​​Director & Board Member

She/Her

Paula Mitchell is the director of the Los Angeles Innocence Project, joining LAIP after serving as the Legal Director at the Loyola Project for the Innocent at Loyola Law School for seven years.

Paula's work focuses on exonerating the wrongly convicted, exposing systemic flaws in the criminal justice system, improving standards for the use of forensic evidence in courtrooms, and advocating for criminal justice reforms needed to increase fairness in the system.  In addition to her work at LAIP, Paula has taught law school courses in habeas corpus, prisoner civil rights litigation, and appellate advocacy. She has also written extensively on California's flawed and costly death penalty system.

Paula is a graduate of Loyola Law School.  Prior to joining LAIP, Paula was Appellate Counsel at Reed Smith LLP, where she represented clients in all stages of civil and criminal appeals.  She clerked for six years for Senior Judge Arthur L. Alarcon of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, where she reviewed over 200 prison civil rights appeals and habeas corpus petitions filed by individuals incarcerated in California state prisons.  She received her BA, cum laude, from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and an MA from the London School of Economics and Political Science.  She is former Chair of the State Bar's Committee on Appellate Courts, she also served on the board of Death Penalty Focus, and currently serves on the board of the California Appellate Project.