NEW ORLEANS, LOUISIANA. (May 18, 2023) - The American College of Trial Lawyers (ACTL) has selected Innocence Project New Orleans (IPNO) as the 2023 Emil Gumpert Award recipient. The award, the highest honor conferred by the American College of Trial Lawyers on a single organization annually, recognizes programs whose principal purpose is to maintain and improve the administration of justice. It comes with a $150,000 grant. 

IPNO was founded in 2001 to free innocent people incarcerated in Louisiana. Since 2001, IPNO has freed forty-three innocent people from prison who spent over 1,033 years in prison between them. In 2020, IPNO launched Innocence Project New Orleans’s Unjust Punishment Project (UPP) to free people serving excessive sentences in Louisiana prisons. The UPP seeks justice for people who were sentenced to inhumane sentences for crimes that are often symptoms of poverty, addiction, and mental illness. UPP has secured the release of sixteen people serving life sentences who spent 273 years in prison between them through litigation and other advocacy.

The $150,000 grant will directly impact unjustly sentenced people in Louisiana. Through its work, IPNO seeks to build an equitable, unbiased, and just criminal legal system where everyone is treated with dignity and humanity.