Hayden Davis is the founder and executive director of the Accurate Justice Project. He leads our efforts around the country to ensure that forensic evidence that could be used to solve crimes or free the innocent does not fall through the cracks.
Hayden came to this work through his involvement with the Georgia Innocence Project—an organization dedicated to preventing and correcting wrongful convictions in the Deep South. He began his career as the Georgia Innocence Project’s first head of public policy, where he crafted and lobbied for reforms to improve evidence storage practices and provide compensation for exonerees (including Georgia’s Wrongful Conviction and Incarceration Compensation Act).
It was at the Georgia Innocence Project that Hayden first learned about the problem of undisclosed forensic database evidence, specifically undisclosed CODIS hits. After discovering that this crucial exculpatory evidence was going ignored not just in Georgia but all across the nation, Hayden developed the first model policy to guarantee the disclosure of exculpatory CODIS hits and the investigation of hits in cold cases. He founded the Accurate Justice Project in 2025 to push for the adoption of these reforms nationwide.
In addition to his leadership of the Accurate Justice Project, Hayden is a consumer protection lawyer focused on protecting Americans’ right to privacy and holding big tech platforms accountable for harms caused by intentionally addictive design.
He received his B.A. from Emory University, and his J.D., cum laude, from Harvard Law School, where he was awarded the Roger Fisher and Frank E.A. Sander Prize for his writing on dispute resolution and access to courts. During law school, he directed the Harvard Prison Legal Assistance Project, which represents people incarcerated in Massachusetts in prison disciplinary and parole proceedings. He is admitted to practice law in Georgia.