Informing and Supporting Original Victims of Crime During Post-Conviction Exonerations

When a violent crime occurs, the crime survivor or victim’s family is forever altered. Broken pieces of former lives have scattered and disappeared and attempting to put things back together the way they were before the crime is an exercise in futility. Imagine the compounded disintegration and pain upon learning years or even decades later that the person you thought committed the crime was innocent, that the wrong person had been convicted and imprisoned while the true perpetrator went free. Not only are the crime survivors and victims’ families re-traumatized by this revelation, the original law enforcement officials involved are personally affected and burdened with knowledge that the justice system failed everyone.