TBA Law Blog


Posted by: Azya Thornton on Jan 31, 2025

Knoxville attorney Stephen Ross Johnson has worked to reestablish the University of Tennessee College of Law Legal Clinic’s commitment to addressing wrongful convictions. In 2000, Johnson, a student at the time, was one of the founding members of an innocence project, which developed into the Innocence and Wrongful Convictions Clinic. In 2018, the clinic was temporarily shut down to develop the Tennessee Innocence Project (TIP), a statewide organization with a mission to exonerate individuals with innocence claims. Since TIP, now based in Nashville and Memphis, has thrived, Johnson is returning his focus on wrongful conviction work in East Tennessee and Appalachia. The new Wrongful Convictions Clinic will maintain a small caseload of clients referred by local courts, prosecutors, defense attorneys or through collaborations with innocence clinics nationwide. Johnson, a partner at Ritchie, Johnson & Stovall, has spent three decades defending criminal cases in state and federal courts nationwide. Read more in a press release from the law school.