Peter Neufeld co-founded and is Special Counsel at the Innocence Project, a national non-profit organization that uses DNA evidence to exonerate the wrongly convicted. The Project also assists legislatures and executive branches as well as the police, prosecutors, and defense attorneys to bring about reform in criminal justice. The Project has exonerated more than 350 individuals in the United States through post-conviction DNA testing and has been instrumental in the passage of federal legislation and more than a hundred state statutes to improve the quality of justice.
Peter is a founding partner in the New York civil rights law firm of Neufeld Scheck & Brustin, LLP. Neufeld’s focus is constitutional law and civil rights. He has lectured and taught students, lawyers, judges, legislators and scientists on subjects at the intersection of science and criminal justice. Before co-founding the Innocence Project, Peter taught trial advocacy at Fordham University Law School.
From 2014 to 2017, Peter served as a Commission Member of the National Commission on Forensic Science, established by the U.S. Department of Justice and the National Institute of Standards and Technology. From 1995 to his resignation in 2016, Peter served on the New York State Commission on Forensic Science which regulates the two dozen crime laboratories in the state. He is a Member Emeritus of the boards of the Montefiore Medical Center and the Albert Einstein School of Medicine.