Olivia Vigiletti, ’22, is a clinical fellow in the Michigan Innocence Clinic at the University of Michigan Law School.
The fellowship has brought Vigiletti back to her native state of Michigan from Georgia, where she worked both as a public defender in Fulton County and as a staff attorney for the Georgia Innocence Project.
During her time at the Georgia Innocence Project, she developed a regional focus on errors in the criminal legal system in Chatham County, a community with 2 percent of Georgia’s population but closer to 20 percent of known wrongful convictions. She also explored whether and how the use of machine learning could assist in post-conviction review.
Vigiletti has a special interest in the intersection of wrongful conviction and removal of non-US citizens. As a litigator, she has grappled with the lack of sufficient support and processes for reversing removal orders that relied at least in part on wrongful convictions for those who manage to win their cases on post-conviction review.
She has dedicated her career to addressing structural oppression in all forms and spent nearly a decade before her legal career addressing many of the social determinants of incarceration, including food access, addiction, and housing insecurity. This has provided the basis for her identity as a relentless advocate and movement lawyer.