SKInnocence Clinic. Founded by Karen Elizabeth Campbell and Susan Iwunze Nwoga. Free, always.
Women are 9% of all U.S. exonerations — despite equal innocence.
We exist because of the other 91%.
A communications executive and a pharmacist. A white woman from the suburbs and a Nigerian-born immigrant. They met in a maximum-security prison and walked out with the same idea.
She went to a Verizon store to replace a dead phone. She was touched repeatedly, some intimate, for two hours. She reported it. The District Attorney charged her — not him. Her sentence: eight and a half years. The sentencing guidelines: probation to six months.
She had a prominent attorney. It didn't matter. She taught herself law inside one of America's most violent women's prisons. She was exonerated. She got Susan out three weeks later.
Read Karen's story
Susan is gracious and elegant and tough. When she wanted the phone, murderers stepped aside for her. Not because they were told to — because of the way she looked at them.
She was convicted on 287 counts after her own defense attorney simultaneously represented the prosecutor who put her away. When Susan was taken in chains, that lawyer hi-fived the prosecution. She has federal civil rights cases pending. She is still fighting.
Read Susan's storyOne day Susan was in the hall and a guard wanted her wedding ring. Susan said no. The guard accused her of something she did not do — spitting at her. A lie. But a guard's lie inside a prison carries the full weight of the institution.
Susan was facing a judicial hearing. The kind that leads to lock-up. So Karen and Susan sat down and wrote a letter to the warden together.
There are cameras in that hall, they wrote. We can pull the tape and it will show exactly what happened. Karen is serving eight years for perjury. The guard signed a sworn statement that was false. If found guilty she may get an 8-year sentence like Karen. Pull the cameras. Karen Campbell & Susan Nwoga — Letter to the Warden
Susan asked the warden to remove her from the kitchen and put her in the mailroom with Karen — a prestigious job that takes a year to get. She was reassigned. Karen was already there. They stuffed envelopes and drank coffee together. It was rough. It was better. It was theirs. That letter is the founding document of SKInnocence Clinic.
Susan and Karen picking up trash in the prison yard. They paused to look at flowers growing along the fence — a small, quiet, human thing to do. A guard spotted them near the perimeter.
Two older women. Flowers. The threat was absurd. And a woman who had already lost everything, refusing to be afraid of one more thing.
A Black woman and a white woman. Both educated. Both with famed attorneys. The system convicted them anyway.
Imagine what it does to women who can't fight at all. That is who SKInnocence Clinic exists to serve.
When researchers separate wrongful convictions by sex, the same data splits in two — and what's true for innocent men is rarely true for innocent women.
DNA cannot reach them. Famous attorneys couldn't save us. Most innocent women are alone with the paperwork.
Read the full case →We sit beside you. We are not lawyers. We are two women who were where you are and found the way through.
You shouldn't have to figure this out alone.
Free Always No exceptions