Erica J. Suter is an innocence attorney, law professor, and assistant public defender. She directs the Maryland Office of the Public Defender Innocence Project Clinic at the University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law, where she represents Marylanders with claims of innocence and teaches the student attorneys who work beside her. Her practice and scholarship focus on wrongful convictions, Brady violations, police misconduct, and post-conviction law.

  • Professor Suter serves on the Executive Board of the Innocence Network, where she is a member of the membership committee and the research committee. She is vice chair of the Criminal Law and Practice Section Council of the Maryland State Bar Association and a former member of the MSBA Board of Governors. She is a past president of the Maryland Criminal Defense Attorneys Association, the first Asian American to hold that position, and a member of the Judicial Nominating Commission for Prince George's County.

  • Professor Suter is the incoming updating author of Maryland Evidence, State and Federal, originally by Lynn McLain, with prior updates by Leonard R. Stamm. She co-authored, with Marguerite E. Lanaux, "Baltimore Needs More Than a 'Do Not Call' List," published in The Baltimore Sun in July 2026.

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  • Professor Suter was named to the inaugural MD500, the Daily Record's list of Maryland's most influential leaders, in 2026. She received the Carol Hansen Award from the Maryland Office of the Public Defender in 2024, and she has been named to The Daily Record's Criminal Law Power List in 2022 and 2025. She was named to the National Asian Pacific American Bar Association's Best Lawyers Under 40 list in 2014. Under her direction, the Innocence Project Clinic received the Judge Alexander Williams Center honor in 2021 and the Warrior for Justice award from the Maryland Office of the Public Defender in 2022.

    • JD Georgetown University Law Center

    • MA University of Chicago

    • BA Bates College

  • Her advocacy has resulted in the reduction of hundreds of years of incarceration, and the life sentences of more than twenty of her clients have been modified or vacated. Two of her cases became matters of extensive public record. In 2022, she represented Adnan Syed, who was freed after twenty-three years of incarceration. In 2025, she represented Douglass Haynie, whose 1993 first degree murder conviction and life without parole sentence were vacated after thirty-two years of wrongful incarceration, following revelations that the prosecution’s ballistics examiner had falsified his credentials.

  • "I'm a first-generation lawyer and a first-generation American on my mother's side. I believe in second chances and in art as a form of advocacy. My two favorite things, other than my family, are freeing humans and teaching students."