Innocence Project New Orleans (IPNO) has grown to be the second largest free-standing (not a law school clinic) innocence project in the country.

IPNO is a nonprofit law office with full time staff attorneys working cases from start to finish, supported by investigators, paralegals and a constellation of volunteer assistance – primarily outside attorneys working pro bono as co-counsel and law students who assist with case review and investigation.

IPNO has a national reputation for winning exonerations; both in cases where DNA can prove innocence, and in more difficult cases where DNA does not exist or has been destroyed. The latter require hundreds of hours of traditional investigation to gather the evidence needed to exonerate an innocent prisoner.

Since its inception, IPNO has won the freedom or exoneration of 21 wrongfully convicted prisoners who have served a total of nearly 420 years in Louisiana and Mississippi’s prisons between them.

We also provide intensive support and guidance to each of our clients upon their release both directly and through our support of, and involvement in, Resurrection After Exoneration.

We simultaneously use our client’s cases to ask for changes in laws and policies that cause indigent prisoners to be wrongly convicted. IPNO believes in preventing wrongful convictions by increasing openness and accountability in the criminal justice system. This approach makes the system fairer for everyone who encounters it, not just the innocent. And, in the states with the nation’s highest rates of incarceration, an exceptionally high proportion of the population is impacted by the criminal justice system.