The Innocence Network’s annual conference is held each spring. The location varies, thematic sessions change, and speakers come and go; but each year, there is a moment during the conference that brings everyone together in a celebration of lives seemingly lost but regained.
Attendees gather in a large ballroom, seated at round tables that hold six or eight people. All types mingle; advocates, exonerees, scholars, journalists, and lawyers sit together, eat, drink, and enjoy each other’s company. It is a mostly joyous occasion, a reunion of sorts, where friends and colleagues get together for a laugh. But the vibe changes when the lights go out and the large projector kicks on.
The new ones go first. A short video clip is shown about each exoneree who has been freed since the previous year’s conference. Amid sighs, gasps, tears, and applause, each person walks up and stands on a stage at the front of the large room. Once the first-timers are there, every other exoneree in attendance is brought up one by one until the stage is crammed with men and women who, without the help of the advocates in the room, could very well be dead or in prison. Music plays as attendees cheer and cry; the exonerees share hugs, high-fives, laughs, and tears as they celebrate the lives they regained. There is an unpredictability to the session; the 2014 one ended with a sing-along of “Lean on Me,” led by Illinois exoneree Antoine Day.
For me, in attendance as a researcher but something of an outsider to the innocence community, the moment was incredibly powerful, emotional, almost cathartic. And it was upon witnessing this scene that, for the very first time, I saw innocence as a movement.
What is a social movement? The answer to this question is murky, at best. There is no universal definition of a social movement. Many have been offered, often focusing on different aspects of collective behavior. Some writers define social movements on the basis of what they look like, the people and groups involved or the tactics employed. Others base their definitions on the object that the behavior seeks to change.1 For some scholars, social movements are defined by informal protest tactics; to others, social movements are about power, often involving the struggle for political representation.
These definitions are fairly specific, but several researchers have defined social movements in more general terms, “as nothing more than the preference structures directed toward social change”2 or “a sustained and self-conscious challenge to authorities or cultural codes by a field of actors (organizations and advocacy networks).”3
None of these definitions is any more “right” than any other. And while some people may suggest that the innocence movement does not fit a particular academic definition of a social movement, it makes little sense to paint such a narrow definitional picture. At the most basic level, the innocence movement is driven by an established network of advocacy organizations dedicated to changing the criminal justice system. As a collective body, the group has been doing this for more than a decade, and several organizations go back much further. More than 1,800 innocent prisoners have been freed, reforms have been implemented at all levels of policy and practice across the country, and innocence has altered the thinking and discourse about some important elements of criminal justice in the United States. In other words, it is clear when we look at innocence in the United States that something has and is happening. But what is that something, on a more normative level? Is it a true social movement? And how is it viewed by the people involved in it?
The rise of innocence as a major factor in the U.S. justice system has been described in a number of ways. Law professor Richard Rosen has commented that the current “age of innocence” marks “an exciting new period of American criminal justice.”4 Keith Findley described it as “the most dramatic development in the criminal justice world since the Warren Court’s Due Process Revolution of the 1960s.”5 More dramatically, Lawrence Marshall, Daniel Medwed, and others have written of the “innocence revolution” in the United States.6
Perhaps the most interesting description of the innocence movement is one that extends its scope beyond criminal justice, harking back to the quintessential social movement in modern U.S. history. Some innocence advocates have suggested that wrongful convictions have sparked a “new civil rights movement,”7 and law professor Daniel Medwed has suggested that innocence may be “the civil rights movement of the twenty-first century.”8
Such rhetoric is powerful and transformative; it suggests something much larger than a set of exonerations and some policy reforms. Standing in the large room at the Innocence Network conference with hundreds of exonerees, their supporters, and other advocates, one can indeed sense this. While difficult to describe, it simply feels as if the meaning of this work stretches beyond the individual exonerations and reaches toward something much greater.
Marvin Zalman describes the movement as the actions of a group of people “who, since the mid-1990s, have worked to free innocent prisoners and rectify perceived causes of miscarriages of justice in the United States.” This movement, he argues, is driven by “innocence consciousness,” or the idea that enough people are wrongly convicted to justify efforts to exonerate them and promote systemic reforms.9 This idea provides a sound jumping-off point for a general discussion of what the innocence movement is and what it is not.
To paint in very broad strokes, the innocence movement is marked by the acknowledgment that the criminal justice system can and does err and by the importance of heeding the lessons that flow from that acknowledgment. That is, it is marked by a shift from the long-standing belief in the high accuracy, even near-infallibility, of the justice system, toward the acceptance that it is an imperfect system that does sometimes arrest, convict, and punish innocents.10 Thus, the innocence movement may be more accurately described as a revelation rather than a revolution. It is an idea, or an ideal, about the basic function of the criminal justice system, and anyone who supports and advances that ideal may be characterized as a part of the movement.
Those who work in the movement have different opinions on what, exactly, the innocence movement is and the extent to which it is a true movement. Stephen Saloom, for example, believes that “any person who takes any action” toward preventing, identifying, or remedying wrongful convictions is part of the innocence movement: “I think if there’s a supporter out there or somebody who makes a political decision based on wrongful conviction issues or, frankly, who at a dinner party with the parents of the other three-year-olds from the day-care center is talking about this and saying it’s important, . . . it seems to me that every single person who cares about preventing wrongful convictions, keeping wrongful convictions from happening, and making sure that justice happens in the wake of a wrongful conviction is part of this movement.”11 There are degrees, of course, as some people “have the privilege of being able to dedicate their careers” to the movement. But Saloom firmly believes that “every single piece matters.” He notes that any person who talks about this issue may encourage someone who is in a position to influence a policy or a case to act. “You just never [know],” he said. “There’s a chaos-theory type of element to it or a randomness to it. . . . I would think any movement wants to embrace anybody who shares those ideals and encourage their participation in the movement.”12
Maddy deLone offered similar thoughts and emphasized that the importance of factual innocence has slipped from the front and center of the justice system: “It’s never been, sort of, focused on in thinking about the criminal justice system,” she said. “Do we convict the guilty? Do we exonerate the innocent? Do we not arrest the innocent? There is a presumption of innocence, which has been lost.” The innocence movement, then, is “a group of people, be they journalists, lawyers, students, activists, formerly incarcerated people, or anybody, family members, who are trying to make sure that innocence is a force in criminal justice that people care about.” She brought up the famous Blackstone ratio, that it “is better that ten guilty men go free than that one innocent suffer,” but suggested we have gotten away from that idea: “People say it, but I think the movement, if it’s anything, is an effort to restore us to those basic principles.”13
Such a cause, “to put innocence back on the table and make it a force that we care about,” is certainly a noble one. To accomplish this task, the innocence movement relies heavily on science, and DNA is a vital element. According to Barry Scheck, “DNA just became a way to reframe the issue in a fashion that the criminal justice community would understand and react to positively.”14 But it is not just the use of DNA to prove innocence that is important. As deLone told me, the work is driven generally by science and logic, which includes not only forensic science but also the social sciences—psychology, sociology, and so forth.15
This reliance on scientific reason is, according to some commentators, a key differentiator between the innocence movement and the criminal justice reform efforts that preceded it. Previous ones, such as the Warren Court’s “rights revolution,” were based on “value judgments,” while “the innocence revolution is born of science and fact.”16
To put this all together in broad terms, the innocence movement has sparked a revelation that the criminal justice system makes mistakes with some regularity—“there are far more innocent people than anybody ever really believed,”17 as Scheck has pointed out—and is defined by a desire to reemphasize the importance of factual innocence in the criminal justice system. But does that make innocence a true social movement?
The framing of innocence as a social movement can take a variety of shapes. Those who are involved in innocence work have different views on the extent to which it is a social movement and offer a number of reasons for their perspectives. The first person to describe it as a movement to the Innocence Network was sociologist and former Arizona Innocence Project director Robert Schehr, who brought it up during an early Network board meeting. The initial reaction from others was to focus instead on more concrete issues, but as the Network grew and they began to work on issues together, such as writing amicus briefs, “it really felt more like a movement.”18 Indeed, in some of my informal conversations with exonerees and advocates, they suggested to me that the national organization of innocence advocacy is enough to warrant calling it a social movement.
Karen Newirth talked about the Innocence Network conference and how it evokes feelings of a social movement, with “a huge number of people who are committed to the same work and the same outcomes. . . . Certainly, the innocence movement feels like a real social movement with shared goals and beliefs and a shared agenda and shared tools.”19 Ron Huff also thinks of innocence as a social movement and said that if you think of it in conjunction with the anti–death penalty movement, it is one of the “three big civil, human rights movements” along with gay rights and immigration reform.20
Some who work in the innocence field are somewhat indifferent about the extent to which it is a movement. Staff at Centurion Ministries, for instance, seem more concerned with their casework than with debating whether innocence constitutes a social or civil rights movement. “I’m not saying it could not possibly be that,” Jim McCloskey said, “but it’s not part of our thought process. That’s not what inspires me. That’s not what I connect to.” He said he is motivated by freeing innocent prisoners and bringing them home to their families, though he is happy if others think of Centurion’s work as part of a broader movement.21 Kate Germond echoed those sentiments: “I think with us, we just put our heads down and do the work. We’re not peeking over the hedge. . . . Jim and I are sort of the foot soldiers, you know? We get up, we’re not thinking much beyond the battle, and that’s just the way I think we’re hardwired.”22
Erika Applebaum, the former director of the Minnesota Innocence Project, said something similar. She said she is “more of a nose to the grindstone” type and is more focused on the day-to-day business.23 Like McCloskey and Germond, she sees innocence as something of a movement but is not motivated or driven by that fact.
Others are more ambivalent about calling innocence a movement, disagreeing about the extent to which it resembles a true social movement. Richard Dieter, for instance, expressed trepidation about calling innocence a movement and about lumping it together with the anti–death penalty movement, which “has been your typical movement.” He described the two as “parallel phenomena,” and while he expressed the importance of innocence work and the lessons learned from it, he hesitates to call it a movement, which “sounds like something with protests and organizing and people demanding change.”24
Michael Radelet also said he does not think of innocence as a social movement, which are generally organized by people who have something at stake. For example, he said, many activists in the gay rights movement are part of the LGBTQ community, and in the civil rights movement, the majority of leaders were people of color. “They all have something at stake,” Radelet told me, which makes innocence as well as the anti–death penalty movement something different.25 This sentiment was echoed by law professors Abbe Smith and Laura Nirider, both of whom emphasized that social movements are generally led from the ground up rather than being driven by legal professionals.26
Others see it as a movement of sorts but not necessarily a major social movement. Journalist Jim Dwyer described it as an “intellectual movement. It has to do with intellectual inquiry. How you know what you know? . . . I wouldn’t say I see it as a social movement.”27
Samuel Gross has an interesting perspective on the matter. For a long time, he told me, he “absolutely disliked and resisted” the idea of calling innocence a social movement. Having been to Mississippi in the 1960s, he thinks of a movement as “much more broadly based than something dominated by lawyers. . . . Feminism is a movement, gay rights is a movement. I did not think of innocence as a movement.” But over time, as innocence picked up support and began to include more than just lawyers, he said he now “tolerate[s] it.” And while he thinks of it as a movement now, “it’s not a mass movement and not a major social movement.”28
The skepticism toward calling innocence a social movement seems to be largely rooted in the fact that it is not, on the surface at least, focused on fundamental social issues. Peter Neufeld has pointed out that the importance of wrongful conviction work stretches beyond the innocence of clients. In selecting cases, advocates look for those “where there are significant issues beyond the narrow parameters of the client’s case. . . . We’re looking for those instances where we can use it to educate, to engage in legal reform, social reform, new legislation.”29
But what about the civil rights framing of the innocence movement in particular? Neufeld said in one interview that he “think[s] of our innocence cases as civil rights cases as much as they are criminal defense cases.” They are not just about the courtroom, he said, but deal with issues like racism, poverty, unequal access to resources, mental health, and “other sensitive issues in America” that “play out in criminal justice.” And there is, he pointed out, a network of organizations working on legislation and education. “They’re all doing social injustice reform. That’s what I call a civil rights movement.”30
Naturally, using civil rights language to talk about the innocence movement immediately triggers thoughts about mid-20th-century racial oppression, but to those who do, it is not just about race. In one interview, Scheck said they “look at it as a kind of civil rights movement to reframe criminal justice issues.”31 And Neufeld told me that civil rights cannot be limited only to racial issues:
“Civil rights movement” has not been limited to dealing with racial oppression. The first civil rights movement dealt with racial oppression. However, that term was then borrowed by the women’s movement, by the gay rights movement. They all considered themselves civil rights movements. So in that respect, this movement to prevent wrongful convictions and improve the criminal justice system so it uses more science and more reliable methods to investigate and adjudicate cases is a civil rights movement, because it will free people from prison who are wrongly convicted and it will improve the whole criminal justice system to make it . . . more reliable and ultimately more just. So in one sense, that makes it a civil rights movement.32
Though the phrase “civil rights” may not be restricted solely to racial equality, using it immediately racializes the conversation as people reflect on the American civil rights movement, and this can breed criticism. In several informal conversations, people suggested that using such rhetoric was pretentious and ego driven; a couple of people even suggested that such framing is financially motivated, as Scheck and Neufeld have a civil rights law firm in New York City and thus have a direct stake in the understanding of innocence movement issues as civil rights matters.33
While not everyone took such a harsh approach, the civil rights language can lead to skepticism when it triggers notions of racial oppression and the day-to-day living experiences of entire groups of people. Jeremy Travis, the former director of the National Institute of Justice, for instance, said he sees innocence as a movement but does not necessarily think it should be characterized as a civil rights movement. “I hold the civil rights movement in very high regard,” he said. “People will often say, ‘Well, this is a new civil rights issue.’ People say that about education. People say that about a variety of things. I’m not quite sure how this [innocence] is a civil rights movement. It is a movement, no question, that has gained a lot of momentum, . . . but I’d characterize it somewhat differently.”34
Paul Casteleiro hinted at this perspective as well when asked if he sees innocence as a civil rights movement. “It’s quite obviously a civil rights issue,” Casteleiro said, “because it involves the rights we all have. But I don’t see it as a civil rights movement. It doesn’t involve basic living rights [like] drinking water from the same fountain or going to the same schools.” As a movement, he sees innocence more narrowly as a justice system issue, about “making people accountable,” rather than about civil rights.35 Similarly, Christine Mumma said she sees it as being about “continuous improvement” in the justice system but does not really consider it a civil rights movement.36
But is there any connection between major civil rights movements and the innocence movement? There is, of course, an obvious connection between race, class, and wrongful convictions. The exoneree stage at the Network conference contains all types of people, but unsurprisingly, there is a clear overrepresentation of people of color, much like there is in the criminal justice system more generally. This fact seemingly adds to the civil rights framing of the innocence movement. “Absolutely, I think it is . . . a civil rights issue,” Germond said, “because our clients, most of them are of color, and if they’re not of color, they were poor. There are very few exceptions.”37 Similarly, Maurice Possley said he thinks of innocence as a social movement “in a sense that people are being wrongfully convicted, and it typically happens among the poor. Yeah, there’s a racial component, but it is largely economic: people who don’t have a lot of resources who end up wrongfully convicted.”38
The racial and socioeconomic component of the work is a key aspect of the civil rights discourse used to describe it. That topic came up in my conversation with Peter Neufeld: “There is no question that, as we talk about the causes of wrongful conviction and the remedies, our own data, both anecdotal and empirical, indicates that one of the greatest causes of wrongful conviction is racism in this country.” He described the disturbing trend in black-on-white sexual assault cases, whereby the proportion of exonerations in such cases is several times larger than their proportion in general. Neufeld also pointed to research that links race to the other contributing factors of wrongful convictions, including poor defense representation and prosecutorial misconduct. “So clearly,” he said, “race is a driving force.”39
A problem arises with framing the innocence movement in terms of civil rights, however. While wrongful conviction cases touch on issues that go far beyond the criminal justice system—race and class but, even more broadly, culture and power—the innocence movement’s agenda does not appear poised to address such broad issues. The innocence reform agenda has been focused on vitally important but relatively narrow criminal justice factors that lead to wrongful convictions, such as errors made by eyewitnesses and interrogations that lead to false confessions. Common reform priorities include adjusting identification procedures, recording custodial interrogations, and ensuring oversight of forensic labs, but innocence advocates are far less involved in sweeping discussions about race, class, and gender. Until that happens, the framing of innocence as a “new civil rights movement” may be difficult to sell to a wider audience.
For example, when I asked Steve Drizin, who is intimately involved in the innocence movement, if he sees the movement as a new civil rights movement, he offered a unique insight:
No, and I take offense when we cast ourselves as a civil rights movement. The simple fact of the matter is that the innocence movement, for it to become a civil rights movement, is going to have to broaden its scope to have an impact on the entire criminal justice system, and as of now, innocence is a very small piece of the criminal justice pie. And the movement is led largely from the top down by white, privileged lawyers, on behalf of a mostly minority population. And to me, that’s not a civil rights movement. Until the movement is broadened so that it becomes not an innocence movement but a reliability movement, so that the reforms aimed at increasing the accuracy of the criminal justice system are not only to the benefit of innocents but also perhaps to the benefit of people who may be guilty, the innocence movement can’t, to my mind, lay claim to being a civil rights movement. There are much bigger problems in the criminal justice system than the innocence issue—length of sentences, the nature and conditions of incarceration, racial bias. To me, these are much bigger problems that sometimes get obscured when there’s too much focus on innocence.
Drizin went on to say that he thinks one of the “strokes of brilliance” in founding the Northwestern Center was not calling it an “innocence project,” because to him, “that has always meant something more than just the exoneration of innocents.”40
Similarly, Nick O’Connell, the son of exoneree Frank O’Connell and former development director for Centurion Ministries, indicated similar trepidation. While he understands the framing of innocence as a social or civil rights movement and agrees with it to an extent, he also expressed concern that the current policy agenda may not necessarily solve the problem. To do so may require the much more difficult task of promoting broader cultural change and implementing accountability into the criminal justice system.41
So where does this leave the innocence movement?
One would be hard-pressed to make a convincing argument that innocence, on its own, is a movement on the same level as the American civil rights movement, but it is undeniably related to important and fundamental social issues. In saying this, I mean not to disparage the innocence movement or to downplay its importance—far from it; wrongful convictions have had a major impact on the criminal justice system, as the issue has a certain appeal and salience that many others lack. Instead, my goal is to evaluate the framing of the movement and, by doing so, to develop a better sense of what it is and what it is not. This in turn can help us understand where the true transformative power of the innocence movement lies.
The idea that innocence is not, on its own, a civil rights movement is not a radical one. In fact, in analyzing the ideas of those who suggest it is, this conclusion is logical. When I asked Scheck what is meant when he and others say that innocence is a “new civil rights movement,” he said simply, “We mean it precisely”: “When you start looking at the criminal justice system from the perspective of all the forces that can result in a miscarriage of justice and an innocent person being convicted, it’s not simply that people deserve due process of law, although that’s an important value. But we really need to change concretely the accuracy of the system.”42 This last part, the “need to change concretely the accuracy of the system,” is similar to what Drizin said. As Drizin pointed out, however, the innocence movement has yet to make broad systemic reform—in other words, reform not focused on innocence—a major element of its reform agenda, as there are much bigger issues in the criminal justice system than actual innocence. And when Scheck continued, he described some of these other problems that are in need of reform, in particular, “the deplorable state of many prisons and jails” and the incredibly high rates of imprisonment, especially of racial minorities.43
These are incredibly important issues in the contemporary United States and are ones to which innocence can speak and potentially have a major impact. As Lisa Kern Griffin has written, stories of injustice, such as those shared by the innocence movement, demonstrate to the public that their perception of the justice system may be inaccurate. Traditional popular culture—Law and Order, CSI, and the like—have perpetuated the notion that most cases have neat resolutions; the police seek the truth and catch the bad guys, who are found guilty and punished. However, tales of injustice, including those seen recently in the news media and through series like Serial and Making a Murderer, signify a shift in “popular culture’s portrayal of the criminal justice system” and encourage the public to see the common lack of resolution in cases and thus think more critically about the process and its injustices.44
Several people I spoke with described the ways in which wrongful convictions are useful for promoting important changes in criminal justice beyond the narrow confines of innocence. One such area, discussed by Aimee Maxwell, is prison conditions: “I think it’s more of a civil rights movement in the idea of really taking a look at justice, . . . because our guys come out with stories of what horror they went through in prison. They are innocent people who’ve had to go through that horror. Is that horror necessary to make people better people when they come out? No, of course not. I think they can talk about the horror of prison and the problems in the criminal justice system in a way that people listen.”45 Maxwell described a recent story she read about a man who was incarcerated at a young age and raped in prison, and she suggested that a similar story with an innocent person can spark a desire for change: “When an innocent person is saying, ‘I went through all of this hell, in addition to just going into prison,’ I think people are going to start to think, ‘Maybe this isn’t the way we want to be.’” In other words, innocence makes that issue of prison reform more relatable, more salient, and ultimately more appealing. It also undermines retribution as the fallback option for critics, who might otherwise suggest that offenders deserve what happens to them in prison. “Well, if they’re innocent,” Maxwell said, “how do you shake your finger and say, ‘You deserve what you get’?”46
Maddy deLone expressed a very similar idea, suggesting that innocence changes the nature of the conversation about criminal justice reform: “I certainly know from my own experience of working with people who committed the crimes they said they committed—they still should never have been treated the way they were treated when they were inside—that when they get out, they are not listened to or heard in the same way. They are just as human as the exoneree. They are no more or less honest . . . as a birthright, you know? But there’s something about the innocent person that allows people to hear the stories in a different way.”47 Reforms involving issues like prisoners’ rights can be difficult to achieve, but inserting innocence into the picture makes them more approachable and more palatable. Importantly, it is not just limited to prisoners’ rights. In some ways, criminal justice has become a modern battleground for civil rights issues. A number of recent events—the police shooting of an unarmed black teenager in Ferguson, Missouri, and the resulting social unrest; the killing of Eric Garner in Staten Island, New York; the shooting of two New York Police Department officers that followed; and many others—have sparked conversations about fundamental issues like race, authority, and the relationship between citizens and the state.48 And more generally, over the past several decades, criminal justice has been closely tied to key social issues. Debates over the war on drugs and mass incarceration, for example, are intimately related to conversations about race, class, families, and neighborhoods.
These are only a few examples, but they serve to show that criminal justice is an interesting window into wider issues, as the Innocence Project’s director of policy Rebecca Brown pointed out: “I think criminal justice, in a lot of ways, is really a very good lens through which to look at larger social problems. . . . I mean, the truth is criminal justice will always tell you a good amount about what is wrong with your society, about what is wrong with your culture, and I think that it couldn’t be more obvious in our culture.” Thus, the work being done to bring attention to the problems in the criminal justice system, “to the insanity of the system, is absolutely a social movement.”49
Judy Royal, from the Northwestern Center, offered similar thoughts. She pointed out that the organization’s goal has never been restricted to “helping individuals” but includes “reforming the criminal justice system,” which is laced with racism and classism. Thus, it is not just about wrongful convictions; the problems in the system, from unfair arrest practices to post-release employment, are all “part of society’s ills. It is all connected.”50
Innocence can therefore be a vital piece of the broader criminal, civil, and social justice discourse because it is a relatively easy way to “wedge into that conversation.”51 It can be a “great tool to get people who aren’t really thinking about criminal justice issues or race or the less clear-cut or palatable issues,” because it “has a pure status [and] can point to problems in the system.”52
Innocence is a valuable resource for people working on key social and civil rights reform and “is leveraged” by those working on other issues, Neufeld told me:
From the very, very beginning, in my own mind, I saw a nexus between wrongful convictions and race, and there’s no question that our movement has demonstrated that it’s true, providing more evidence of that. And if you want to use our work just as it was used by people in the death penalty movement to turn people against the death penalty, so too will those people in the civil rights movement, the NAACP or other organizations that are . . . fighting against mass incarceration and over-criminalization. They see that as a civil rights issue because most of the people being prosecuted and most of the people being incarcerated are disproportionately black or Hispanic. And certainly, they too can use in the future, and will use, our work, just as the death penalty [activists] did.53
Given how the innocence movement has demonstrated the fallibility of the fact-finding process, Neufeld questions how the system can focus on improving reliability with such an emphasis on locking up large numbers of people. Thus, he suggested that social and civil rights reformers “will be able to use our data, use the power of our narratives, to critique over-criminalization and mass incarceration, just as people for the last 15 years have used it to change public attitudes about the death penalty.” He also mentioned how, internationally, the lessons learned about the U.S. justice system through the innocence movement are being used to improve the systems in other countries. Thus, the work of innocence advocates is tremendously valuable for a variety of other reform issues, and Neufeld hopes the work that innocence advocates do “can be exploited by lots of different civil rights and human rights movements.”54
What Neufeld and others essentially are describing is not innocence as its own civil rights movement but as a key issue that can be a powerful piece of the much larger civil rights conversation. In other words, it is not quite accurate to characterize innocence, in and of itself, as “a new civil rights movement,” as some people do. It is, rather, a legal-reform movement that can serve as a relatively small but intensely powerful piece of other modern civil rights struggles.
A number of interviewees essentially said this more directly. Rob Warden described the innocence movement as “an extension of the civil rights movement” and tied it in with other important criminal justice issues, including disproportionate minority contact with the justice system, the impact of justice system involvement on families, and overly harsh punishment.55 Similarly, Ryan Costello suggested that “working on racial issues within the incarceration system is like the new civil rights movement. . . . How our administrative systems, particularly the prisons and parole systems work, that’s a huge civil rights issue,” and “exoneration is one subset of that.”56
Innocence, then, is not its own civil rights movement but an important support column for one, as Meredith Kennedy said: “I don’t know that I’d say it’s the ‘next civil rights movement,’ but . . . it is a movement. I see it happening globally. I mean, the issues aren’t all exactly the same. It’s not like there’s a platform that is, sort of, three bullet points that everyone is subscribing to and pushing. But absolutely, I think criminal justice reform, it’s the larger bucket. I think that’s a social movement, and I think innocence is a key leg of that table.”57
This point was made by a number of those with whom I spoke, including Alan Maimon, an investigator for Centurion Ministries, who said he thinks innocence is “certainly part of a larger social movement”: “I think that’s beyond dispute.”58 Similarly, both Emily West, the former research director for the Innocence Project, and Shannon Leitner, when asked if they thought of innocence as a social or civil rights movement, described it as just one piece of a much larger pie. “I’m not sure that the movement is limited only to innocence,” Leitner said. “It almost feels like innocence is part of a broader movement.”59
I began this chapter by describing my experience at the Innocence Network conferences and how, upon seeing the exoneree stage, I for the first time got the feeling that innocence was a movement. I stand by that assertion. Clearly, the innocence movement is a force for change.
The hard work of lawyers, journalists, and investigators has changed the lives of thousands of people—innocent men and women who sat in prison for crimes they did not commit, their families and friends, and others affected by these miscarriages of justice. Many of these individuals were resurrected from the depths of human experience, and their lives, as well as those of their loved ones, will forever be changed because of it.
The innocence movement has also changed perceptions. At the most basic level, wrongful convictions raise questions about justice and fairness and how well our system achieves them. It has made people realize, in a very concrete way, that the system, much like the human beings who design and administer it, is fallible. Such a realization is powerful and has been the catalyst for changes to policy and practice across the United States.
The innocence movement is clearly an important legal-reform movement and can safely be called a social movement, but those carry very different connotations than declaring it a “new civil rights movement.” That, I argue, it is not.
Any time something is declared a “civil rights movement,” the imagery generated is that of the racial oppression that came to a head in the 1950s and 1960s. The civil rights movement was a battle for basic day-to-day equality for millions of people. It developed and was spread, in large part, through black communities and institutions.60 Although activists were not exclusively African Americans, a large segment of the movement was made up of constituents who had a direct stake in it and who risked their lives for change.
Although the term “civil rights movement” may not be restricted solely to racial equality, other movements that share that phrase more closely resemble the original one. Perhaps the most notable example, the gay rights movement, is led in large part by the millions of gay and lesbian individuals fighting for equality.61 And although lawyers and legal tactics can and have played important roles in civil rights movements,62 they were never the heart of it; that consisted of the constituents themselves who made up the majority of the movement bases.
The innocence movement does not resemble these other civil rights movements. That does not mean, however, that it is not extremely valuable or important or that it cannot or should not be a part of the civil rights conversation. As noted earlier, many modern civil rights issues play out prominently in the criminal justice system. Law, police, courts, prisons, and prisoner reentry are all tied intimately to contemporary discussions of race, class, gender, mental health, and other social issues; they generate questions and encourage debate about individuals, communities, and the power of the state.
To repeat a point made earlier, the criminal justice system is a fascinating lens through which to view the social world and provides a telling window into our culture. Wrongful convictions provide perhaps the most compelling window into that system and the processes that play out within it. All of the factors that impact what we see in criminal justice also affect wrongful convictions; race, class, gender, politics, and moral emotions all impact the extent to which people receive justice.
Herein lies the issue with framing innocence as its own “new civil rights movement”: the innocence movement’s reform agenda has, for very good reason, focused mainly on altering police and prosecutorial practices, ensuring reliable forensic methods, and securing post-release compensation for exonerees. These are all important goals, and people in the wrongful conviction community should continue to pursue them, but they are very technical. Law professor Adele Bernhard agreed that innocence advocates probably could go further in discussing the broader issues, though the way to go about addressing this particular limitation is unclear. Still, it is worth thinking about, she said: “Let’s take a step back and think about how the values of society at large permeate those organizations—the training, the hiring, the supervision—and [start] thinking about it from that perspective instead of focusing way down on the details of actual procedures.”63
One potential path forward in this area is that taken by the sister projects of the Northwestern Center. Laura Nirider told me that the Center on Wrongful Convictions of Youth, for instance, is active in building relationships with outside organizations and tackling issues beyond innocence. For instance, its staff members write and join in amicus briefs on cases that speak to issues about due process rights and juvenile confinement, even if the clients are guilty.64
Regardless, when viewed through a broad lens that steps away from the legal and into the social, wrongful convictions are not about eyewitness misidentifications, false confessions, and overzealous prosecution. Such issues, while crucial to the legal process, are relatively small. Deep down, these cases are about social inequalities, power struggles, and culture. They are indicative of bigger struggles with race and class and gender. And while innocence advocates are most certainly aware of this fact, the innocence movement has yet to become heavily involved in broader social reform efforts. Instead, the reform agenda emphasizes important but very narrowly defined legal and criminal justice practices, rather than more fundamental social reform. There may be good reasons for this emphasis—such broad change is ambiguous and difficult to define, let alone actually achieve, and thus innocence advocates may be best served by focusing on incremental but attainable change—but until the innocence movement is proactive in building real, working alliances with people in the established civil rights community and becoming more actively engaged in broader social reform efforts, many people will remain skeptical of innocence laying claim to being a “new civil rights movement.”
When I met with Nick O’Connell, he reminded me of a quote by famed lawyer and social justice activist Bryan Stevenson that is pertinent to this discussion about criminal justice, civil rights, and social reform. “The opposite of poverty is not wealth,” Stevenson said. “I don’t believe that. I actually think, in too many places, the opposite of poverty is justice.”65
So perhaps it is not vital that the innocence movement become more active in fundamental civil rights or social reform efforts. After all, every one of these advocates, whether for innocence, racial equality, gay rights, or other matters, is ultimately seeking what he or she perceives to be justice.