Andrew Royer, the first exoneree of Notre Dame Law School's Exoneration Justice Clinic, has been officially added to the National Registry of Exonerations.
Royer spent 16 years in prison after he was wrongfully convicted in the strangulation death of an elderly woman who lived in his apartment building. Throughout his prison sentence, he maintained that Elkhart police had taken advantage of his disability in order to confuse him and pressure him into falsely stating that he committed the crime.
In late July, Royer was officially exonerated when a judge granted the Elkhart County prosecutor’s motion to dismiss the murder charge against him.
The National Registry of Exonerations is a project of the Newkirk Center for Science & Society at University of California Irvine, the University of Michigan Law School and Michigan State University College of Law, according to the project's website. It was founded in 2012 in conjunction with the Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern University School of Law. The registry provides detailed information about every known exoneration in the United States since 1989 — cases in which a person was wrongly convicted of a crime and later cleared of all the charges based on new evidence of innocence.