Paula Mitchell is the director of the Los Angeles Innocence Project at Cal State LA, joining LAIP after serving as the Legal Director at the Loyola Project for the Innocent at Loyola Law School for seven years.
Mitchell’s work focuses on exonerating the wrongly convicted, exposing systemic flaws in the criminal justice system, improving standards for using forensic evidence in courtrooms, and advocating for criminal justice reforms needed to increase fairness in the system.
In addition to her work at LAIP, Mitchell has taught law school courses in habeas corpus, prisoner civil rights litigation, and appellate advocacy. She has also written extensively on California’s flawed and costly death penalty system.
Before joining LAIP, Mitchell was Appellate Counsel at Reed Smith LLP, representing clients in all stages of civil and criminal appeals. She clerked for six years for Senior Judge Arthur L. Alarcon of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. She reviewed over 200 prison civil rights appeals and habeas corpus petitions filed by individuals incarcerated in California state prisons.
Mitchell earned a BA, cum laude, from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and an MA from the London School of Economics and Political Science. She is a graduate of Loyola Law School. A former Chair of the State Bar’s Committee on Appellate Courts, she also served on the board of Death Penalty Focus and currently serves on the board of the California Appellate Project.