Edwin Borchard’s Innocence Project
The Origin and Legacy of His Wrongful Conviction Scholarship
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.29173/wclawr6Keywords:
wrongful conviction, exoneree compensation, Progressive EraAbstract
The article recognizes the life and work of Edwin Montefiore Borchard, the founder of US innocence scholarship, as fitting for the Wrongful Conviction Law Review’s inaugural issue. The sources of his scholarship are located in his life and times in the early twentieth century US Progressive movement. The links between Borchard's other legal scholarship and his wrongful conviction writings are explained. Borchard's writings and advocacy leading to his main work, Convicting the Innocent, and passage of the federal exoneree compensation law are described. The article concludes that Borchard's lasting legacy is to refute innocence denial, a deeply help belief that wrongful convictions never occur or are vanishingly rare.
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- 2020-08-10 (2)
- 2020-05-12 (1)
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Copyright (c) 2020 Marvin Zalman
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.