Innocence Project New Orleans (IPNO)is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit legal office that represents innocent prisoners serving life sentences in Louisiana and Southern Mississippi, and assists them with their transition into the free world upon their release.

IPNO, the country's second largest free-standing Innocence Project, works in the states with the country's highest incarceration rates and the highest rates of wrongful conviction in the country. By identifying and remedying cases and causes of wrongful conviction, we engage in high impact, frontline advocacy in the courts of law and public opinion, and lead community-based responses into the mistakes made by our criminal justice system.

A few of our successes include:

• Winning the freedom of 15 wrongly convicted prisoners who have served a total of 261 years in prison for crimes they did not commit - Allen Coco, Jimmy Bass, Dan Bright, Greg Bright, Dennis Brown, Glenn Davis, Larry Delmore, Travis Hayes, Anthony Johnson, Arthur Johnson Dwight Labran, Terrence Myers, Earl Truvia, Leroy White and Cedric Willis;
• Working with John Grisham and the University of Mississippi to raise seed money and establish an Innocence Litigation Clinic at the University of Mississippi;
• Directly assisting Louisiana's wrongfully convicted men with rebuilding their lives upon their release and founding and supporting Resurrection After Exoneration (RAE), the first exonoree-led, holistic, re-entry program in the country;
• Founding and facilitating a working group of prosecutors, police, defense attorneys, judges and evidence clerks in Orleans Parish to formulate and implement best practices in evidence collection, storage and preservation and, in 2009, winning a $1.4 million grant for those agencies to inventory their evidence facilities, improve storage and retention policies and DNA test old biological evidence;
• Working with the Louisiana legislature to pass a compensation statute for Louisiana's wrongfully convicted in 2005 and then working with the Louisiana District Attorneys Association in 2007 to secure beneficial amendments to the law, including an extension of the deadline for the filing of applications and
• Working with the Louisiana legislature to pass a DNA testing law in 2001 and securing extensions of the deadline for prisoners to apply for testing in 2004, 2006 and 2008. Prisoners in Louisiana now have until 2014 to file for DNA testing if it could prove their innocence.

IPNO spends thousands of hours reviewing a case before agreeing to represent the individual. IPNO currently represents 17 individuals, is investigating an additional 13 cases and has over 3,000 applications on file.