Illinois’s Certificate of Innocence as a Site of State Power

• In Event: 50414 - Citizens Interpretations and Experiences of Law

Abstract

The literature on life after wrongful conviction is foundational to examining how freed and exonerated people experience reentry. This scholarship primarily focuses on the social and psychological challenges freed and exonerated individuals face after wrongful incarceration, including prolonged trauma and stigma, and how they affect the reentry process. While offering essential insights into the effects of wrongful conviction on freed and exonerated people’s personal lives, this work only scratches the surface of exploring how criminal legal contact continually shapes their everyday lives. In some jurisdictions, a vital part of the wrongful conviction process is the Certificate of Innocence (COI) which legally crystallizes exonerees' Actual Innocence and paves the way for monetary state compensation and criminal record expungement. This research focuses on the Certificate of Innocence, as well as the legal process it entails to achieve it, as sites of the state’s power to ascribe a long-awaited legal status that represents a turning point in exonerees’ pursuit of freedom after wrongful conviction. Understanding the material and symbolic potential of the COI is a relational process through which exonerated people shape their present and future lives after incarceration. Through ethnographic fieldwork and interviews with innocence lawyers, innocence organization support staff, and freed and exonerated individuals, this research focuses on Illinois’s Certificate of Innocence as an empirical case. It offers a sociolegal perspective on statutory policies that codify and reify ‘innocence’ as a social and legal status and, therefore, presents opportunities for exonerated people to prove that they deserve diverse forms of restoration and, ultimately, justice.

Author

• Reyna Hernandez, University of Chicago