The project began between 2000 and 2003, when Simon photographed 46 people who had been wrongfully convicted of violent crimes, mostly on the strength of mistaken eyewitness identification, and later exonerated through DNA evidence via the Innocence Project. Rather than shooting straightforward portraits, she staged each photograph at a location tied to the wrongful conviction, the scene of the crime, the site of the misidentification, an alibi location, a choice meant to underscore how photographic evidence itself (mugshots, lineups) had helped put innocent people away.

The work became one of her best-known early series and was the subject of a MoMA exhibition.