About Us
Our Mission
When our criminal justice system makes a mistake and puts the wrong person in prison, lives are destroyed. There is a lot of public focus on exonerating and releasing the wrongfully convicted. But, what happens after innocence?
The nightmare of wrongful conviction does not end at the prison gate. The vast majority of America’s exonerees do not receive consistent, reliable assistance with rebuilding their lives after release, nor do they receive meaningful monetary compensation. Even after we know exonerees were in prison for crimes they did not commit, we let them down all over again.
After Innocence is the leading provider of re-entry assistance to people released from prison after wrongful conviction. Our unique mission is to provide every exoneree—anywhere in the United States and no matter how long they’ve been out of prison—with highly skilled, tenacious, ongoing assistance in a few key areas of support.
Our highly efficient model of remote case management and resource development leverages the work of untapped service providers––and recruits new ones––in the exoneree’s community. This allows us to reach and get results for an unprecedented number of exonerees across the country, anywhere they live. Read more about our work and impact.
We have already reached more than 800 exonerees across 46 states and provided millions of dollars in value of services, for free.
Rather than directly represent one exoneree at a time, I realized that I could do much more by recruiting and mobilizing attorneys across the country to help exonerees, and then doing the critical follow-up work to ensure the work actually gets done
Our History
Founded in 2015 by Jon Eldan, After Innocence is a 501(c)(3) public charity and member of the Innocence Network, which brings together organizations that work on behalf of the wrongfully convicted. The idea for the organization came when Eldan, a former commercial litigation lawyer, was volunteering to work on behalf of exonerees when he started to ask them: What is your biggest need? The discovery was an area of support that fell dramatically short.
In recognition of the historical deficit that most exonerees do not receive much support in getting back on their feet after the system finds them to be wrongfully convicted and releases them, we have made it our mission to be the re-entry resource for the entire exoneree population.