Students, volunteers and staff for the Illinois Innocence Projects gathered in the Quad at UI-S to mark International Wrongful Conviction Day.

The Illinois Innocence Project (IIP) at the University of Illinois Springfield marked the day with a visual display created by UIS students interning and volunteering with IIP. The display features 3,348 flags, each representing a wrongfully convicted and imprisoned innocent person who has been exonerated since 1989.

As part of the flag display, the “UIS blue” flags represent the 514 people exonerated in Illinois as of July 25, 2023. According to IIP, collectively, these innocent men and women lost 4,040 years of their lives to wrongful incarceration. The National Registry of Exonerations reports 77% (97) of Illinois’ 126 exonerations in 2022 were wrongful convictions resulting from police misconduct led by disgraced former Chicago Police Sgt. Ronald Watts.

The Innocence Network is an affiliation of 72 organizations worldwide dedicated to providing pro-bono legal and investigative services to individuals seeking to prove innocence of crimes for which they have been convicted, working to redress the causes of wrongful convictions and supporting the exonerated after they are freed.

The Illinois Innocence Project, one of the Network’s first member organizations, works to free innocent women and men imprisoned in Illinois for crimes they did not commit; educate students, the public and law enforcement about wrongful convictions; and reform the criminal justice system to reduce the incidence of wrongful convictions in Illinois.

IIP has helped exonerate/release 23 innocent men and women in Illinois who were wrongfully convicted of crimes they did not commit and wrongfully imprisoned for a collective 511 years at a cost of $33 million for incarceration alone.