Seven laws. One purpose.

In a federal study of habeas corpus cases filed by state prisoners, 92.3% of the non-capital cases had no lawyer for the petitioner. For most women challenging a conviction, the prison law library is the only help there is.

Many prisons now provide legal research through tablets or kiosks, using tools built for lawyers who already know how to research. When South Dakota replaced in-person legal help and printed law books with a LexisNexis app on tablets, users reported connection problems that kept them from doing research at all.

In September 2026, the U.S. Department of Justice asked companies for information about AI platforms that can analyze documents and draft legal memos for its own attorneys. This act gives the people on the other side of those cases the same kind of help.

What the act requires:

1. Free access. No charge to her or her family, and no use of paid tablet minutes.
2. Current law. Case law, statutes and court rules for her state and the federal courts, updated at least weekly.
3. Help with the real work. Plain-language explanations of the law, deadline checks, and drafting of petitions, motions and letters.
4. Checked citations. Every case and statute the assistant cites links to the actual source, so she can read it herself.
5. Privacy. Her research and drafts are treated as legal materials. Staff may not read them, and the state may not use them against her.
6. Real access. Guaranteed hours each week, and the ability to print and save her drafts.
7. Training and a person to ask. Instruction in how to use the assistant, and a trained staff member or law clerk she can go to with questions.
8. Public reporting. Each prison system reports every year on access hours, outages and use.

Read the full bill text →

DNA testing has freed hundreds of wrongly convicted men. It has freed very few women — because there is no DNA to test in a case where no crime occurred. Yet that is exactly the kind of case in which most exonerated women were convicted.

Few Conviction Integrity Units are staffed, trained, or resourced for the medical-evidence reanalysis, witness-recantation review, and conflict-of-interest investigation that no-crime cases require. This act creates units that are.

Of the 205 Innocence Project clients exonerated by DNA, 29% involved a false confession (Innocence Project, as of April 14, 2026). A confession that an innocent person gave under hours of pressure looks identical, in a transcript, to a true admission. The only reliable way to tell them apart is to see them happen.

Partial recording — the practice of capturing only the final, summary statement — is the worst of both worlds: it manufactures the appearance of due process while concealing the coercion that produced the statement. This act ends it.

Many states already require recording by statute or court rule, but the rules differ on which crimes and which interviews are covered, and some states have no requirement at all. This act sets one national floor: every custodial interrogation for a felony, recorded from start to finish.

A woman who reports a crime should never be charged for making the report when the evidence supports what she said.

This act puts a second, independent set of eyes on any charge against a person for her own report of a crime, before the case goes to a grand jury. The corroborating evidence in such cases is often in the prosecutor's own file. The act requires that someone outside that office look at it first, and it lets a victim sue officials who retaliate against her for reporting.

Every state must provide counsel at trial and on a first appeal — and then, when those have run, leave the wrongly convicted to fend for themselves. The result is predictable. Many post-conviction petitions are filed by prisoners without lawyers, often without access to the trial transcript.

This act extends the right to counsel through every collateral proceeding in which a constitutional violation may be raised — and through every appeal from the denial of one. Competence is defined by an experience standard, not just a license.

Destroyed or fabricated evidence, and uncorrected errors in court records and pre-sentence reports, can produce a wrongful conviction and keep it in place.

This act makes the intentional destruction, fabrication or concealment of evidence by police, prosecutors, crime laboratories and the contractors that handle evidence for them a criminal offense, and requires referral to the proper disciplinary body. It also creates a simple procedure, on motion by either side, to correct factual errors in a pre-sentence report, judgment or other court record.

An exonerated woman is, on the day she walks out of the courthouse, in most states, in a worse position for support than a paroled one. She has no parole officer with a referral list. She has no halfway-house spot reserved. Some states still have no compensation law at all.

This act establishes a federal minimum floor: every exoneree receives, at the moment of release, the same coordinated reentry support the system provides to parolees. Compensation is paid promptly and in full, and is in addition to reentry support — not in lieu of it.