The Journalism and Justice Initiative

The Journalism and Justice Initiative at Sarah Lawrence College steps into a double void: that of America’s troubled criminal justice system and the fractured state of the American media that is meant to cover it.

Wrongful convictions are an ever-present feature of the American criminal justice system. Some place the number of wrongful convictions at 15-20% – up to one in five – of prison inmates. Since the advent of DNA exonerations, roughly 2,000 have been exonerated, with thousands more awaiting their day in court.

But tens and perhaps hundreds of thousands more wrongfully convicted prisoners have no hope of justice through DNA evidence, as it is absent or inconclusive in their cases. False and coerced confessions, unreliable witnesses, tainted evidence, and overzealous prosecutions are among the leading reasons for many false convictions. In such cases in which DNA evidence is lacking, investigative journalism may be the sole means to bring these stories to light. The issue is that in the retrenchment of major newspapers and magazines, investigative journalism budgets have been cut to ribbons. Enter The Journalism and Justice Initiative at Sarah Lawrence College, a non-profit center which produces privately funded investigative journalism that shines a spotlight on stories of wrongful conviction, an issue essential to the fair dispatch of justice that forms the basis of the American experiment.

– Marek Fuchs
Executive Director