Today, October 2, 2025, is the 12th Annual International Wrongful Conviction Day—a day dedicated to raising awareness of the causes and remedies of wrongful convictions and to recognize the impacts on innocent people and their families. Since 1989 there have been 88 recorded exonerations in Louisiana. Louisiana has the second highest rate of wrongful convictions of any state in the nation. New Orleans has the highest rate among cities.
There are many factors that contribute to wrongful convictions—including eyewitness misidentification, false confessions, reliance on “junk science,” and defense lawyers failing to adequately defend an accused person’s rights. The leading cause of wrongful conviction in Louisiana is prosecutorial misconduct. In 60% of cases in this state where people were later exonerated, prosecutors had broken the rules and sent an innocent person to prison.
Innocence & Justice Louisiana aims to address these root causes in multiple ways:by litigating and publicizing the cases of wrongfully-convicted people; by advocating for changes to laws that protect innocent people’s rights before and after conviction, and by filing bar complaints against prosecutors where a court has already determined that they broke the rules. Despite our determined campaign to hold prosecutors who break the rules to account, no prosecutor has been disciplined for their role in a wrongful conviction since 2005.
Nearly 9 months ago, we filed a complaint with the Office of Disciplinary Counsellaying out clear misconduct committed by Jim Williams, a former prosecutor in Orleans Parish, who has been tied to nearly a dozen trials where evidence was hidden, including 8 capital trials. In particular we alleged misconduct against Innocence & Justice Louisiana exonerees Raymond Flanks and Jerry Davis, who spent a combined 79 years in prison for crimes they didn’t commit. The Office of Disciplinary Counsel has taken no public action and has not filed charges against Mr. Williams. This is unacceptable.
If we want wrongful convictions to end, we need a robust system of accountability for prosecutors who break the rules. That is why we are asking our supporters to sign our open letter to the Office of Disciplinary Counsel calling on its staff to #RaiseTheBar for prosecutors by taking complaints against them seriously and fully investigating allegations of wrongdoing.
In the coming weeks we’ll have more to say about why this campaign is about the bedrock of fairness in our criminal legal system. Today we honor the thousands of people across the world who have been wrongfully convicted and exonerated, and those still waiting for freedom.
