Serena Witherspoon

The Project

Serena (she/her/hers) supported incarcerated people with innocence claims as they navigated California’s parole process.

Since 1989, there have been over 236 exonerations on the basis of wrongful convictions in California alone. Today, we have the benefit of years of research that has informed us as to which criminal procedure practices carry a high risk of error and can no longer be used to secure a criminal conviction. However, this information provides no retroactive benefit to correct the miscarriage of justice experienced by many people who remain in prison despite those exact practices being used to convict them in years past.

Although an incarcerated person’s plausible innocence claim is not supposed to be grounds for denying a parole request, under the current California parole process there is no framework that the parole board can look to in determining exactly how plausible innocence is established. The parole process needs a framework that can reliably establish when an innocence claim is plausible. Innocent people deserve every opportunity to secure justice.

Serena’s work in the parole process motivated her commitment to improving incarcerated people’s opportunities to advocate for their release.

Fellowship Highlights

During the two-year Fellowship, Serena:

• Represented people with plausible innocence claims who were eligible for release under California’s parole process
• Collaborated with criminal procedure experts to design a framework that provided factors that established when an innocence claim was plausible
• Designed a training based on her findings to present to the Parole Board so that it had better tools to make determinations regarding innocence claims