Daily Roundup — August 19, 2026: Innocence Groups Under Financial Strain, a Vetoed New Hampshire Reform, and a Deposition Order in Cook County

There wasn't a flood of breaking wrongful-conviction news over the last few days, so today's roundup pairs the three real developments we found with the underlying data — and with the phone calls and complaint forms that actually move cases.

1. The Midwest Innocence Project pulled back from the brink — and it says the funding crisis isn't over

In July, the Midwest Innocence Project told supporters it was close to shutting down after losing federal grants and funding in 2025, and it had already cut its staff by 25%. As of a report published August 13, the organization has avoided closure and is now trying to grow again (KSMU/St. Louis Public Radio). MIP is the organization that litigated for Lamar Johnson, whose Missouri murder conviction was thrown out in 2023 after nearly 28 years.

Why this matters beyond one nonprofit: innocence litigation is slow, document-heavy, and almost entirely donor- and grant-funded. When a regional project cuts a quarter of its staff, the practical effect is that intake slows, case reviews stall, and people with genuine innocence claims wait longer — sometimes years longer — for anyone to read their file.

Action: The Midwest Innocence Project covers Missouri, Kansas, Iowa, Nebraska, and Arkansas. If you're in that footprint, its intake and donation pages are at themip.org; St. Louis Public Radio's interview coverage is worth listening to before you write your state legislators about state-level funding for innocence work.

2. New Hampshire: a veto that keeps an arbitrary clock on innocence claims

On August 11, the New England Innocence Project asked supporters to help override Governor Ayotte's veto of HB 1422 — a bill that would have removed New Hampshire's three-year deadline for filing a new-trial motion when new evidence or new science emerges (New England Innocence Project).

This is the least glamorous and most consequential category of wrongful-conviction law. Deadlines like this one bar courts from even looking at claims that arrive late — and innocence evidence is almost always late. Recantations surface when a witness's circumstances change. Forensic disciplines get discredited a decade after the testimony. Codefendants talk. A three-year window is shorter than the average time it takes many exonerees to find a lawyer at all.

Action: If you live in New Hampshire, contact your state representative and senator about an override vote and reference HB 1422 by number. NEIP's action alert and contact information are on its homepage.

3. Cook County: a former top prosecutor ordered to explain exoneration decisions under oath

A federal judge has ruled that the woman who served as former State's Attorney Kim Foxx's top assistant must sit for a deposition and answer questions under oath about the office's exoneration decisions — including its choices not to contest the vacating of the Mulero and Mendoza convictions, and its discussions with the Exoneration Project (CWB Chicago, August 12, 2026).

We'd note the obvious tension here: conviction review units are the mechanism reformers spent two decades fighting for, and they only work if prosecutors can agree that a conviction is unsound without being punished for it. But CRUs also need to be transparent, and litigation over how those decisions get made is a predictable consequence of a system that has never standardized them.

That tension is live in New Jersey right now. New Jersey's Conviction Review Unit has already recommended exoneration in the case of Richard Barge — the sole eyewitness recanted, the informants recanted, and new evidence points to other suspects — and the file has been sitting with the Attorney General's Office awaiting final action. A CRU recommendation that no one acts on is not a remedy. Readers can call the New Jersey Attorney General's Office at (609) 292-4925, reference Richard Barge's case and mention Jennifer Davenport, and then add their name to the petition.

Grounding this in the data

• Death row. Since 1973, at least 202 people who were wrongly convicted and sentenced to death in the U.S. have been exonerated, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. DPIC also reports that on July 23, 2026, a Delaware Superior Court judge ordered a Certificate of Innocence for Jermaine "Marlow" Wright and granted expungement of his conviction.
• Compensation. As of the National Registry of Exonerations' August 2026 update, 38 states and the District of Columbia have wrongful-conviction compensation statutes — meaning 12 states still have none, and the Registry's own research examines how many eligible exonerees actually recover anything (National Registry of Exonerations, Compensation).
• Race. A Registry report found that Black people, then 13.6% of the U.S. population, accounted for 53% of the 3,200 exonerations recorded as of August 8, 2022, and are roughly seven times more likely than white people to be falsely convicted of serious crimes (University of Michigan Law School). The Registry's total has grown substantially since that report.
• Contributing patterns. The Registry codes cases by contributing factor — official misconduct, mistaken witness identification, false confession, false or misleading forensic evidence, and perjury or false accusation. On forensics specifically, the Equal Justice Initiative documents convictions built on lab errors, inaccurate testimony about results, and fabricated results, citing Garrett and Neufeld's study of invalid forensic science testimony (EJI). EJI's own client Anthony Ray Hinton spent nearly 30 years on Alabama's death row before his 2015 exoneration.
• Cases still moving. The Exoneration Project reports that on May 26, 2026, a Philadelphia judge vacated the convictions of Jermal Shuler, Marc Brittingham, and Rasheed Smith in a 1997 North Philadelphia murder, and that Kentucky's Supreme Court in October 2025 upheld the reversal of John "Brandon" Lamotte's 2019 conviction (Exoneration Project).

On judicial discipline and removal specifically, nothing significant surfaced in the last few days. If you have a complaint about a judge's conduct, every state has a body that takes them — Illinois routes complaints through the Judicial Inquiry Board, Missouri through the Commission on Retirement, Removal and Discipline, New Hampshire through the Judicial Conduct Committee, and New Jersey through the Advisory Committee on Judicial Conduct. Use each body's official state website to file; complaints are generally confidential, and volume matters more than eloquence.

Two things to do today: call the New Jersey AG's office about Richard Barge, and if you're in New England or the Midwest, send your innocence project either a volunteer email or a recurring donation. The bottleneck in this movement right now is not evidence. It's staff hours.