In 1980, Malcolm Alexander was sentenced to life in prison. In 2018, after nearly 38 years of incarceration, prosecutors filed a motion to dismiss the charges, and Alexander was released. After half a lifetime behind bars, the truth had finally come out: he was innocent.

No deprivation of liberty is more total than what can be imposed by the criminal justice system. Tragically, America’s system is deeply flawed, producing in staggering numbers the ultimate miscarriage of justice: wrongful convictions of the innocent.

That’s why in September, some 400 supporters of freedom gathered at the Andrew W. Mellon Auditorium in Washington, DC, to join the Cato Institute in presenting the 2021 Milton Friedman Prize for Advancing Liberty to the organization whose work freed Alexander and many other victims of miscarriages of justice: the Innocence Project.

Named after the late Nobel laureate and champion of freedom who lent his name to the award in 2001, the Friedman Prize has been awarded to policymakers who led their nations out of tyranny and to heroic dissidents who have been persecuted by totalitarian regimes. This year, the prize served as a reminder that the United States, too, has its own serious injustices that cry out for change. And with a substantial cash award attached to the honor, the prize is more than just a symbolic boost to that work.

The award dinner featured a keynote address by Pulitzer Prize–winner George Will, a longtime friend of Cato, who observed that Cato has begun to have an impact on the criminal justice debate more broadly. “Cato is leading the charge against qualified immunity and has single-handedly changed the conversation,” he noted, referring to the doctrine that shields police and other government agents from liability for rights violations. Along with coercive plea bargaining and the evisceration of jury trials, these issues intersect with the problem of wrongful convictions.

The Innocence Project was founded in 1992 and has worked to exonerate those who are wrongfully convicted, to implement reforms designed to reduce the number of wrongful convictions, and to impose accountability on a system that regularly produces them. Since its inception, the Innocence Project has freed 232 people who were falsely convicted and who collectively spent 3,555 years behind bars for crimes they did not commit.

The Innocence Project’s founders, Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld, realized early on that if DNA technology could prove people guilty of crimes, it could also prove that people who had been wrongfully convicted were innocent. So they pioneered the use of DNA evidence to overturn wrongful convictions, including in many instances for those wrongfully convicted of murder and sent to death row. Scheck and Neufeld, along with the project’s executive director Christina Swarns, joined Clark Neily, Cato’s senior vice president for legal studies, for a panel discussion as part of the award presentation.

The injustice of wrongful convictions is profound, and the Innocence Project’s cases involve heart-wrenching tales of tragedy and lives forever changed. The average age at the time of a wrongful conviction is 27; the average age at the time of exoneration and release is 43. The Innocence Project took on Alexander’s case in 1996. His own lawyer, later disbarred for chronic incompetence and malfeasance, had failed to mount even a basic defense in the one-day trial that resulted in a life sentence. In 2013, the crime lab discovered new evidence in its archives, enabling DNA testing that ultimately exonerated Alexander. Five years after that, the Innocence Project succeeded in convincing prosecutors to officially drop charges and set him free.

Alexander is the Innocence Project’s longestserving exonerated client, but he is far from alone. In courtrooms across the country, the Innocence Project’s lawyers fight, often for years, to overturn convictions built on debunked pseudoscientific forensic methods or obtained through profoundly flawed trials, coerced guilty pleas, or wholly inadequate defense attorneys.

The organization’s work is not limited to litigating individual cases. The Innocence Project also works through strategic litigation, legislative advocacy, and 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.

“Looking at the issue from their perspective [as exonerees] brought a moral force, and we realized it really could attract sustained attention to issues that people otherwise might not want to engage with,” explained Scheck during the award presentation. Pointing out one of the project’s exonerees in the audience, Kirk Bloodsworth, who was exonerated after eight years on death row, Scheck explained how “an exoneree can become a spokesperson for the issue. Kirk, in 2004, went to Congress and helped pass the Justice for All Act.… And part of that act is the Kirk Bloodsworth program, which provides funding for DNA testing” like the kind that freed him.

Wrongful convictions harm the victims and their families most, but they also undermine the principles of a free society. This corruption of the proper role of limited government comes with deep moral harms and erodes public confidence in the criminal justice system. In the spirit of the Declaration of Independence and the tradition of constitutionally limited government, the exercise of arbitrary power over individuals is inherently unjust. No power can be more arbitrary and unjust than destroying innocent lives on the basis of false convictions, whether obtained through malice, negligence, or lack of due process.