Live Webcast Today: Exonerees and the Supreme Court

02.26.09

Today’s Innocence Project event in Washington, D.C., featuring exonerees, legal experts and others directly affected by wrongful conviction,

will be broadcast live on the web at 12:30 p.m. EST here

. Tune in, and follow our

live tweets at www.twitter.com/innocenceblog

If you're in the D.C. area,

head over to today's event

– it's free and won't be one you soon forget.

Speakers at today's event include:


Marvin Anderson

, who served 15 years in prison for crimes he didn’t commit. He was exonerated with DNA testing in 2002 – becoming the first person in Virginia exonerated through post-conviction DNA testing.




Rickie Johnson

, who served 25 years at Louisiana’s notorious Angola Farm Penitentiary for a 1982 rape he didn’t commit. Johnson was exonerated in 2008 after the Sabine Parish District Attorney quickly agreed to DNA testing in his case.


Dennis Fritz

, who was convicted of murder in Oklahoma and served 11 years in prison before DNA testing exonerated him in 1999. The wrongful convictions of Fritz and his co-defendant, Ron Williamson, are the subject of John Grisham’s best-selling nonfiction book, “The Innocent Man.”


Michele Mallin

, who was brutally raped in 1985 when she was a 20-year-old sophomore at Texas Tech. She was the fifth victim of a serial rapist on campus, and she identified Timothy Cole as her assailant. Cole was convicted and sentenced to 25 years in prison. In 1999, Cole died in prison at the age of 39. Last year, Mallin learned about evidence of Cole’s innocence and joined his family in an effort to exonerate him posthumously. Mallin testified at an unprecedented hearing in Austin earlier this month, where a judge recommended throwing out Cole’s conviction.


Det. Jim Trainum

, a 25-year veteran of the Washington, DC, Metropolitan Police Department who oversees the department’s Violent Crime Case Review Project, reviewing “cold cases.” Trainum, who handles murder cases, obtained a false confession from an innocent suspect several years ago and now educates fellow police officers and others about wrongful convictions.


David Rudovsky

, one of the nation’s leading authorities on post-conviction remedies under federal law. Rudovsky is a Senior Fellow at University of Pennsylvania Law School and has written scholarly articles and litigation-related books on criminal law, constitutional criminal procedure and evidence. He recently presented about the Osborne case to a National Institute of Justice conference.

They will be joined by several other people exonerated through DNA testing and other leading attorneys in the field. The event is sponsored by Georgetown’s Office of Public Interest and Community Service, the Innocence Project and the Mid-Atlantic Innocence Project.


Read more about the Osborne case

.

Leave a Reply

Thank you for visiting us. You can learn more about how we consider cases here. Please avoid sharing any personal information in the comments below and join us in making this a hate-speech free and safe space for everyone.

This field is required.
This field is required.
This field is required.