Innocence Project
Website for youth-led campaign against wrongful convictions
An Innocence Project initiative, supporting a movement speaking out against injustice and helping to reform the broken parts of the United States legal system.
Madeo and Innocence Project partnered on creating and activating ‘Youth Against Wrongful Convictions’ as a new hub for the youth-led movement, started by young Americans seeking change. The organization helps educate on historic laws that directly impact young people, provides tools for advocacy to change harmful laws, and uses a large online audience of over 1 million people to inspire change.
Then teenagers Yusef Salaam and Raymond Santana are wrongly arrested as suspects in the infamous Central Park jogger case in 1989. (Image: AP Photo/David Burns)
The Daily News cover story described the young boys as “wilding” and was one of the many that demonized them before they had a trial and a chance to demonstrate their innocence.
Korey Wise, arraigned in court in 1989, was the oldest of the wrongfully arrested group at age 16. He was remanded to New York’s notorious Rikers Island and spent 12 years in prison. (Image: John Pedin/NY Daily News Archive via Getty Images)
In 1989, Donald Trump took out full-page ads in several New York City papers calling for the execution of then teenagers Kevin Richardson, Antron McCray, Raymond Santana, Korey Wise, and Yusef Salaam, who had been charged with rape and assault on a jogger in Central Park.
Kevin Richardson, Antron McCray, Raymond Santana, Korey Wise, and Yusef Salaam at the Innocence Project Gala in May 2019, one day before the premiere of their Netflix series When They See Us, which recounts their racially motivated wrongful conviction. (Image: Matthew Adam Photography/Innocence Project)