DAYTON — The drive to overturn wrongful convictions is getting a boost from a group of former Ohio inmates released and exonerated for their crimes.
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Leaders of a former inmate’s theater group are trying to raise awareness of wrongful convictions.
“We actually have the person that this happened to playing themselves in the play,” Al Cleveland said.
Cleveland is the writer of the former inmate acting group, Voices of Injustice.
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He’s written four different mini-plays.
The group will perform one of them in Dayton next Wednesday as part of an Innocence Project event.
“Having seen the play and leaving different, leaving understanding that these are real lives,” Cleveland said.
He himself was accused of a murder he did not commit.
He spent 20 years in prison before being released in 2020 with the help of the Innocence Project.
“It’s actually really good. It’s raw and emotional because these guys are telling their own stories,” Mark Godsey, director of the Ohio Innocence Project and law professor at the University of Cincinnati, said.
Godsey said 44 people have been released from jail who have spent over 900 years in prison for crimes they didn’t commit.
He said the Innocence Project is very specific.
They have hundreds of people ask them to review their cases, but they have only taken on somewhere between 50 and 100.
“I can’t even describe it, how miserable and heartbreaking and how tough it was to actually go into the system, and make it, knowing you didn’t do the crime,” Cleveland said.
The Innocent Project will hold a fundraiser in Dayton at the Victoria Theater on April 22. Tickets can be purchased here.
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