Carnegie Mellon University
February 04, 2015

Bill Moushey To Discuss Innocence Project's Future at Carnegie Mellon

Bill Moushey Bill Moushey

Bill Moushey, an award-winning journalist and professor of communications at Point Park University, founded "The Innocence Institute" in 2001 to expose systemic issues in the criminal justice system.

Moushey and the institute spent the next several years working to free 17 wrongfully convicted individuals and became a leading voice on problems with eyewitness identifications, false confessions, forensic science, prosecutorial misconduct and issues related to juvenile offenders sentenced to life in prison.

At 4:30 p.m. on Feb. 16 in the Swank Room (Baker Hall 255B), Carnegie Mellon University will host Moushey for a talk on how a revamped "Innocence Project" could benefit from CMU's strengths in creative and professional writing, history, statistics, psychology, public policy and social and decision sciences.

And Carnegie Mellon could benefit as well.

"Carnegie Mellon could certainly benefit from Moushey and the Innocence Project. Since it calls on so many disciplines, it would potentially unite a lot of people, faculty and students both," said Jane McCafferty, professor of English in the Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences.

Moushey has examined more than 3,500 Pennsylvania cases and amassed nearly one million pages of case studies that he believes could provide a valuable base of study in numerous disciplines.

"What has become painfully clear in all of this work is that there has been very little examination of the causes and effects of wrongful conviction, there is a dearth of public policy discussion on this major societal problem that has only been identified over the past 15 years and that there is very little multidisciplinary research and study of a wide assortment of the issues in this movement," Moushey said.

The Department of English is sponsoring this event.