Marcus Sapp - Ohio Innocence Project

Marcus Sapp served 13 years in prison after being wrongfully convicted in 2010 of murder and assault that occurred during a home invasion in Southwest Ohio. He was sentenced to prison for a term of 27 years to life.

OIP’s co-founder and director, Professor of Law Mark A. Godsey, investigated Marcus’s case for years. He and his student teams eventually uncovered exculpatory evidence. They discovered that the jury in Marcus’s case never heard evidence that the surviving victim of the home invasion had identified another person shortly after the murder. Because that evidence undermined the entirety of the case against Marcus (which was based solely on the witness’s identification of Marcus), Professor Godsey, OIP’s Rosenthal Post-Graduate Fellow Kate Flexter, and the student fellows working on behalf of Marcus moved for a new trial at which a jury could consider the entirety of the evidence, including that which should have been disclosed before the original trial. A Hamilton County Common Pleas Court judge ordered a new trial and allowed Marcus to be released from prison pending his new trial.

Marcus was released on January 27, 2023. He was home in time to celebrate his mother’s 69th birthday. Since then, Marcus has become a frequent speaker about his experience, educating attorneys and hundreds of high school, college, and law school students. He hopes to move forward with his dreams of owning his own business in the Cincinnati area. You can learn more about Marcus in this short video produced by extraordinary filmmaker Barry Rowen, here