BOOKS: ​“The Trials of Walter Ogrod” Chronicles Pennsylvania Possible Innocence Case

Walter Ogrod was convicted and sentenced to death in Philadelphia in 1996 for the 1988 murder of a 4-year-old girl, whose body was found in a discarded television box. Ogrod, who is developmentally disabled, has long maintained his innocence, but despite significant irregularities in the case and amidst allegations of official misconduct, local prosecutors have fought efforts to obtain DNA testing of the physical evidence and to investigate the role a discredited prison informant played in implicating Ogrod.

A new book, “The Trials of Walter Ogrod,” by Tom Lowenstein chronicles the crime, the trial, and the failures of the criminal justice system in Ogrod’s case. The book tells how a Philadelphia homicide detective interrogated the intellectually limited Ogrod for more than 14 hours before Ogrod signed a 16-page confession that was written by the detective and that was filled with emotionally-laden language Ogrod—with an autism spectrum disorder—would not have used.

Ogrod’s court proceedings have been controversial from the outset. The jury in Ogrod’s 1993 trial voted to acquit, but as the verdict was being read, one juror called out that he had changed his mind, causing a mistrial. Before the second trial, Ogrod was placed with a prison cellmate named John Hall, a snitch so notorious for producing confessions that he was nicknamed “The Monsignor.” Hall claimed that Ogrod had confessed to him, giving a story that was completely different from the written confession extracted by detectives and used in the first trial. Hall also introduced Ogrod to a second informant, who received leniency in his own case after claiming Ogrod had made a confession similar to the story Hall had reported.

Ogrod did not match witness descriptions of the likely perpetrator and no physical evidence linked him to the crime, but a jury convicted him in a retrial in 1996 based upon the informant testimony. A year later, Hall was discredited after being caught fabricating a confession in another high profile Philadelphia murder case.

Ogrod’s lawyers have sought DNA testing of fingernail scrapings taken from the victim, but prosecutors and courts have blocked their efforts. Philadelphia is in the midst of a campaign for District Attorney, and Lowenstein believes the next person elected to that office should take another look at Ogrod’s case and several others like it, in which prosecutors used jailhouse snitches and high-pressure interrogations to obtain convictions.

“What I would like to see is the next DA in Philadelphia do a thorough review of death-penalty and life-imprisonment cases from the 1990s,” he said. “There was a systemic problem with how that DA’s office was prosecuting people.”