Mississippi Innocence

About the Project

The Mississippi Innocence Project is committed to providing the highest quality legal representation to its clients: Mississippi state prisoners serving significant periods of incarceration who have cognizable claims of wrongful conviction. In addition, the Project seeks to identify and address systemic problems in the criminal justice system and to develop initiatives designed to raise public and political awareness of the prevalence, causes and societal costs of wrongful convictions.

The goals in creating "Mississippi Innocence" are, first, to document the extraordinary story of the thirty-plus year wrongful convictions of Levon Brooks and Kennedy Brewer, their exonerations in 2008, and, additionally, through that effort, harness the power of these two innocence narratives so that viewers will not only be exposed to these tragedies but refuse to countenance them in the future by working within their own individual capacities to prevent such failures of justice.

For some viewers, the film will be their first exposure to these issues. For them, the goal is to bring them in as newly-engaged members of the conversation. The film's effort will be aided by an array of viewing guides and various curricula each designed for specific audiences. For other viewers, like law students and criminal justice majors, for example, the goal is slightly different. The assumption is that they will have had exposure to several of the film’s themes and that they are thus prepared to enter into more complex discussions. The curricular offerings available to them and their professors would therefore be designed slightly differently – to enable discussion, for example, about the vagaries of eyewitness identification, for instance, or the effectiveness of certain law enforcement techniques. The project will also include material for this type of viewer: broader, professional-grounded concepts, like professional ethics and aspirational modes of practice and procedure, inasmuch as those things affected what happened to Brooks and Brewer.

The Fledgling Fund Impact

The Fledgling Fund is pleased to be able to support Mississippi Innocence. Our funding will help to create the curriculum to ensure that the project is able to reach key audiences that can make change in our broken justice system.