Meet Andrea Hayduk

Tennessee Innocence Project Board member Andrea Hayduk

Profile by Brooke Wanser

Andrea Hayduk says she doesn’t have a story for how she ended up in law. But the passion in her voice as she describes wrongs in the criminal justice system shows she ended up in the right place.

“I think this work is at the heart of what defense work is,” she said of the Tennessee Innocence Project.

As an English major in college, Hayduk said she enjoyed literature and writing, and figured a legal career would be a good space to use those skills.

After attending the University of Tennessee’s College of Law with TIP co-founder Stephen Ross Johnson, Hayduk moved to Maryland and began practicing criminal defense with an attorney who specialized in DUI cases. The upside to practicing DUI law was the ability to litigate regularly in court.

“I was uniquely positioned to get a lot of trial experience right out of the gate,” she said.

Hayduk moved back home to Chattanooga for over a decade, before recently settling in McLean, Virginia with her family.

In law school, Hayduk recalled a seminar on wrongful convictions, work Johnson was already heavily involved with. “I remember listening to this even back then and thinking, that’s the best, most important work a lawyer can do,” Hayduk said. “I always thought I’d do some advocacy work.”

Even in cases where everyone may have the best intentions, “Sometimes we just get it wrong, and we have to be open to that fact,” Hayduk said.

“I want people to understand the extreme impact of something that’s become a pop culture phenomenon,” she continued. “It’s not just a case study or something you read about in a book. Every single one of those individuals matter.”

Hayduk wants to continue bringing awareness to false convictions and the need for sentencing reform, especially in the juvenile justice system.

“Being charged with a crime, it can happen,” she said, “and it can happen to the best of us.”