WTI & The UN: Reporting Our Experiences as Death Row Exonerees

Herman Lindsey, Executive Director

May 2025, Geneva, Switzerland

Last week I attended a conference in Geneva focused on the United Nation’s Expert Mechanism to Advance Racial Justice and Equality in Law Enforcement. My visit was a remarkable experience, not only the site of Switzerland but most importantly the two-day discussion on racial biases and structural discrimination emanating from systemic racism that exists in all phases of our criminal justice system.

We discussed obstacles, challenges, lessons learnt and promising initiatives at different stages of the criminal justice proceedings, including before, during, and after a trial. We explored how race and other intersecting factors contribute to discrimination against, and disproportionate outcomes for, Africans and people of African descent in the criminal justice system as well as the correlation between racial discrimination and the overrepresentation of Africans and people of African descent in detention.

The invitation to participate in the conversations in Geneva arose from WTI’s participation in a United Nations Call for Inputs on the topic. The Advocates for Human Rights (TAHR) organized a team to create a report that included stories from WTI’s community of exonerees who experienced one of the worst possible outcomes of the broken system – wrongful conviction and incarceration on death row. That report, Response to the Call for Input for the Fourth Annual Report of the International Independent Expert Mechanism to Advance Racial Justice and Equality in Law Enforcement - On systemic racism against Africans and people of African descent in the criminal justice system was submitted to the United Nations and can be accessed here:

Call for input EMLER April 2025 TAHR WTI WCADP (3).pdf

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WTI also shared input in two other reports to the UN from TAHR this spring, bringing the voices of those with lived experience to international human rights dialogue: The United States of America Stakeholder Report for the United Nations Universal Periodic Review: The Rights of People Exonerated from Death Row and a Response to the Call for input: Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) comprehensive study on human rights and the social reintegration of persons released from detention and persons subjected to non-custodial measures, available here:

Call for inputs OHCHR study human rights _ reintegration of persons released HRC 57-9 v3 (.

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I met people from many other countries who expressed the existence of this problem in their homelands. We have scheduled further collaboration to come up with resolutions. Citizens understand change can only come if we all represent this issue, bringing education and awareness to the table in schools and other venues. We then move to ask policy makers to make the changes necessary to fix this problem.

In our court system in the US, individuals are sentenced with “We the people of the State of ____, hereby sentence you to” but we the people often have no knowledge of the unfairness and cruelty in our system. The key thing is “We the people” – that change starts with “We the people”. We, the death row survivors of Witness to Innocence, tell our stories to the world to help repair the broken system.