Legislative Advocacy

We focus on creating and improving statutory post-release remedies — both compensation and services — for people released after wrongful incarceration, which not only helps exonerees, but also increases systemic accountability for wrongful conviction. Our work draws upon our nine years of one-on-one re-entry work with hundreds of exonerees nationwide. We’ve seen first-hand the need for laws that better support exonerees by providing prompt access to effective services and meaningful compensation, and how existing laws do and don’t work in practice. We work in collaboration with many exonerees, and other stakeholder groups inside and outside of the innocence movement.

 We begin our policy work by convening and consulting with exonerees in order to develop and advocate for proposed reforms. For example, in recent years we recently convened groups of exonerees in California, Michigan, and Pennsylvania to directly inform the legislation we are working on in those states. We then draft specific statutory provisions, based on best practices and our on-the-ground experience across the country, and tailored to each state we work in. We work directly with legislative staff, build political alliances, and collaborate closely with other stakeholders inside and outside the innocence movement. Throughout the legislative process, we provide legislative staff with revised language, budget forecasts, and data with a quick turn-around. We help our clients prepare to testify in support of bills before committees and legislative houses. Our recent successes include enactment of new compensation statutes in Delaware (2024) and Georgia (2025), and a revision to the statute in Oklahoma (2025), in collaboration with Innocence Delaware, the Georgia Innocence Project and the Oklahoma Innocence Project.