The recent “Faces of Wrongful Conviction” conference at UCLA featured a wide variety of speakers, including California’s Senate Majority Leader Gloria Romero, former special prosecutor and federal judge Kenneth Starr, and former Bexar County (TX) District Attorney Sam Milsap. The conference was organized to examine mistakes in the criminal justice system and to explore reforms, particularly in California. A state Senate commission is preparing a study of California’s death penalty system, and some members of the commission participated in the conference.
At the opening event, inmates who had been exonerated and freed from California’s prisons and death row spoke briefly about their cases and attached handcuffs to a wall on stage, symbolizing those still incarcerated who have been wrongly convicted.
“It’s time for California to be humbled by its capacity for error,” noted Stanford University law professor Lawrence Marshall, who organized the first national conference of death row exonerees at Northwestern University Law School in 1998. According to the the Innocence Project at California Western School of Law in San Diego, more than 200 people have been wrongly convicted in the state since 1989. Many of those exonerees were serving long sentences; some were facing execution.
(Los Angeles Times, April 9, 2006) (photo: R. Dieter). See Innocence.
