John,

I’m Ngozi and I’m the first Special Advisor on Race and Wrongful Conviction at the Innocence Project.

It’s no secret that racism has been deeply ingrained in our country’s criminal legal system from the very beginning. From colonial times, criminal laws prescribed different rights and punishments based on race. In the wake of the Civil War, southern states enacted black codes to restrict the liberties of newly freed Black people. Even after the Fourteenth Amendment guaranteed equal justice under the law, convict leasing practices funneled Black people into the criminal legal system to supply free labor, and Jim Crow justice continued to ensure differential treatment based on race.


Unfortunately, unequal justice is not an artifact of the past. It persists in our criminal legal system today, and we witness it daily at the Innocence Project. More than half of the people we have helped to free or exonerate are Black, and two-thirds are people of color.

Our clients of color have been tried by all-white juries, targeted because of having interracial relationships, called animals and monsters by public officials, and convicted on the basis of racial stereotypes. Social science has helped explain that these visible experiences of racism are just the tip of the iceberg, with studies highlighting the many ways that explicit and implicit racial bias affect policing, expert evaluations, judicial rulings, and jury decision-making.

Our team is actively striving to build a more just and equitable system, but we can’t do that without the support from our community.

The end-of-year fundraising deadline is right around the corner. Will you make a donation right now to help us continue the work of transforming the criminal legal system? [[link removed]]

Racial bias has devastating effects in the context of wrongful convictions. A 2022 report from the National Registry of Exonerations found that innocent Black people were seven times more likely to be wrongly convicted of serious crimes than innocent white people. Cases of Black people exonerated from murder convictions are 50% more likely to involve police misconduct than those of white people. Moreover, Black and Latinx people accused of crimes are more likely to be detained pretrial, increasing their risk of pleading guilty to a crime they didn’t commit by putting their jobs, housing, and families at risk.

I could continue to present you with a myriad of statistics about the racial disparities in our criminal legal system for many more paragraphs — and that’s the problem. Because the system was rooted in racism from the very beginning, the work we do at the Innocence Project to free innocent people and transform the system must be grounded in anti-racism.

All of us are deeply committed to strengthening police and prosecutorial accountability, ensuring that interrogations are recorded, improving lineup protocols, requiring prosecutors to promptly provide crucial evidence to defense counsel, refining forensic science practices, and so much more.

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Your support means the world to us, and it brings us one step closer to creating a fair and just future.

Warm regards,

Ngozi Ndulue
Special Advisor on Race and Wrongful Conviction
Innocence Project


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The Innocence Project works to free the innocent, prevent wrongful convictions, and create fair, compassionate, and equitable systems of justice for everyone. Founded in 1992 by Barry C. Scheck and Peter J. Neufeld at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University, the organization is now an independent nonprofit. Our work is guided by science and grounded in anti-racism.

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