For Christopher Ochoa, being in the wrong place at the wrong time got him a life sentence. After being seen eating and drinking with his roommate, Richard Danziger, at a Pizza Hut in Austin, Texas — where a young female employee was recently murdered — Ochoa became a prime suspect in a murder investigation. Days later, as a result of the combination of police pressure, a skeptical attorney and fear of the death penalty, Ochoa falsely confessed and implicated his roommate in an act of violence neither had anything to do with.
Enter the Wisconsin Innocence Project.
Created in 1998 by University of Wisconsin Law School clinical professors Keith Findley and John Pray through the Frank J. Remington Center at the UW Law School, the purpose of the Wisconsin Innocence Project is to provide free legal advocacy for selected inmates claiming innocence for crimes for which they are currently serving time.
After a different Texas inmate serving three life sentences confessed to the murder for which Ochoa was convicted, law students working in the project began to investigate Ochoa’s possible innocence. In 2000, after nearly 12 years of wrongful incarceration, Ochoa — as well as his former roommate Danziger — were exonerated with the help of the Wisconsin Innocence Project.
What can one say that will do justice to the merits of such a program? In interviews, students working in the program appear as mere watchdogs whose purpose is to test the criminal justice system and expose it when it doesn’t get it right. But this isn’t simply a fact-checking website or a group that monitors governmental expenditures because its members really, really hate paying taxes. It is a guarantor of justice and a safeguard against tyranny. The Innocence Project bails us out when the reliably faulty system we designed to create a stable and just society robs innocent people of their right to liberty — and sometimes life.
Work done by innocence projects like ours on Bascom has forced debate and reform in the realms of forced confessions, eyewitness testimony and police questioning tactics. But the important point is how this has been accomplished. Innocence projects accomplished this not just by proving innocent people were being incarcerated, but by proving this was occurring in the most weighty cases that could come before courts. While the Wisconsin Innocence Project has never taken up a death penalty conviction, the implications of these wrongful convictions do extend beyond reforming police investigative techniques to that one place culture warriors love — capital punishment.
On the normal points of emphasis, advocates of the death penalty can run, but they can’t hide. Capital punishment is more expensive in almost every case than a life sentence without parole, is not a deterrent to crime and is generally handed down with a strong bias against lower classes and racial minorities. (Before you say it, that last statistic controls for differential rates of crime between demographic groups).
Innocence projects have highlighted one more point of certainty: Capital punishment kills innocent civilians, plain and simple. We know we have killed innocent people, and we also know we have just barely saved a number more. The American Civil Liberties Union puts the number of inmates found innocent while sitting on death row at 135, more than half of which were exonerated in the last 10 years. That means one person was exonerated for every eight people executed in that period.
These statistics bear disgusting and intolerable implications. And yet they are heartily accepted and supported by a seemingly immovable two-thirds of the public, pro-death-penalty since 1937 according to Gallup.
So while recent revelations owed in part to innocence projects like our own have succeeded in reforming and abolishing unreliable police and courtroom procedures, they have done nothing of the sort for the equally implicated death penalty. The solution to this conundrum lies in the method by which we approach the problem. Whether I think a serial killer should be put to death is a decision inherently based in emotional motivation. Whether I believe police can use certain investigative techniques is more subject to rational argument.
For those who either support or are wavering on the death penalty, I would then ask you: Are the lives of innocent people, past and future, worth sacrificing to gain the emotional satisfaction you so desire by executing a handful of society’s worst offenders, rather than allowing them to rot in prison for the rest of their lives?
Every time we execute a person we place the remainder of that person’s life as a bet on our own ability to predict the future. We say we can be absolutely sure no one will come forward in the future to confess to the crime, no key witness in their trial will be found unreliable, and no new evidence or technology will appear that supports that person’s innocence — even though history says otherwise.
This Friday at the UW Law School, organizers expect up to 10 exonerated individuals to show up for a celebration of 10 years of the Wisconsin Innocence Project. Their stories tell us, without a doubt, that making that bet may be one of the most irresponsible and tragic things we can do.
Alec Slocum ([email protected]) is a senior majoring in philosophy and legal studies.
