2023 End-of-Year
After 20 Years, We're Reflecting on What Has Been and What Will Be
Milestone events are opportunities to reflect on what has been and what will be. This year brought a huge milestone: 2023 marked the Innocence Project of Florida’s 20th year of finding and freeing the wrongfully convicted and helping these men and women rebuild their lives in freedom. Since 2003, IPF has helped free 30 innocent individuals who spent a collective 647 wrongfully incarcerated.
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As we look forward, IPF is hyper focused on our dozens of clients who are still wrongfully incarcerated and those we have not found yet. This means hiring more lawyers, investigators, critical legal staff, and social workers to find and free more innocent people and have greater ability to transform their lives for the better after release. To kickstart this growth, Dr. Sarah H. Pappas, one IPF’s great supporters from Sarasota, Florida, has established the Dr. Sarah H. Pappas Fund for Innocence, a substantial matching fund to increase IPF’s capacity to find and free innocent men and women in Florida’s prisons.
This year, every dollar contributed to our end-of-year campaign will be matched through Dr. Pappas's generous gift. We have a goal to raise $125,000 through the end of 2023. Contribute today for your donation to go twice as far.
The Innocence Project of Florida is so terribly sad to share the news that our exonerated client, Leonard Cure, was shot and killed by a Camden County Georgia Sheriff’s deputy during a traffic stop on October 16, 2023, while driving back from Florida to his residence in Georgia.
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Lenny was a great person who had already lost 16 years of his life to wrongful incarceration. And now this. He and his family deserved better. Lenny’s life mattered. We are completely devastated.