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 that highlights the aspects of wrongful conviction and tells 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 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.
The program originated in 2018 at Georgetown University, where it has been taught every Spring semester since 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, an expansion of the program piloted at Princeton University, and the law companion course was created at Georgetown Law. 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 61 cases and contributed to the release of 13 innocent individuals nationwide, who served over 300 years in prison for crimes they did not commit. Many others are also now represented by counsel and/or receiving significant media attention.
