Brittney Plesser | Fair Law Project / Oregon Innocence Project | Senior Staff Attorney
Brittney Plesser earned two Bachelor of Arts degrees in Women’s Studies and Business Economics from the University of California, Santa Barbara. Brittney’s background in feminist theory drew her to law school to better understand institutions and government power. She earned her Juris Doctor from Lewis & Clark Law School, cum laude, in 2015. Brittney discovered her passion for assisting people who are incarcerated while working for the ACLU of Oregon in 2013. She was tasked with assessing uses of force in an Oregon jail and has never looked back. She then assisted in a capital murder case to study Oregon’s capital sentencing trends as compared with crime severity. She has been doing innocence work since 2014, when she began conducting research on national trends in the innocence movement in advance of Oregon Innocence Project’s launch. From there, she went to work at the California Innocence Project in San Diego, a project that is responsible for dozens of exonerations throughout southern California. She took what she learned at the California Innocence Project and returned to Portland to work with the newly established Oregon Innocence Project. Brittney now works as an attorney at Oregon Innocence Project. In addition to supervising law students and litigating innocence cases with a focus on forensic and social sciences, Brittney is a member of OIP’s steering committee, which makes case and policy determinations for the project.
JD, Lewis & Clark Law School, cum laude
BA, University of California, Santa Barbara