4 minutes read
Published Jun 30, 2026
Nearly 4,000 wrongful convictions have been documented in the United States since 1989. The organizations working to overturn them have long operated with limited resources, reviewing thousands of pages by hand. Mike Semanchik of the Innocence Center and exoneree and practicing attorney Marty Tankleff join Jack Newton, CEO and Founder of Clio, to discuss how legal technology is reshaping case review and what it means for the people still waiting for an answer.
When Mike Semanchik was assigned his first wrongful conviction case in 2008, the work looked exactly as it had for decades. Thirty banker’s boxes. Thousands of pages. One reader.
“Take every piece of paper and read it one by one. That’s literally how I started this,” he recalls. “What a tedious and impossible job. And keep in mind, that’s one case of the 10 that as a student I had assigned to me.”
Nearly 20 years later, Mike is the executive director of The Innocence Center in San Diego, and the process looks fundamentally different. Legal technology has changed what the first read looks like. And that change ripples outward: into how many cases get reviewed, and how many people waiting on the other side of those files finally get an answer.
Jack Newton, CEO and Founder of Clio, recently sat down with Mike and Marty Tankleff, who spent nearly 18 years in prison for a crime he didn’t commit and is now a practicing attorney and co-founder of Georgetown’s Making an Exoneree program. Both spoke candidly about a field long constrained by limited resources, and what becomes possible when legal technology meets decades of dedication to getting wrongful convictions overturned.
The reality of wrongful conviction cases
The National Registry of Exonerations has documented nearly 4,000 wrongful convictions in the United States since 1989. That figure includes only cases that resulted in exoneration.
The early wave of innocence work was anchored in DNA. Test the evidence, get a result that points elsewhere, bring the person home. But DNA exposed something beyond individual cases. Systemic failures that nobody had been tracking, from unreliable science to false confessions to eyewitness misidentification.
Today, the vast majority of identified wrongful convictions are non-DNA cases. Exoneration requires full reinvestigation. Locating witnesses, reconstructing timelines, surfacing details buried in decades-old files. That takes time and resources most innocence organizations don’t have.
“There’s a never-ending number of clients looking for assistance,” Mike says, and only a few people to do the work.
The case review process, reimagined
For most of the history of innocence work, reviewing a case meant reading every police report, every witness statement, and every page of trial transcript, without knowing in advance which detail would matter.
Legal technology has changed that premise. Tools that can process thousands of pages and identify patterns, names, inconsistencies, and overlooked details are giving innocence lawyers a capability they have never had before, the ability to know where to look before committing weeks of work to a case.
“AI has been really good at taking a massive amount of information and distilling it down to some of the things that we should be looking for,” Mike explains. “It’s gone from reading 10 banker’s boxes to, in a matter of minutes, it’s like, ‘Hey, you should actually take a look at this single eyewitness identification that was made in this case and see if there’s something wrong with it.’”
Marty sees the same potential at Making an Exoneree, where Georgetown undergraduates investigate real wrongful conviction cases. Last year, his students manually reviewed 450 cases. Technology, he believes, changes what that number could become.
“When you read the same documents over and over again, you keep missing the same thing because your brain is just processing the same information over and over,” Marty says. “With AI, it’s able to isolate that and take that away from us.”
The implications extend beyond efficiency. Technology surfaces what human readers, fatigued by repetition, might otherwise miss. For innocence organizations operating at capacity, that means cases get reviewed faster and more thoroughly.
What it looks like from the inside
Marty’s own case illustrates what is at stake on the other side of those case files.
On September 7, 1988, he woke up to find his mother had been murdered and his father clinging to life. Police arrested him almost immediately. During an interrogation that was never recorded, detectives told him his father had regained consciousness and named him as the attacker. That wasn’t true.
He was convicted in 1990 and sentenced to 50 years to life. Over the next 18 years, he appealed through every available channel. New witnesses came forward. His legal team brought fresh information to the DA’s office and continued to build the case for his innocence.
Marty was exonerated on December 27, 2007. He went on to earn an undergraduate degree, then a law degree, and became a practicing attorney. That experience gave him a perspective on the system that few practitioners share, and a clear sense of what needs to change.
Making an Exoneree
In 2018, Marty’s childhood friend, Mark Howard, proposed the idea of the two of them teaching a class at Georgetown University called Making an Exoneree, where undergraduate students investigate real wrongful conviction cases. The program is now expanding to five undergraduate universities and one law school. Student investigations have contributed to 13 exonerations.
“Where would 13 innocent people be right now if I hadn’t gone to prison, if Mark and I hadn’t created Making an Exoneree?” Tankleff says. “They may all still be in prison.”
Many of the students who come through the program intend to become prosecutors. Marty sees that as an opportunity.
“I instill in them the power that they have, the damage that they can do, and the changes that they can make in the system for the good,” he says. “They want to become ethical prosecutors because they understand, because they got to meet me, they got to meet other individuals.”
Momentum, built case by case
The pace of exonerations is accelerating. When Mike started this work, a new exoneration was a weekly event. Now it happens daily. More resources are flowing into innocence organizations. The tools are getting better. And the institutions that shape how justice is administered are increasingly engaging with the people this work is designed to serve.
Marty recently appeared alongside another exoneree at a continuing legal education program with a sitting federal judge. “When the federal judiciary is actually having CLEs with two exonerees,” he says, “we’re making a huge impact.”
For Mike, legal technology is central to sustaining that momentum, giving small teams the ability to operate at the scale the work has always demanded.
“What really excites me is that there are companies like Clio and others that are using technology for good,” Mike says, “making it possible so that the work that we’re doing can be done even faster and better than before. The casework should get significantly easier. We’re going to be able to move through cases significantly faster. It means people are going to spend fewer days in prison for crimes they didn’t commit.”
The work that remains is substantial. But so, increasingly, is the capacity to do it.
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