Program Overview

In many ways, the American criminal legal system is not designed to correct its own errors. We can never know exactly how many innocent people remain in prison, but some experts estimate that it is between 2 and 5% of the current prison population, meaning anywhere between 46,000 and 230,000 people (National Registry of Exonerations, 2019).

Wrongful convictions thus remain one of the most devastating consequences of the United States’ system of punishment, but pathways to justice for innocent people and their families are often steep and uncertain. The Making an Exoneree program seeks to both teach undergraduate students about this horrifying problem and directly engage them in efforts to remedy it.

Through our program, passionate and highly motivated students at universities nationwide will spend an intensive semester reinvestigating likely wrongful conviction cases reviewed and selected by the Making an Exoneree program staff, ultimately creating a public documentary, website, and social media campaign that highlight the aspects of wrongful conviction and tell the story of the incarcerated individual.

Unlike traditional law school clinics, which primarily provide legal services and often focus on cases involving DNA evidence, Making an Exoneree concentrates on complex wrongful conviction cases that require reinvestigation, storytelling, and public advocacy. We empower and support undergraduate students to travel to the crime scenes, visit the person in prison, and create short documentaries, websites, and social media campaigns advocating for exoneration (and for parole, clemency, resentencing, or other release, if appropriate). The undergraduate program also works closely with a Georgetown Law companion course, taught by Marty Tankleff and Joy Evans. Through this collaboration, law students provide critical paralegal support to undergraduate teams across all participating universities, while simultaneously assisting counsel and pursuing legal avenues for the incarcerated individual.

Making an Exoneree, which originated at Georgetown University, has been taught at Georgetown by Marc Howard and his childhood friend Marty Tankleff, who was himself wrongfully convicted and incarcerated for almost 18 years before being exonerated. In 2023, we piloted an expansion of the program and model at Princeton University in 2023, which was a resounding success, and created the law companion course at Georgetown Law the same year. In 2025, the program further expanded to New York University and the University of California, Santa Cruz, and to Rice University in 2026.

Today, across five universities and Georgetown Law, Making an Exoneree has investigated 59 cases and contributed to the release of 13 innocent individuals nationwide, who served nearly 300 years in prison for crimes they did not commit. Many others are also now represented by counsel and/or receiving significant media attention.