What Your Support Makes Possible

UNCUFF takes on the wrongful-conviction cases that other innocence organizations decline — cases involving men convicted of rape or sexual assault, where the facts are complex, the politics are unwelcome, and the evidence is buried so deep that overturning the conviction will take years of specialized legal work.

These cases are not resolved by a single DNA test. They are resolved — when they are resolved at all — through sustained post-conviction litigation, expert forensic review, and the slow, adversarial process of forcing institutions to disclose records they would rather keep hidden.

Without dedicated legal capacity, claims go unfiled. Records get destroyed. Wrongful convictions persist by default.

What We Are Asking Donors to Fund

A full-time post-conviction attorney. This is not trial defense. It is the painstaking, specialized work that begins after the system has declared a case "final": drafting and litigating appellate and post-conviction briefs, filing evidentiary and discovery motions, pursuing Brady and disclosure violations, coordinating expert analysis, and supporting existing counsel on large active matters such as Daniel Holtzclaw's. The long-term goal is not one attorney but a small team capable of carrying multiple complex cases simultaneously.

Dedicated legal capacity for public-records litigation. Police departments, crime labs, and prosecutors' offices rarely release critical records voluntarily. Records lawsuits change that calculus. Because many transparency statutes shift attorney's fees to the State when we prevail, this work is exceptionally cost-effective — and a single successful records case can unlock evidence relevant to multiple convictions. It is also a race against time. Once records are destroyed, the underlying innocence claim can become impossible to prove. We will begin with part-time and contract counsel and scale to a full-time attorney as the records docket grows.

Forensic and investigative experts in DNA, serology, crime-lab practices, handwriting analysis, medical evidence, and digital forensics. Without expert work, even strong documentary evidence may never reach a court in a form that can change an outcome.

Secure AI infrastructure and licensing for document review. The Holtzclaw case illustrates the scale that serious post-conviction work now involves: thousands of pages of police and lab records, thousands of pages of pre-trial and trial transcripts, an appellate docket of dozens of motions and briefs, thousands of pages of deposition testimony, and thousands of internal police-department emails obtained only through years of records litigation. Reviewing this manually would take a small team a decade. Reviewing it with consumer AI tools would expose privileged, sealed, and victim-identifying material to vendors that train models on user inputs, retain data indefinitely, or cannot meet the security standards legal work requires.

Why This Work Is Urgent

Every year of delay is another year an innocent person remains imprisoned. Daniel Holtzclaw has already spent a decade behind bars. Without sustained post-conviction capacity, cases like his can take decades more to correct — if they are corrected at all.

UNCUFF is not asking donors to fund policy memos or conferences. We are asking you to fund the lawyers who reopen cases the system has closed, the litigation that forces hidden evidence into daylight, the experts who turn raw records into proof, and the secure infrastructure that lets a small team confront institutional failure on its own scale.

Your support does not free just one innocent man. It builds the capacity to free many.

Support Our Mission

Fund Legal Aid for the Wrongfully Convicted