Every two years, Cato presents its Milton Friedman Award for Advancing Liberty to a person or group who has made a significant contribution to the cause of human freedom. Past winners include Las Damas de Blanco, who support freedom for political prisoners in Cuba; Danish journalist and author Flemming Rose; and Chinese economist Mao Yushi. On September 30, we were honored to present the Friedman award to the Innocence Project. Our award-ceremony interview with the founders and executive director of the Innocence Project is here.
From its creation 1992, the Innocence Project has fought to exonerate the wrongfully convicted and implement reforms designed to reduce the number of wrongful convictions and impose accountability on a system that regularly produces them. Since then, the Innocence Project has freed 232 people who were falsely convicted and collectively spent 3,555 years behind bars for crimes that they did not commit. And their work goes well beyond litigating individual cases. The Innocence Project also engages in strategic litigation, legislative advocacy, and various efforts to directly support its clients upon release. As an example, working with the Cato Institute, the Innocence Project recently helped secure passage of a Missouri law allowing prosecutors to seek dismissal of charges against a convicted person, which prosecutors had previously been restricted from doing even in cases of clear exoneration. The Innocence Project also advocates for laws to compensate innocent victims of wrongful convictions.
Besides the horrific injustice they inflict on individuals and their families, wrongful convictions allow the real perpetrators to victimize others, undermine public confidence in the criminal justice system, and attack the principles of a free society. The exercise of arbitrary power over individuals is inherently unjust, and none can be more arbitrary and unjust than destroying innocent lives on the basis of false convictions, whether obtained through negligence, malice, or coercive plea bargaining.
As the scholars in Cato’s Project on Criminal Justice have explained through their scholarship and advocacy, among the chief pathologies of our system are unconstitutional overcriminalization, plea-driven mass adjudication that has almost entirely displaced jury trials, and a policy of near-zero accountability for police and other government officials whose cornerstone is the judicially confected doctrine of qualified immunity. As I have previously explained on this blog, it is no exaggeration to say that America’s criminal justice system is rotten to the core. And perhaps nowhere is that more glaringly—and tragically—evident than the system’s near-total indifference to the very real problem of false convictions, of which nearly three thousand have been documented by the National Registry of Exonerations.
Cato is proud to support the work of people and organizations who advance the cause of freedom, and it is with great respect and appreciation that we named the Innocence Project as our 2021 winner of the Milton Friedman Prize for Advancing Liberty.
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The Milton Friedman Prize for Advancing Liberty
The Innocence Project was the recipient of the 2021 Milton Friedman Prize for Advancing Liberty, a $250,000 biennial award presented to a group or individual who has made a significant contribution to advancing human freedom. The Milton Friedman Prize Dinner was held on Thursday, September 30, 2021. Please join us in honoring Milton Friedman’s legacy and recognizing our Milton Friedman Prize for Advancing Liberty recipient.
