Loyola Marymount University’s Loyola Law School announced Monday that its wrongful-conviction clinic has received a $150,000 multiyear grant and a pledge of up to $300,000 in matching funds to investigate innocence claims involving Los Angeles County inmates sentenced to death or life without the possibility of parole.
The funding from the Audrey Irmas Foundation for Social Justice will support two initiatives operated by the Loyola Project for the Innocent, according to the university.
The foundation awarded the project a $150,000 grant and pledged to match additional donations up to $300,000, potentially providing a total of $450,000 in funding.
The money will support the project’s Death Row & LWOP Innocence Initiative, which provides legal representation, investigation and expert consultation for Los Angeles County inmates sentenced to death or life without parole and pursues habeas corpus petitions on their behalf.
Funding will also support the Memory Science & Misidentification Initiative, which uses research on eyewitness memory and identification in efforts to challenge convictions involving potentially unreliable identifications.
The Loyola Project for the Innocent is litigating three cases involving eyewitness misidentification and investigating other cases, according to the law school.
The clinic was founded at Loyola Law School in 2011 and provides representation and post-conviction investigation while giving law students clinical legal experience.
According to the university, the project has secured 24 exonerations involving more than 600 cumulative years of incarceration.
The project is also a member of the California Innocence Coalition and has participated in sponsoring more than a dozen bills enacted into state law over the past seven years, the university said.