Problem Statement
Philadelphia’s criminal legal system has a decades-long history of police and prosecutorial misconduct, deficient defense lawyering for indigent defendants, and bias among trial judges that has resulted in a plague of wrongful convictions. While the impact of a wrongful conviction is always significant, it is especially dire when it results in the death penalty or a lengthy prison sentence. It is impossible to accurately capture how many Philadelphians have received wrongful death, death by incarceration (DBI), or de facto life sentences, but reliable indicators suggest that the number is unconscionably high.
Philadelphia’s Conviction Integrity Unit (CIU), for example, receives an untenable number of applications for review of prior convictions on a routine basis and has obtained the exoneration of 50 people in the eight years since its inception. The well-documented racism in our city’s crime punishment system extends to its wrongful convictions: 48 of the exonerees are people of color, predominantly Black men from underresourced neighborhoods. Beyond exonerations, there are an untold number of innocent Philadelphians whose convictions have been vacated, accepting pleas of guilt to lesser charges in order to leave their lived nightmare of life-long incarceration behind them. These cases reveal a pattern of suppression of exculpatory evidence by Philadelphia police and prosecutors. Several homicide detectives have also recently been criminally prosecuted for their history of abusive interrogation tactics with witnesses and suspects, revealing many more systemically-corrupt and wrongfully obtained convictions from our city’s past.
Working to overturn a wrongful conviction is a long and procedurally complex journey. The wrongfully incarcerated petitioner, their attorney, and their supporters move in relative isolation from one another, obscuring paths to success and sewing frustration, exhaustion, hopelessness, and distrust. Way Moore Justice Support disrupts this systemic isolation, bringing human connection to a cold and dehumanizing system.
