Bump and Update: We're glad to see this is still in the news--3 days running now. Here's today's article.

Here's more from NPR on the The Innocents, a new book by Taryn Simon that tells the stories of people wrongly imprisoned for years before proving their innocence.


Buy the Book Today!

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Originally posted May 9:

The Innocence Project and the DNA Identification Technology and Human Rights Center of Berkeley, Calif., are forming a much needed new project to assist exonerated prisoners after their release from jail.

"We were getting all these people out of prison, but we found most of them were having tremendous difficulty with life on the street," said Peter Neufeld, a co-founder of the Innocence Project at Cardozo Law School, which provides legal assistance to prisoners seeking to prove their innocence through DNA testing.

The Life After Exoneration project will create a national network to provide support services such as "housing assistance, job training and mental health services" to the newly exonerated.

To date, $75,000 has been raised to fund the initial phase of the project, which will inlude " evaluating the exonerated to determine the services they need and recruiting social service agencies from across the nation to participate in the project. "

An additional $300,000 to $500,000 will be needed "to get the project up and running. "