Innocence Project Northwest

Jackie McMurtrie is a Professor at the University of Washington School of Law. In 1997, she founded Innocence Project Northwest - the nation’s third innocence organization - and served as Director until 2015. As Director,  Prof. McMurtrie led IPNW’s growth from its roots as a volunteer effort to a law school based social justice organization overseeing two flourishing law clinics. To date, IPNW has exonerated 14 people who collectively served over 100 years in prison for crimes they did not commit and successfully advocated for Washington laws to compensate the wrongly convicted and to preserve biological evidence.

Prof. McMurtrie’s presentation will give an overview of the leading causes of wrongful convictions – eyewitness misidentification, false confessions, government misconduct, ineffective assistance of counsel, and the use of government informants. It will use case studies, drawn from IPNW’s work, which illustrate how these factors lead to conviction of the innocent. Finally, it will focus upon known reforms - guidelines for eyewitness identification procedures, recording interrogations, limiting the use of jailhouse informants and improving indigent defense - that will decrease the rate of error in our system. To learn more about IPNW, please visit www.ipnw.org.