Fund the work
Undoing a wrongful conviction takes investigation, expert analysis, and years of litigation, and all of that costs money. Your gift supports UNCUFF’s work and the limited administrative infrastructure required to carry it out, for people the system has given up on.
Give today.
One-time or monthly. Recurring gifts matter most to us, because the work unfolds over years, and steady support is what lets us commit to a case and see it through.
UNCUFF the Innocent is an IRS-recognized 501(c)(3) nonprofit, so your donation is tax-deductible to the fullest extent allowed by law.
EIN: 82-3208410 · Givebutter will email a contribution acknowledgment after your donation is processed.
Gifts support UNCUFF’s full mission. Our board directs funds to the work where they will do the most good.
Almost all of it goes to the work.
Figures cover our three most recent filed fiscal years, ending June 30 of 2023, 2024, and 2025: $53,204 spent on the work against $55,370 in total expenses, with administrative costs of $2,166 over the full three years. Every figure comes from our Forms 990-PF, which are public documents. You can read them at ProPublica’s Nonprofit Explorer.
Donor support helped put key witnesses on the record.
Donor support pays for many kinds of work — investigators, experts, records, filings — and for telling the stories of wrongfully convicted people to the public, including videos and this website. Here is one example of what that looks like in practice. Beginning in 2017, UNCUFF donors contributed substantial support to Daniel Holtzclaw’s defense of the federal civil suits brought against him and the City of Oklahoma City by his accusers — a series of significant contributions, made alongside other private support. That effort helped make possible a set of depositions in which detectives, forensic analysts, and supervisors answered questions under oath. The depositions created sworn testimony that UNCUFF believes will be critical in post-conviction proceedings.
Between 2018 and 2021 UNCUFF made four payments totaling $57,607.04 toward the work that produced these depositions, including court-reporter and videographer costs, per UNCUFF’s books. That testimony now runs through the Daniel Holtzclaw pages on this site, with page citations, and through the animated videos that tell the story of the evidence, beginning with The Journey of Daniel Holtzclaw’s Pants.
Sign up for our newsletter to be notified as each new video is released. The depositions are one example among many — every case we take on generates work like this that someone has to fund.
The cases other organizations decline, and what it takes to reopen them.
UNCUFF takes on the wrongful-conviction cases other innocence organizations decline: the ones where the defendant is unpopular, the facts are complex, the politics are unwelcome, and the evidence is buried deep enough that overturning the conviction takes years of specialized work. These cases aren’t resolved by a single DNA test. They’re resolved, when they are, by sustained post-conviction litigation, expert forensic review, and the slow work of forcing institutions to disclose records they’d rather keep. Without dedicated legal capacity, claims go unfiled and records get destroyed. Here’s what your gift funds, in the order we need it.
A post-conviction attorney
Not trial defense. The work that begins after the system has called a case final: drafting and litigating post-conviction briefs, filing evidentiary and discovery motions, pursuing disclosure violations, coordinating experts, and supporting existing counsel on large matters like Daniel Holtzclaw’s. The goal is a small team that can carry several complex cases at once.
Public-records litigation
Police departments, crime labs and prosecutors rarely release critical records voluntarily. Lawsuits change that, and because many transparency statutes shift attorney’s fees to the State when we win, this is the most cost-effective work we do. It’s also a race: once records are destroyed, an innocence claim can become impossible to prove. We’ll start with contract counsel and scale up as the docket grows.
Forensic and investigative experts
DNA, serology, crime-lab practice, handwriting, medical evidence, digital forensics. Without expert work, even strong documentary evidence may never reach a court in a form that can change an outcome.
Telling the story
Courts move slowly and quietly; public attention doesn’t. The videos, this website, and the records we publish with page citations are how the public, the press and future donors learn what the file says. The Journey of Daniel Holtzclaw’s Pants is the first in a series, and how far the series goes depends on funding. This work is paid for by donors too.
Secure tools for reviewing the record
The Holtzclaw file runs to tens of thousands of pages: a 14,000-page police case file, some 8,000 pages of internal emails obtained through records litigation, more than thirty depositions of a hundred to three hundred pages each, and a 5,000-page trial transcript. A small team can’t read that by hand in any useful time, and consumer software can’t be trusted with sealed or victim-identifying material. Professional document-review tools built for confidential work let a few people do the reading of many, without the file leaving our hands.
Every year of delay is another year an innocent person stays in prison. Daniel Holtzclaw has been there for more than a decade. Your gift pays for the lawyers who reopen closed cases, the litigation that forces hidden evidence into daylight, the experts who turn records into proof, and the videos that make people look. One freed person is the goal. The capacity to free the next one is what the money builds.
More than one way to help.
By check
Prefer to mail a gift? Make your check payable to UNCUFF the Innocent and mail it to 6701 Corporate Dr. #4143, Johnston, IA 50131. A mailed check carries no processing fees, so none of your gift is lost to a payment processor.
Give monthly
Set up a recurring gift through the donation form above. Predictable support lets us commit to the work for the long haul.