Mike Udvardy
Founder and Director, Digital Innocence Initiative | Founder, IRIS LLC
Board-Certified Criminal Defense Investigator | Cold-Case Specialist | Digital-Evidence Strategist
Mike Udvardy’s work spans complex pre-arrest, pretrial, appellate, cold-case, and post-conviction investigations.
Across that work, one question has remained constant:
What evidence exists that has not yet been found, pursued, or fully understood?
The Investigative Foundation
Mike began working as an investigator nearly a decade before founding IRIS LLC in 2001, before the internet and modern digital technology became central to investigative work.
His foundation was traditional investigation—using records, historical research, genealogy, witness location, interviews, and field investigation to develop evidence, reconstruct events, pursue difficult leads, and locate hard-to-find witnesses.
Mike’s professional background also included emergency medical services, where rapid assessment, prioritization, situational awareness, and timely decision-making were essential—skills that also informed his investigative approach.
As technology transformed investigations, Mike incorporated digital evidence without changing the fundamental investigative questions:
What evidence should exist? What was collected? What was missed? And what do the underlying facts actually show?
Cases That Shaped the Work
Several investigations became especially important in shaping Mike’s approach.
Michael Skakel: Look Beyond the Original Case File
In the Michael Skakel case, Mike served as lead investigator in a broad post-conviction reinvestigation involving alibi evidence, third-party culpability, witness credibility, historical records, geographic analysis, and timeline reconstruction.
His work included locating Dennis Ossorio, an alibi witness who supported Skakel’s account of his whereabouts; investigating Tony Bryant’s third-party culpability claim; locating witnesses connected to the Elan School who challenged allegations made by Greg Coleman; and examining Coleman’s credibility, potential financial motives, and related records.
Mike also developed additional Belle Haven witnesses, including a person who was among the last known to have seen Martha Moxley. He used detailed geographic analysis to examine locations, movements, sightlines, and timelines.
Those findings contributed directly to the post-conviction case that ultimately led to Skakel’s release.
The work reinforced a principle that remained central to Mike’s investigative approach:
The original case file is not necessarily the complete evidentiary picture. A thorough reassessment can reveal overlooked witnesses, unpursued leads, conflicting evidence, and facts the original investigation never developed.
Anthony Christiana: Identify the Right Evidence
Anthony Christiana was charged with murder after an eyewitness described the gunman as clean-shaven.
IRIS became involved to examine a cell phone for potentially relevant digital evidence. When the expected photographs were not found, Mike reassessed the situation, identified another phone that could contain the relevant evidence, and located it for forensic examination.
A photograph recovered from that device, taken approximately 14 hours after the murder, showed Christiana with a mustache and goatee, materially conflicting with the eyewitness description.
The murder charge was ultimately dropped.
Lesson: Case assessment determines what forensic examination has an opportunity to find.
Cecil Grant: Determine What the Evidence Actually Shows
In Grant v. Commissioner of Correction, Mike reviewed historical telephone records involving a key prosecution witness and identified conflicts between the objective records and testimony presented at trial.
The records showed that the witness’s phone had not made calls to the businesses that the witness and an investigating detective testified it had called.
Mike documented his findings and testified during the habeas proceeding. In 2026, the Connecticut Supreme Court relied extensively on his investigative report and testimony in concluding that the unexamined telephone records could have created reasonable doubt and ordered Grant’s convictions vacated and a new trial.
Lesson: The defense must independently determine what the underlying evidence actually shows.
Vernon Horn and Marquis Jackson: Identify What Is Missing
The wrongful convictions of Vernon Horn and Marquis Jackson demonstrated why the defense must also ask what evidence should exist but is missing.
Historical telephone records had been produced, but important provider information needed to meaningfully evaluate the cell-site evidence was absent.
That information was later recovered through the continuing Federal Defender reinvestigation, allowing the evidence to be evaluated in a materially different way.
Horn and Jackson ultimately had their convictions vacated and charges dismissed after together serving approximately 34 years in prison.
Lesson: Having digital evidence is not the same as having the complete evidentiary picture.
From Casework to Digital-Evidence Readiness
Across these and other cases, a recurring digital-evidence problem became increasingly clear.
Important digital evidence was too often being recognized late, incompletely examined, or never meaningfully investigated by the defense.
Alongside this casework, Mike worked with the Connecticut public defender system to develop and implement digital-evidence training for attorneys and investigators.
The goal was not to turn defense professionals into forensic examiners. It was to give them enough practical knowledge to recognize digital-evidence issues early and respond effectively.
The guiding principle was simple:
Fundamentals before forensics.
Applied in actual cases, the approach produced meaningful results: it prevented arrests and other wrongful outcomes, contributed to overturning wrongful convictions, and was successfully used by public defenders beyond Mike’s own cases.
Those methods became the foundation of DII’s digital-evidence readiness approach.
Building the Digital Innocence Initiative
By 2018, that approach had matured beyond individual investigations.
When identified early, digital evidence could prevent an arrest, undermine an unsupported accusation, or change the course of a case. Evidence missed or inaccessible at the time could still prove innocence years later.
Mike began developing the Digital Innocence Initiative (DII) in 2018 and publicly launched it in 2019 to make the approach available beyond individual cases and a single public defender system.
Its mission is direct:
Prevent and overturn wrongful convictions through digital-evidence readiness for public defense.
Extending the Work to Past Convictions
Mike also undertook a practitioner review of wrongful-accusation and wrongful-conviction cases involving material digital evidence.
The review identified recurring problems in older cases and helped establish post-conviction digital-evidence review as another part of DII’s work.
Historical cell-site evidence was the most common recurring issue: 12 of the 20 wrongful-conviction cases raised significant questions about whether the cell-site evidence had been adequately evaluated by the defense.
The review also reinforced a principle from Mike’s cold-case work: advances in extraction, recovery, device repair, and forensic technology can create new opportunities to examine evidence that could not be meaningfully evaluated during the original case.
That work expanded DII’s focus from preventing wrongful convictions in active cases to identifying past convictions that may warrant renewed digital-evidence review.
From Proven Practice to a National Framework
The methods developed through casework and public-defense implementation became the National Digital Evidence Readiness Framework for Public Defense.
At the case level, the Framework uses the Digital Evidence Case Assessment Method (DECAM) to give defense attorneys and investigators a repeatable way to assess digital-evidence issues, determine what matters, identify what may be missing, and decide what action is needed.
The Digital Evidence Toolbox supports that process with free working resources, guidance, checklists, and technical information defense professionals can use in actual cases.
DERU—the Digital Evidence Review Unit— provides the office-level implementation pathway for public defender agencies. Rather than requiring an agency to create a new forensic lab or specialized department, DERU gives an office a practical way to incorporate digital-evidence readiness into existing casework using its current attorneys, investigators, and resources.
DERU partner offices also become part of the Digital Innocence Coalition, connecting participating public defender agencies through shared resources, training, practitioner exchange, and lessons from recurring digital-evidence issues.
The work has since extended beyond Connecticut through public defender partnerships, training, and implementation across multiple jurisdictions.
The practices underlying the Framework have proven effective in preventing and overturning wrongful convictions and, when used early, have prevented arrests in most cases.
Current Work
Mike continues to direct IRIS LLC and lead the Digital Innocence Initiative, while remaining actively involved in complex investigations, cold cases, post-conviction review, and public-defense training.
He is also a co-founder of eLab Digital Forensics LLC, which provides advanced digital-forensic and technical services specifically for public defenders and the defense community—built by the defense, for the defense.
His work remains grounded in the same investigative principles that shaped the Initiative:
Find what was missed. Determine what the evidence actually shows. Act before the opportunity is lost.
Explore the National Digital Evidence Readiness Framework
Explore the Digital Evidence Toolbox