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Centurion Ministries

The Freeing The Innocent Imprisoned Committee of NACDL has worked closely with Centurion Ministries (CM) of Princeton, New Jersey, to aid efforts to establish the innocence of men and women who were wrongfully convicted and gain their release from prison. CM was founded in 1983 by a dedicated lay minister James McCloskey, a former corporate executive who traded in his Wall Street suspenders for a Masters of Divinity degree from Princeton University. CM is a non-profit organization whose singular mission is to liberate from prison and vindicate individuals who are completely innocent of crimes for which they have been convicted and imprisoned.

Centurion Ministries usually takes on cases of inmates who have been sentenced to life terms or were designated for execution. Since 1983, CM's extraordinary efforts and commitment have resulted in freeing more than 14 innocent people from prison.

Centurion Ministries is a small organization whose limited resources are not able to meet the demands of the many requests for assistance which it receives. Therefore, CM has established a list of several criteria to be met before they will consider a case.

• Individual must have been sentenced to death or a life sentence with little chance of parole for at least 15 years;
• Individual must be 100% innocent of the conviction and have had absolutely no involvement whatsoever with the crime. This eliminates self-defense or accidental death cases;
• CM does not take child sexual abuse cases because they require a special expertise that CM does not possess; and
• Individual must be indigent and have pretty much exhausted their appeals. CM is a last resort for cases which would otherwise not be heard.

Centurion Ministries
32 Nassau St., Third Floor
Princeton, NJ
(609) 921-0334







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