His work this time involves racial bias in jury selection, which is one part of the systemic criminal justice reform Carrington has dedicated his professional life to addressing. 
 
Carrington is the founding director of The Mississippi Innocence Project (MIP) at the University of Mississippi School of Law. MIP is dedicated to freeing wrongly convicted citizens and addressing inequities in the criminal justice system. Previously, as a trial lawyer at the Public Defender Service in Washington, D.C., and as a fellow at Georgetown Law Center, Carrington has always relished speaking truth to power and confronting injustice. 
 
He laughs as he remembers his bewildered mother asking him as a teenager, “Why are you so mad all the time?” 
  
As someone who had rooted for the underdog from an early age, he found that his time at StC in the 1970s and 1980s informed his worldview. “St. Christopher’s sharpened that sense in me,” said Carrington. “I had some teachers who made us aware of civil rights, social inequities, and placed a premium on healthy skepticism and critical thinking. I’ve been pleased to see that the School has continued to inculcate and sharpen in its students a sense of community responsibility,” he said. 
 
Early in his professional career, Carrington taught at Baylor School in Chattanooga, Tennessee, where he endeavored to open his students’ eyes and minds to the wider world. Carrington appealed to their sense of justice through his coursework, and, in doing so, realized that he wanted to effect change more directly. 
 
“I wanted to be in court, I wanted to face off against prosecutors and judges, and I wanted to talk to juries about these cases. I wanted to present them with the facts and have them do the hard work of citizen engagement, whether that be in convicting my client, or acquitting them,” he said. 
 
Carrington’s work with the MIP has earned the organization national recognition and captured the public’s attention several times. He teamed up in 2018 with Washington Post reporter Radley Balko to publish “The Cadaver King and the Country Dentist: A True Story of Injustice in the American South,” and his work to exonerate three clients from Mississippi’s death row has made national news. 
 
Many of the cases Carrington works on don’t simply feature wrongful convictions. There are systemic barriers to justice that he works actively to correct. “It may or may not be an innocence case, but the reality is that many of these cases are compromised,” Carrington said. “It may be shoddy lawyering or bogus forensic science, and there is value in exposing those things and in seeking a remedy for them. Some are perdurable. It’s 2026, and we’re back at the Supreme Court on a race bias and jury selection issue, same as we were in 2019.” 
 
Carrington, inspired by his sense of justice, feels grateful for the chance to be involved in these cases. “If you’re a lawyer and you’re tasked with retelling or translating someone’s story for a judge or jury, you’re an advocate. I think that is a deeply moral act. People thank me for the work I do, but the truth of the matter is that it’s a privilege; I’m the real beneficiary.”