Charles Palmer

The Illinois Innocence Project (IIP) is very pleased to announce that our client Charles Palmer was exonerated and freed on Wednesday November 23, 2016, after 18 years of incarceration for a murder that DNA proved he did not commit. The case involved the 1998 murder of a man in Decatur IL.  The victim had expired with an unknown person’s tissue under his fingernails, and another person’s hair in his hand, both of which went untested prior to trial.  DNA testing of these items was litigated successfully by the Illinois Innocence Project, over the State’s objection.

The flags on the University of Illinois Springfield quad tell the story: almost three thousand of them, each representing a wrongful conviction. They’re black, except for the 359 blue ones, representing those in Illinois.

Christine Ferree, program director of case evaluation of the Illinois Innocence Project, says she is not trying to help criminals get off the hook.

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Walks out of prison

The Illinois Innocence Project (IIP) at the University of Illinois Springfield is pleased to announce its client Jennifer McMullan has been released after more than 19 years of wrongful imprisonment for a murder she did not commit. At a court hearing on Wednesday, June 16,at the McHenry County Courthouse, the State vacated McMullan’s murder conviction and sentence, and presented a plea agreement that would release McMullan that day with her sentence considered “time served.”

When John Hanlon started his career as a lawyer in 1983, he knew of only one case where an innocent person had been cleared of a crime: Sam Shepphard, the Ohio physician exonerated in 1966 of killing his wife.

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The IIP argued Propst's case before the Illinois Prisoner Review Board in 2019.

The Illinois Innocence Project at the University of Illinois Springfield is pleased to announce that its client Norman Propst, who was wrongfully convicted twice – in 1991 and 1997 – in Cook County has been pardoned, based on actual innocence, by Gov. JB Pritzker. 

A DuPage County judge found William (Bill) Amor not guilty of arson murder today. Amor, a client of the Illinois Innocence Project at the University of Illinois Springfield, served 22 years in prison for a crime he did not commit.

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