Barry Scheck has been honored as the most outstanding criminal defense lawyer in America. A pioneer of the use of DNA evidence, he co-founded the Innocence Project at Cardozo Law School in New York City. In the past decade, the Project has helped secure the exoneration of more than 200 men previously convicted of crimes they did not commit, many of whom would have faced execution but for the intervention of Scheck and his associates. He describes many of these cases in his book, Actual Innocence: Five Days to Execution and Other Dispatches From the Wrongly Convicted.

Born and raised in New York City, Scheck became active in the civil rights and antiwar movements while still in his teens. He became interested in civil rights law as an undergraduate at Yale University and paid his way through law school at Berkeley with money he won playing poker. Right out of law school, he published an influential book on the legal issues raised by electronic surveillance. Returning to New York City, he served as a public defender in the South Bronx at the height of its mid-‘70s crime wave. He worked for the Legal Aid Society of New York City for three years before joining the faculty of Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University, where he has now taught for over 27 years.

Scheck may be best known to the American public as the DNA expert on the O.J. Simpson defense team, an occasion he saw as an opportunity to promote higher standards in the handling of DNA evidence. He was also part of the defense team for Louise Woodward, the British au pair accused of murdering her infant charge in Massachusetts. He has frequently served as an expert advisor to law enforcement agencies, including the FBI, and has assisted in the investigation of unsolved crimes such as the JonBenet Ramsey murder. He has also reported on high-profile cases, including the Oklahoma City bombing, as a legal analyst for NBC News. He has served as counsel in numerous civil and criminal actions involving the rights of battered women and incidents of police brutality, including the Abner Louima police assault incident in New York. He co-founded the Innocence Project after six years of litigation to establish standards for the use of DNA evidence in U.S. courts.