Word: ochoa
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...learned that his office had mistakenly prosecuted two men for the 1988 murder of Nancy DePriest, a 20-year-old mother killed at the Pizza Hut where she worked. To Earle, it had seemed a horrific but fairly straightforward case: not long after the murder, a man named Christopher Ochoa, who worked at another Austin Pizza Hut, signed an intricately detailed confession. Ochoa said that he and a co-worker, Richard Danziger, had raped DePriest and that Ochoa then shot her in the head. The confession said the two had sexually violated her corpse and then washed...
Danziger denied the crime from Day One, but Ochoa's graphic confession helped convict them both. Partly because neither Danziger nor Ochoa had the violent criminal history typically needed to convince jurors of future dangerousness, Earle's office didn't seek the death penalty; the two were sentenced to life in prison. But in 1996 another Texas inmate, Achim Marino, started writing letters--to police, to the Austin American-Statesman, to Governor George W. Bush and eventually to the D.A.'s office--saying he had killed DePriest. Few believed him until 2000, when DNA tests revealed that Marino...
...Ochoa's attorneys, Keith Findley, says his client signed the confession only because police had threatened that he would get the death penalty if he didn't. Earle and assistant D.A. Claire Dawson-Brown, who worked on the case, say Ochoa may have been frightened in the police station, but they point out that he told the same story for years afterward. Nonetheless, two innocent men had been convicted--and one will pay for the rest of his life. In 1991 a fellow inmate wearing steel-toed shoes kicked Danziger in the head. Part of his brain...
Earle was devastated. He felt awful for the victim's family, for Danziger and Ochoa, and, frankly, for himself. He told Bryan Case Jr., one of his most trusted assistant D.A.s, he was sure the Danziger-Ochoa debacle would mean the end of his political career. But instead of hunkering down, Earle admitted the system had screwed up. He asked Case to lead a task force to review hundreds of the office's old cases for any other errors. If an inmate still claimed innocence and if biological material from the crime still existed, prosecutors investigated further. Eventually they whittled...
...doesn’t find the concept of “non-gossip” amusing. “I don’t know, that stuff just isn’t funny,” offered Stevens in the way of analysis…Karen I. Ochoa ’05 likes “The Sopranos.” “It’s so good!” she remarks…Jamie C. Rogers ’04 hates shopping period. “Ugh,” she says...