A small photo hanging in Larry Marshall’s law-school office depicts a longhaired Rolando Cruz and a taller, rangier Rubin “Hurricane” Carter getting ready to rumble, while Marshall stands between them, his arms outstretched. All three are smiling. “That was taken on death row,” Marshall says. The three men have been instrumental in pulling together this weekend’s National Conference on Wrongful Convictions and the Death Penalty, being held at Northwestern University’s School of Law: Cruz was the instigator, Marshall the main organizer, and Carter the inspiration.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
When Carter was released from prison in 1988 he moved to a commune in Canada. He didn’t stay long, though it was an amicable parting. “Rubin had sort of been in a commune for 20 years,” Marshall says. Members of the commune had been in the ex-boxer’s corner when no one else was, and they’d forced the issue of Carter’s wrongful conviction in the courts. “Carter started a group with them called the Association in Defense of the Wrongly Convicted,” says Marshall, “and sometime around 1992 they had their first conference up there. They had a bunch of wrongly convicted people from Canada, they had one of the Birmingham Six there from England, they had a couple of folks from the States there. These folks shared their stories, they had experts, they had sessions. I left that conference just feeling so energized and alive and so changed that I felt this is something we ought to do in the States.”
Since 1973, one woman and 73 men have been released from death row. Marshall has been involved in seven of those cases. When he began putting together a conference last November, he called several people who’d been closely involved with wrongful convictions, including David Protess, the journalism professor whose class project turned up the evidence that proved the innocence of the Ford Heights Four; lawyer Rob Warden, who cowrote two books on wrongful convictions; and Locke Bowman, legal director of the MacArthur Justice Center, a cosponsor of the conference.
Part of the reason the inmates feel that way, says Marshall, is that “in many ways the wrongly convicted are treated a whole lot worse than the rightly convicted. The rightly convicted end up going through gradual-release programs. They go from maximum to medium to minimum in some cases, they get work release perhaps for the last year or so of their sentence. They get supervision from the probation department, with help in finding jobs and skills and education. They get, at the very least, a small amount of money when they get out to buy some clothes. Not so with people who’ve been wrongly convicted. A judge declares them innocent, the prosecutor drops the charges–and there they are the next morning, out on the curb with nothing. The rightly convicted did something to deserve being punished. These folks are completely victims–and yet they’re just left out there in the cold. Predictably, some of them have great difficulties.” He adds that there are groups outside the system that try to help out, but they’re limited in what they can do.
