Grassroots Giver: The Mid-Atlantic Innocence Project Fights Wrongful Convictions, Mends Lives

By Erica Blackburgn | APRIL 17 2013

In 2000, a group of District of Columbia attorneys formed the Mid-Atlantic Innocence Project (MAIP) to identify and correct wrongful convictions in the District of Columbia, Maryland, and Virginia and to advocate for systemic changes that can prevent these injustices from happening in the future. So far, the Mid Atlantic Innocence Project has helped 12 men who were wrongfully convicted find justice.

Parisa Dehghani-Tafti, Staff Attorney for the Mid-Atlantic Innocence Project, believes that minorities are more vulnerable to wrongful convictions, but she doesn’t see any relations between the two. “To the extent that racial minorities are overrepresented in the criminal justice system and many misidentifications are based on cross racial identification, minorities would appear to be more vulnerable to wrongful convictions,” said Tafti. “But there is no data on race-based motivation and little data on whether or not there is a causal relationship between race and wrongful convictions.”