CLARKSVILLE, TN (CLARKSVILLE NOW) – The Tennessee Innocence Project is a nonprofit law firm that investigates and litigates claims of innocence made by people behind bars.
Jessica Van Dyke, executive director and lead counsel for the organization, explained the program on Wednesday to the Rotary Club of Clarksville.
“We help free people who have wrongfully been convicted of crimes in Tennessee. That includes a lengthy investigation into the case, the facts of the case, and then we eventually take it back to court to try and get them released from the judicial system,” Van Dyke said.
The Tennessee Innocence Project was founded in 2019 and receive all their funding from donors and foundations.
As of today, more than 2,800 people in the U.S. have been wrongly convicted of crimes they didn’t commit, adding that number is based on the number of people who have been exonerated free and clear.
“That doesn’t include people who were told if you plead guilty today to a lesser charge, you can get out of prison, so those people are not going to be included, and that happens far more than we would like to see happen,” Van Dyke said.
Van Dyke said many factors can lead to someone being wrongfully convicted. Among them are perjury, which is false testimony; another is mistaken eyewitness identification. Van Dyke said people are not as good at identification as they think they are, especially when it comes to cross-racial identification.
Another factor is false confession, which Van Dyke said happens in about 12 percent of cases.
For more information, or to seek help, go to the Tennessee Innocence Project website.