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.

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