Making An Exoneree: Overview and 2025 Update

Wrongful convictions remain one of the most devastating injustices in our criminal legal system, with researchers estimating that approximately 100,000 innocent people are currently incarcerated for a crime they did not commit. When people are wrongfully convicted, they lose their freedom, their reputation, and their dignity. Beyond this, their loved ones and communities suffer as additional victims of these miscarriages of justice. This results in increased generational trauma, financial difficulties, and mental health problems for families. Additionally, the problems of wrongful conviction extend beyond fairness and justice to include public safety, since actual perpetrators remain at large and often continue to endanger the community.

To address the ongoing crisis of wrongful convictions in this country, Martin Tankleff (himself an exoneree who spent nearly 18 years in prison before his exoneration) and Marc Howard (Tankleff’s childhood friend) started an undergraduate course at Georgetown University in 2018. This 5-credit course—called “Making an Exoneree” (MAE) —is unique in multiple respects. Over the course of each spring semester, a group of 15 highly motivated undergraduate students reinvestigate potential wrongful conviction cases and create campaigns advocating for release or exoneration, including eight-minute documentary films portraying the main issues, challenges, injustices, and human stories involved in each case. When Marc and Marty started Making an Exoneree, they drew on their own experience, given that Marty’s exoneration would not have been possible without zealous reinvestigation, sustained media attention, and public pressure. Thus, Making an Exoneree was born out of a vision for utilizing what we often refer to as “secret weapons”: undergraduate students who pour their hearts into reinvestigating cases and can help bring them out of obscurity.

Since its founding, MAE has developed as a program with staff dedicated to reviewing case applications and supporting students in their advocacy for our cases. We successfully expanded the MAE program to Princeton University in 2023, and, to sustain this expansion, we established an independent 501c3 organization, called Making an Exoneree Project, Inc. The MAE staff collaborates to carefully narrow down the list of potential cases and provide comprehensive guidance and support to students throughout the spring semester.

This course model now operates at four universities: Georgetown University (since 2018), Princeton University (since 2023), New York University (since 2025), and the University of California at Santa Cruz (since 2025), all of which are partly supported by a practicum course at Georgetown University Law Center. Overall, the MAE program has helped gain freedom for 12 wrongfully convicted individuals. Our organization works tirelessly to pursue freedom and justice for the wrongfully convicted, while engaging young, passionate students in real-world advocacy.

This past Spring 2025 semester, students at the four schools were able to reinvestigate 16 cases of likely wrongful conviction. All together, these 16 individuals have spent 420 years and counting behind bars for crimes they did not commit. Thanks to zealous student reinvestigation, pro bono support from leading experts in the criminal legal field, and experienced professors and lawyers assisting our program, Making an Exoneree has become a life-affirming and life-altering course for everyone involved. In the eight years since inception, we have developed a model that allows us to replicate and expand the program to more universities across the country, and we look forward to continuing our expansion and helping wrongfully convicted people achieve their much-deserved and long-awaited freedom.