Witness to Innocence

P.O. Box 34725 ¨ Philadelphia, PA 19101
Phone: 215-387-1831 ¨ E-mail: witnesstoinnocence@gmail.com

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE CONTACT:
April 3, 2006 Kurt Rosenberg, 215-609-9462
Eunice Timoney Ravenna, 513-579-8547

Exonerated Death Row Prisoner to Speak Out
Talk will highlight injustice, flaws in death penalty

CINCINNATI – A wrongfully convicted man who spent three years on Ohio’s death row before being exonerated will speak here next week about his experience of facing execution knowing he was innocent. Gary Beeman, who was on death row in Ohio from 1976-79, will speak at 3 p.m. on Wednesday, April 11 at the University of Cincinnati College of Law and at 7 p.m. at Xavier University as a part of a statewide series of programs co-sponsored by Witness to Innocence, Ohioans to Stop Executions, and a number of colleges and universities.

Beeman was convicted of aggravated murder in Ohio in 1976 despite firmly maintaining his innocence. He had contended that he was innocent and that an escaped prisoner who testified as the main prosecution witness at Beeman’s first trial was the actual killer. But Beeman was still sent to death row. In 1978, the District Court of Appeals granted Beeman a new trial. On retrial, five witnesses testified that they heard Claire Liuzzo confess to the murder and Beeman, serving as his own attorney, was acquitted in 1979.

“It was stunning when the judge sentenced me,” says Beeman. “It was surrealistic, an unreal experience. My mother actually had a heart attack right there in the courtroom.”

Since Beeman’s exoneration, four more Ohio death row prisoners have been released from death row as a result of their innocence, including three in the past three years. Those three men – Timothy Howard and Gary Lamar James, both released in 2003 – and Derrick Jamison, exonerated in 2005, spent a combined total of 72 years in prison for crimes they did not commit.

Ohio, which has the nation’s fifth largest death row with 196 prisoners awaiting execution, has executed 20 people since it reinstated the death penalty in 1981. Its ratio of executions to exonerations (4 to 1) is troubling to many Ohioans, especially when compared to the national ratio of eight executions to every one exoneration, a figure in itself considered by numerous criminal justice and death penalty experts to be unacceptable. Nearly 50 percent of Ohio’s death row is African-American, although less than 12 percent of the state’s population is African-American. Meanwhile, Ohio has yet to meet standards developed by the American Bar Association for appointment, performance and compensation of counsel for indigent prisoners.

“We’ve tried the death penalty in Ohio and we know it’s just not worth it, especially since we have alternatives that are better and safer for everyone,” says Alice Gerdeman, president of Ohioans to Stop Executions. “Ohioans are outraged by the fact that the death penalty here is simply an inaccurate lottery of geography and skin color.”

Beeman is a member of Witness to Innocence, a Philadelphia-based project of The Moratorium Campaign that brings to light the crisis of wrongful convictions in death sentencing in the United States. The project works with exonerated ex-death row prisoners to draw public attention to their moving stories and to the injustice of the death penalty.

“Justice and innocence don’t have very much relevance in many death penalty cases,” Beeman says. “And I shudder to think about what it’s like on death row in Ohio now. It would be very difficult, if not impossible, for people on death row today to have the access that I had to legal resources then.”