Exonerations in the U.S., 1989-2012 6/22/2012
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Acknowledgments
This Report – and the Registry on which it’s based – would never have come into existence
without the commitment and enthusiasm of Rob Warden and others at the Center on Wrongful
Convictions at Northwestern School of Law, especially Dolores Kennedy, who oversaw the
creation of the files that were the starting point, and Ron Fredrickson.
We are very grateful to Brandon Garrett, for sharing his path breaking database on the first 250
DNA exonerations in the United States, and to the Innocence Project for allowing us to use over
200 summaries of DNA cases from their web site and for help and advice at many stages of our
work. We are grateful to Richard Dieter, Barbara O’Brien and Michael Radelet for data they
shared with us. We also received essential help – leads, names, information, documents – from
many individuals and institutions: Shawn Armbrust, Corinne Beckwith, Denise Foderaro, John
Hollway, David Klem, Laurence Masson, Jacqueline McMurtrie, Debbie Nathan, Stephen J.
Ross, Jonathan Sacks, Mike Snedeker, Claudia Trupp, Michael Ware, Marvin Zalman; the
Center for Appellate Litigation in New York, the Dallas County District Attorney’s Office,
Innocence Project, the Innocence Project Northwest, the Michigan State Appellate Defender’s
Office, and no doubt others we have neglected to mention, for which we apologize deeply.
The lion’s share of the work of finding, researching, and coding cases – and a great deal of
writing the summaries – was done by a group of wonderful University of Michigan law students
and recent law graduates: Charles Armbrust, Amy Bruning, Ryan Bush, Stephanie Denzel, Allen
Ginzburg, Tina Hoang, Ben Lawless, Karen Oprea, Michael Perry, Kristina Saleh, Scott
Seagrave, Alex Shookhoff, Cameron Smith and Kevin Weber. Alexandra Gross gathered
information and wrote summaries about many of the death row and shaken baby syndrome
exonerations, and Edward Kennedy helped with better statistical analysis than we deserved.
Six months ago Maurice Possley took over major responsibility for investigating and reporting
exoneration cases. We are very fortunate. He has contributed to this Report in many ways,
including advising, editing and correcting – and as co-author of Section VI. We also had editorial
comments and advice from Phoebe C. Ellsworth, Brandon Garrett, Alexandra Gross and Rob
Warden; painstaking editing from Sean Karunaratne and Ted Koehler; and organizational
assistance from Karen Rushlow that was practically perfect in every way. Rich Savitski did
superb work creating the web site; Alexander Lee equaled him for graphic design.
This project was supported, in chronological order, by the Vital Projects Fund of New York, the
William W. Cook Endowment Fund of the University of Michigan Law School, the University
of Michigan Office of the Vice President for Research, the Open Society Foundations and the
Proteus Action League; we also received substantial in-kind help from the law firm DLA Piper.
Since we were able to complete our work with essentially nothing to spare, it’s fair to say that
each contribution was essential. And of course the creation of the National Registry of
Exonerations would not have been possible without the steady help of the University of
Michigan Law School and the Northwestern University School of Law.