A free public Symposium on "Innocence and the Death Penalty" on Monday, April 28 at the Orpheum Theater will bring to Madison a panel of individuals closely connected to the issue of the death penalty. The speakers will include former Governor George Ryan of Illinois, who last year historically commuted the death sentences of all 167 people on death row in Illinois, and Christopher Ochoa, a wrongfully convicted Texas man who served 12 years of a prison term for a crime he did not commit, before being exonerated and released with the help of University of Wisconsin Law School students working on his case.
The event will take place from 4:30 to 6:30 p.m. Sponsors of the Symposium include the Wisconsin Innocence Project of the Frank J. Remington Center at the University of Wisconsin Law School, and the Criminal Law Section of the State Bar of Wisconsin.
Joining Ryan and Ochoa will be Jeanette Popp, mother of the murdered young woman for whose death Ochoa was wrongly convicted; and Professor Larry Marshall, Legal Director of the Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern University School of Law, who played an instrumental role in the process leading to Gov. Ryan's decision to grant blanket commutations.
The Symposium will examine the fairness and efficacy of the death penalty, the lessons to be learned from the experiences of other states that impose the ultimate punishment, and the implications of those lessons for the criminal justice system.
In addition, individual presenters will discuss their own experiences:
? Governor Ryan will speak about the events and factors that led him to his decision to commute the death sentences of everyone on Illinois death row.
? Christopher Ochoa will talk about his experience in the criminal justice system and the ways in which the existence of the death penalty contributed to his wrongful conviction. Ochoa was released from prison in 2001 after the Wisconsin Innocence Project successfully obtained DNA testing that proved he did not commit the crime.
? Jeanette Popp will describe her experience as a victim of a system that failed completely to provide justice, her experience several years later when she met the man who actually raped and murdered her daughter, and her efforts to have his life spared.
Questions about the fallibility of the criminal justice system have sharpened the debate over the death penalty. That debate is getting renewed attention in Wisconsin, as legislation has been introduced to reinstate the death penalty in this state. Wisconsin has not had the death penalty since 1853.
Since reinstatement of the death penalty in the United States in 1973, 107 people in 25 states have been released from death row based on evidence of their actual innocence. Confidence in the criminal justice system has been further shaken by DNA exonerations in non-capital cases. Since 1989, 123 wrongly convicted people have been exonerated through postconviction DNA testing. Of those, 12 were capital cases. Two of the DNA exonerations have been Wisconsin cases. Experts agree that these exonerations account for only a small percentage of the actual wrongful convictions in this country.
The symposium is approved for 2 general CLE credits.
For more information, Law School contacts are:
Keith Findley 262-4763 -- kafindle@wisc.edu
John Pray 263-7461 -- japray@wisc.edu
Mary Prosser 265-1159 -- mmprosser@wisc.edu
Submitted by on April 2, 2003
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