Lara Benitez

Lara Benitez holds a Bachelor of Law degree from Universidad de San Andres. She graduated summa cum laude with a thesis on the admissibility of evidence in criminal procedures. Her work won the Best Law Degree Thesis Award. She is now studying for a Master’s Degree in Criminal Law at Universidad de San Andrés. Lara has dedicated her career to study and fight wrongful convictions. As a student, she joined Innocence Project -a Non-Profit Organization aimed at exonerating wrongfully convicted people- where she developed almost all her professional career working as a Lawyer. Currently, she is a Professor at Universidad de San Andrés Legal Clinic, where she works in wrongful conviction cases with law students. Also, she is working in the General Secretariat of Criminal Justice Policy of the City of Buenos Aires, designing criminal policy based on empirical evidence. Her research project focuses on the use of expert evidence in criminal proceedings as a cause of erroneous judicial decisions. Her project aspires to design and propose a legal framework to regulate the use of expert evidence with the aim of creating a more truth conducive system that reduces the probability of wrongful convictions and wrongful acquittals.