‘Crime, Punishment and Truth By Testing' seminar
Chronicling the UW Law School group's efforts since 1998 to exonerate life-term or death-row prisoners based on DNA and other evidence, the Wisconsin Innocence Project held a seminar titled Crime, Punishment and Truth By Testing\ Tuesday at the Overture Center for the Arts.
In light of Steven Avery's recent charges for the murder of 25-year-old Manitowoc native Theresa Halbach and his 2003 exoneration through the Project from a 32-year prison sentence for a rape he did not commit, the Project sought to explain its role in the justice process.
The Project tries to push through legislation to remedy wrongful convictions as an attempt to reform the evidence-collection process, such as standardizing procedures for interrogation and witness questioning, according to UW-Madison law professor and Project Co-Director Keith Findley.
Findley said eyewitness error accounted for 60 to 85 percent of wrongful conviction.
Because of similar errors in the pre-trial process, Evan Zimmerman of La Crosse, Wis., and Christopher Ochoa of Texas, who both spoke at the event, were both convicted and later exonerated following appellate efforts by the Project.
""I owe them my life and subsequently I always call them my family,"" Evan Zimmerman said. ""You can't imagine the gratitude that I feel toward this particular law school.""
Zimmerman's conviction was in the case of the strangulation death of his former girlfriend.
""The evidence against him was entirely circumstantial and because he was an emotional man who had been distraught about the break-up and had troubles with alcohol at the time, he became a likely suspect and so the police focused in on him immediately,"" Findley said.
Ochoa also experienced the effects of circumstantial evidence after his arrest on suspicion of the murder of a woman in a Texas Pizza Hut restaurant, following an incident in which he posed questions about the highly publicized crime to a facility employee.
He was then subjected to a four-day interrogation process that led to his confession.
""They showed me pictures of death row and said, this is where you're going, this is the cell you're going to live in and you'll never get to hold your family again,"" Ochoa said.
Having no previous criminal record, Ochoa said he was goaded into signing a confession.
""It was [the interrogator's] confession with his details … I just retold them and signed the confession,"" he said.
Thanking the Project for their exonerations, Ochoa and Zimmerman said they are taking life one day at a time: Ochoa, as a law student at UW-Madison, and Zimmerman, who is fighting ""one hell of an uphill battle"" to regain his pre-conviction reputation.
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