The last hope for wrongfully convicted Midwesterners is in crisis | Hudnall
Cedric Warren spent more than 15 years in a Kansas prison for a 2009 double homicide, convicted largely on the word of a single eyewitness with a documented history of severe mental illness.
No physical evidence tied Warren to the crime; the DNA and fingerprints at the scene weren’t his. The lone witness was involuntarily committed to a mental health facility immediately after identifying Warren, and years earlier had been declared incompetent to stand trial in a separate case.
Wyandotte County prosecutors knew all of this and disclosed none of it. Warren sat in prison until December 2024, when a judge vacated his conviction, ruling that withholding that evidence violated his constitutional rights. Prosecutors declined to retry him.
Today, Warren is living in Atlanta, working on a goal of visiting all 50 states. He is free in large part because of the years of tireless legal and investigative work done by the Midwest Innocence Project. Since 2001, the nonprofit has freed 16 wrongfully convicted people from prison across Arkansas, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri and Nebraska — 10 of them fully exonerated, the rest still fighting to clear their names.
That important work is now at risk.
“Without immediate funding,” the group posted this week to social media, “Midwest Innocence Project could be forced to close its doors as early as October.”
Tahir Atwater, who became MIP’s executive director last June, told me the math is straightforward and grim. MIP doesn’t take a cut of any civil settlements its exonerated clients win. It instead relies on a combination of federal grants, foundation support and individual donors.
Federal funds have been in steady decline, and this past year’s freezes and disruptions hit at the same time private donations have been softening.
“It’s been kind of a perfect storm,” Atwater said.
Budget, executive pay, staff cut
The organization has already cut its budget by more than 25%, trimmed executive pay and cut a quarter of its staff.
That leaves nine people covering a workload that hasn’t shrunk to match.
MIP currently has more than 900 applications waiting to be screened, each one a claim of innocence that has to be evaluated for the hallmarks of a wrongful conviction — mistaken identification, coerced confessions, undisclosed evidence, bad forensics — before it can even be considered for investigation. Cases that clear that bar can take years of work from law students, investigators, forensic experts and pro bono attorneys before they ever get back into a courtroom.
MIP is trying to raise $500,000 by the end of the year, with a donor matching gifts up to $50,000 through August.
“This is about making sure the Midwest Innocence Project is open not just through this year, but into the next year,” Atwater said. “It’s about sustainability as well as survivability.”
Kevin Strickland
One of the organization's best-known and most challenging successes was Kevin Strickland, who spent 43 years in prison for a triple murder he did not commit — one of the longest wrongful incarcerations in American history. Freeing him took more than a decade of work. Strickland wrote letter after letter from prison seeking help. The Midwest Innocence Project took up his case in 2009, but it languished for years before the organization changed leadership and renewed its efforts. The case gained new momentum after a Kansas City Star investigation brought fresh attention to the evidence against his conviction.
I met with Strickland in a midtown office a few days after he was released in 2021. It was sobering to sit across from a man whose life had been stolen from him. It’s easy to talk about wrongful convictions in general terms. It’s a different experience speaking to a person who lived through one. Strickland was relieved to be free, but there was anger there, too. I left that meeting carrying some of his anger, and with a deeper appreciation for the people willing to spend years fighting these cases.
I asked Atwater how Strickland was doing. He said he’d just spoken to him the day before. Strickland’s message, he said, is one MIP hears from client after client: The organization was his last hope. If it hadn’t been there, he’d still be in prison.
“We’ve got so many people on our waiting list right now,” Atwater said. “These are people who cannot afford to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars out of their own pockets to hire representation. So they come to us. Their families see us as their only pathway to freedom. We are their last chance. And if we can’t provide that support, nobody will.”
If you want to help MIP provide that support, the group is taking donations through its website at themip.org through the end of the year.
