Barry Scheck
Barry C. Scheck is Co-Founder and Special Counsel of the Innocence Project. The Innocence Project (IP) started as a clinical program in 1992. It is now a large independent non-profit organization that fights for fair, compassionate, and equitable systems of justice for everyone; frees the innocent; and prevents wrongful convictions. The work is guided by science and grounded in antiracism. The IP works with criminal justice stakeholders to pass state and federal legislation to reform the criminal justice system in the areas of law enforcement accountability, including eyewitness identification procedures, interrogation methods, crime laboratory administration, and forensic science research. In its thirty-three years of existence, the IP has participated in the exoneration of 252 individuals and helped pass hundreds of state statutes and important federal legislation. The IP also serves as the headquarters of the Innocence Network that consists of 60 innocence organizations within the United States and 13 abroad.
Mr. Scheck was a founding partner and is currently Of Counsel in the law firm of Neufeld Scheck Brustin Hoffman & Freudenberger, LLP (formerly Cochran Neufeld & Scheck), specializing in civil rights and constitutional litigation. The firm is frequently retained by victims of police brutality or other forms of police misconduct, pursuing civil rights claims in the courts, securing compensation for victims and often institutional reform.
Mr. Scheck has conducted extensive trial and appellate litigation in significant civil rights and criminal defense cases. He has published extensively in these areas, including a book with Jim Dwyer and Peter Neufeld entitled, Actual Innocence: When Justice Goes Wrong and How To Make It Right. He has served in prominent positions in many bar associations, including the Presidency of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (NACDL) where he currently serves as a Trustee of the NACDL Foundation. He served as a Commissioner on New York State’s Forensic Science Review Board (1994-2016), a body that regulates all crime and forensic DNA laboratories in the state. Since its inception in 2014 he has been a member of the Legal Resource Committee of the Organization of Scientific Area Committees (OSAC) run by the National Institute of Standards and Technology. In 2021, he was appointed by the Chief Judge of the State of New York as a permanent member of the NYS Justice Task Force to review, along with independent prosecutors, defense attorneys, judges, legislators, police officials and scientists, documented exonerations and identify the systemic factors that led to wrongful convictions. From 1998-2000, he served on the National Institute of Justice's Commission on the Future of DNA Evidence. In 2005 he was a member of the American Judicature Society’s National Commission on Forensic Science and Public Policy.
In 1971 he received his undergraduate degree from Yale University and in 1974 his law degree from the University of California at Berkeley.