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Christopher Ochoa Exonerated by DNA Evidence
Nancy DePriest was murdered in 1988 in Austin, Texas, as she prepared to open the Pizza Hut restaurant she managed. There were no witnesses and few leads. Several weeks after the crime, Chris Ochoa, a 22 year-old Mexican American, went to the same Pizza Hut with another man, Richard Danziger. The employees thought the two looked suspicious, so they called the cops. Chris was picked up at his workplace and brought in for questioning. His nightmare had begun.
Chris was interrogated by the police for two full days, with a night of confinement in a hotel room in between. Although there was no evidence linking him to the crime, they told him they knew he was guilty. They told him that he would be placed in a cell where he would be "fresh meat" for other inmates. When he didn't provide the information they wanted, they yelled, pounded the table, and one threw a chair at him, narrowly missing his head. They made him believe that he would certainly get the death penalty unless he confessed. They tapped him on the arm to show him where the needle would be inserted and they showed him pictures of death row. They told him that the "white guys always walk, and the Hispanics always get the needle." They told him, falsely, that his friend Richard Danziger was being interrogated in the next room and was ready to implicate Chris. Over time, Chris wore down and became convinced that he was doomed and that his only choice was whether that doom would be death or prison. To avoid death, he gave the police what they wanted. He signed the confession they had written, endorsing the details they had put down on paper.
In 1996, a prisoner named Achim Josef Marino began sending letters to authorities in Austin saying he alone had killed Nancy DePriest. The letters didn't do any good. In 1999, Chris contacted the Wisconsin Innocence Project. Law students in the project discovered that untested DNA evidence still existed. In 2000, that DNA evidence and other corroborating evidence proved beyond any doubt that Chris and Richard were totally innocent, that Marino alone had killed DePriest. After 12 years of prison, Chris Ochoa was officially cleared of any involvement in the crime and released from prison. Richard Danziger was released a few weeks later. Unfortunately, Richard had been severely beaten by another inmate while in prison. Because of brain damage, Richard's release was delayed so authorities could arrange adequate care outside prison.
Outside the prison gates, Chris was greeted by two mothers, his own and Jeannette Popp, the mother of the victim. The wrongful conviction forced Jeannette to revisit the pain of losing her daughter. And Jeannette came to realize that the police had perpetrated a lie against her for 12 years. The confession concocted by police wrongly included unnecessary brutality, including false claims that her daughter had been repeatedly sodomized and had been forced to beg for her life. Chris and Jeannette became friends, even before Chris was released. She gave him his first gift upon his release- a watch, because, she thought, time matters again to him now.
In 2003, Chris Ochoa went to law school. In 2004, he became a student in the Wisconsin Innocence Project, the same program he'd contacted from his prison cell years earlier.
[Christopher Ochoa and former Illinois Gov. George Ryan.]