The Innocence Project

The innocence project is "national litigation and public policy dedicated to exonerating wrongfully convicted individuals through DNA testing..." On February 15th, 2008, a wrongly accused man named Kennedy Brewer was exonerated making history as the first person to be exonerated based on post-conviction DNA evidence.  Accused of capital murder and sexual battery of his three year-old daughter, Brewer was held in jail for fifteen years, seven of which were spent on death row.  Now, the Innocence Project has exonerated 305 wrongfully convicted men and women, showing our country the faults in our system.
After his biological daughter was found dead in a creek near his house, Brewer was accused, arrested, and sent to jail.  Three years after he was arrested, Brewer's trial began and he was put on death row.  His conviction was based off of invalid evidence that nineteen bite marks along the victim's body mathed Brewer's teeth marks.  In 2001, the analysis of semen collected from the body in 1992 proved Brewer innocent, but he was not immediately released.  The prosecution intended to re-try Brewer for a single charge of capital murder, resulting in brewer being moved from death row to pre-trial detention. With a new prosecutor on the case, Brewer was released in 2007 with a new trial pending.  Before he could be tried, it was discovered that the DNA sample matched a man named Justin Johnson.  Johnson confessed to the crime as well as to a nearly identical crime.  Both of these cases shared the same prosecutor and sheriff.  In both cases, they overlooked the obvious suspect, a registered sex offender who resided nearby and instead convicted an innocent man.  On February 15th 2008, Brewer was exonerated, proven innocent.
I truly believe and strongly support the concept of the Innocence Project and after reading many stories about wrongly convicted men and women, I am shocked to hear about the faults in our system.  It is shocking to learn about the lies that are told in the courtroom and it's hard to understand how a jury can base their verdict off untruthful evidence.  Overall, I am very grateful that our country has an organization like the Innocence Project and that it works so effectively to exonerate innocent people.