On Tuesday John and I attended a charity event of the Georgia Innocence Project (http://ga-innocenceproject.org/). The Georgia Innocence Project has the goal to free innocent people from prison through DNA testing, educating the public that wrongful convictions are not rare or isolated events and helping the exonerated rebuild their lives. Speaking on the event were Calvin C. Johnson Jr., who was the first person from Georgia exonerated through an innocence project after serving 16 years in prison and John Grisham, Bestseller author and former attorney, who has written his latest book about the case of Ronald Keith Williamson who was exonerated from death row only to drink himself to death a couple of years later. Being drawn into the subject of wrongful convictions while writing this book, John Grisham has started campaigning and supporting the innocence projects which exist in several federal states (http://www.innocenceproject.org/).
The innocence projects are not funded by public money and have to rely on volunteer work and donations. Until today 235 people have been exonerated by one of the innocence projects, some of them from death row. Taking into consideration the limited resources of the innocence projects this leads to the uncomfortable thought of how many more cases exist and for how many people any help might have come too late. In this context I note that in my current home state Georgia in the year 2008 107 prisoners were on death row (http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/death-row-inmates-state-and-size-death-row-year).
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