untestable even when it exists. Jurisdictions differ sharply in how long they are required to retain it and under what conditions, and gaps in those requirements have foreclosed testing in cases where it might otherwise have produced a result.
What the project's record establishes, with a precision that advocacy alone could not achieve, is that wrongful conviction is not a theoretical risk. It is a documented frequency, attached to real cases, real techniques and real errors — and the DNA result, applied post-conviction, is the instrument that made counting possible.
