Tricia Rojo Bushnell

Kevin Strickland

Bushnell and the Midwest Innocence Project represented Kevin Strickland after Missouri enacted section 547.031, a procedure allowing a prosecuting or circuit attorney to present evidence that a convicted person may be innocent or erroneously convicted.

The statute created a civil collateral proceeding, required a hearing, allowed the attorney general to participate, and directed the court to grant relief upon clear and convincing evidence of actual innocence or constitutional error undermining confidence in the judgment. It gave later-developed evidence a prosecutor-initiated route into court under a defined burden.

Jackson County Prosecutor Jean Peters Baker filed under the new statute. On November 23, 2021, the court found clear and convincing evidence of Strickland’s actual innocence, vacated his convictions, and ended more than forty-three years of imprisonment — among the longest wrongful incarcerations in American history.

Missouri amended section 650.058 in 2025 to recognize qualifying innocence established after a habeas hearing or a section 547.031 proceeding, in addition to qualifying DNA exonerations.

The amendment addressed the gap between vacatur and state recognition for people cleared without DNA. It expanded the legal routes through which an exoneree could seek compensation and related assistance after a modern innocence proceeding — so that the form of the proof no longer determined whether the state acknowledged the error.

Lamonte McIntyre and Kansas Compensation

The Midwest Innocence Project worked on Lamonte McIntyre’s case during Bushnell’s tenure. On October 13, 2017, prosecutors dismissed the charges, and McIntyre left prison after more than twenty-three years.

McIntyre had learned to cut hair as a child and continued the craft inside prison. After release, he opened a barbershop, co-owned a barber academy, entered real estate with his brother, and co-founded Miracle of Innocence to provide legal and reentry assistance to others.

Bushnell and the Midwest Innocence Project then helped advocate for Kansas’s mistaken-conviction statute, enacted in 2018. The law authorizes $65,000 for each year of wrongful imprisonment and $25,000 for each year wrongfully spent on parole, postrelease supervision, or a sex-offender registry. It also provides for certificates of innocence, expungement, counseling, health coverage, housing assistance, and tuition support.

In February 2020, a Kansas court approved McIntyre’s award of $1,553,379.45 for 8,583 days in prison. The order also granted attorney fees, a certificate of innocence, expungement, counseling, state health benefits, and a postsecondary tuition-and-fee waiver.

The statute recognized that wrongful imprisonment can damage the records and practical identity through which a person obtains work, housing, education, treatment, and credit. McIntyre’s exoneration helped make the absence of compensation visible; the law converted that gap into a repeatable remedy for the next qualifying person, not only the client whose case revealed it.

Lamar Johnson

Missouri’s section 547.031 supplied a procedure for presenting later-developed innocence and constitutional evidence concerning Lamar Johnson’s conviction. After an evidentiary hearing, the court vacated Johnson’s conviction on February 14, 2023, and he left custody after more than twenty-seven years.

Section 547.031 created a distinct action that let a prosecutor present later-developed evidence under a defined burden, outside the expired timetable for a new-trial motion. Bushnell’s work at the Midwest Innocence Project connected Johnson’s proof to that procedure — the second time in two years the statute had returned an innocent Missourian to freedom.

Christopher Dunn

Bushnell and Rachel Wester of the Midwest Innocence Project represented Christopher Dunn with Justin Bonus and Jonathan Potts in a section 547.031 proceeding. After a hearing, the circuit court found clear and convincing evidence of actual innocence and vacated his convictions.

On July 30, 2024, the Missouri Supreme Court lifted an emergency stay, the Circuit Attorney dismissed the charges, and Dunn left prison after thirty-three years. On May 19, 2026, the Missouri Court of Appeals, Eastern District, unanimously affirmed the judgment, approved consideration of the earlier habeas record, and found substantial evidence supporting Dunn’s actual innocence.

The result carried the new procedure through a complete appeal. Dunn’s exoneration ended not only in release but in an affirmed judgment capable of guiding future use of section 547.031 — precedent that hardens the pathway for every innocence claim that follows.

Sentinel Event Review

Bushnell led the Midwest Innocence Project for twelve years, arriving as its only employee and leaving behind a staff of twelve serving Kansas, Missouri, Iowa, Nebraska, and Arkansas. That work included seventeen exonerations or releases — including Strickland, Johnson, Dunn, and McIntyre — as well as Kansas compensation reform and the establishment of new law-school innocence clinics across the region.

At the Quattrone Center, Bushnell directs structured reviews involving prosecutors, police, defense lawyers, courts, and other justice-system participants. The Wayne County Sentinel Event Review Team applied that process to Eric Anderson’s wrongful conviction.

Bushnell became the Quattrone Center’s executive director on August 1, 2025. In individual innocence litigation, she tests whether a conviction can stand. In sentinel-event reviews, she traces how an erroneous result developed across agencies and procedural stages and identifies safeguards against repetition.

The review, released in November 2025, identified forty contributing factors and produced twenty-five agreed recommendations addressing eyewitness evidence, investigation management, corroboration, alibi development, defense resources, training, oversight, community partnerships, and pretrial procedure.

The review assessed how prosecutors, police, defense lawyers, and courts contributed to the error. It located each point where information weakened, assumptions hardened, or a safeguard failed to redirect the case, then recommended changes designed to intervene before another person reached trial.

Colorado Field-Test Reform

Color-based field drug kits produce a quick presumptive result from a chemical reaction, not a conclusive laboratory identification. A positive color can nevertheless become the basis for arrest and a guilty plea, allowing a person facing detention to accept a conviction before an accredited laboratory tests the material.

A Quattrone Center study estimated that approximately 773,000 of more than 1.5 million annual drug arrests involve presumptive color tests and that as many as 30,000 people possessing no controlled substance may be falsely implicated each year.

Under Bushnell’s leadership, the Center joined a coalition supporting Colorado House Bill 26-1020. The House passed it 65–0, the Senate passed it 33–0, and Governor Jared Polis signed it on March 26, 2026.

The law requires a summons rather than arrest when a colorimetric test is the sole basis for specified low-level possession suspicions. Before accepting pleas in covered cases, courts must advise defendants that the tests have known error rates and that they may plead not guilty and request testing by an accredited forensic laboratory.

“Colorado’s unanimous reform reminds us that justice need not be partisan,” Bushnell said. The law turned a national error pattern into a narrow operating rule: a color test alone would no longer justify jail in a covered case, and a plea could not be accepted without disclosure of the test’s limits and the right to laboratory confirmation.

Education and Leadership

The first person in her family to attend college, Bushnell was born in California, is of Mexican descent, and earned her B.A. from Bucknell University and her J.D. from New York University School of Law. Her professional experience includes the Equal Justice Initiative, the University of Wisconsin Law School, Kirkland & Ellis, and twelve years as executive director and lead attorney of the Midwest Innocence Project. She has served as president of the Innocence Network, an affiliation of roughly seventy innocence organizations around the world, and as president of the ACLU of Missouri.

Bushnell was drawn toward criminal-justice work at NYU through work on Emmanuel Gissendanner’s Alabama death-penalty case. Her career then widened from individual representation to organizational leadership, legislative advocacy, sentinel-event review, and empirical research — while her hands stayed in the case files: she served on the legal teams that secured the exonerations of Kansans Floyd Bledsoe, Lamonte McIntyre, and Olin “Pete” Coones, Jr.

She is now Executive Director of the Quattrone Center for the Fair Administration of Justice at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School.

Bushnell’s work links enforceable orders for individual clients to repeatable remedies and reviews intended to intervene before the next wrongful conviction. Release, affirmed exoneration, compensation, expungement, health care, education, and procedural change are different answers to the same question of what government owes after an error — and her career has widened every one of those answers.