The Wrongfully Convicted

Perry Lott was a young man of 24 working in Ada, Oklahoma in 1987 -- a former schoolteacher who had recently moved to Oklahoma from Wisconsin -- when he was accused, charged and convicted of rape in 1987.  He was wrongly convicted based on faulty eyewitness identification by the accuser based on an unduly suggestive lineup, and sentenced to 300 years in prison.  He spent the next 30 years in prison claiming his innocence.  He was released in 2018 at the age of 56 based on a DNA test in 2014 that showed he was not the rapist.

Michael L. Radelet is Professor, Department of Sociology, University of Colorado-Boulder.  He completed his Ph.D. at Purdue in 1977 and post-doctoral training in Psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin Medical School, and then spent 22 years at the University of Florida before moving to Boulder in 2001.  From 1996-2001 he served as Chair, Department of Sociology, University of Florida, and from 2004-2009 was the Chair of the Sociology Department in Boulder.  Radelet’s research focuses on capital punishment, especially the problems of erroneous convictions, racial bias, and ethical issues faced by health care personnel who are involved in capital cases and executions.  His work on erroneous convictions (with Hugo Adam Bedau) is widely credited with introducing the “innocence argument” into contemporary death penalty debates.  In 2002, at the request of Illinois Governor George Ryan, he completed a study of racial biases in the death penalty in Illinois that Governor Ryan used in his decision in 2003 to commute 167 death sentences.  Radelet has testified in approximately 75 death penalty cases, before committees of both the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives, and in legislatures in seven states.  He has worked with scores of death row inmates and gone through “last visits” with 50, and also works closely with families of homicide victims in Colorado.

Thomas Webb III grew up in St. Louis, Missouri, and Chicago Illinois. In 1982, the 22-year old Webb moved to Norman, Oklahoma, with a friend. Shortly thereafter, a man broke into the apartment of a 20-year old woman in the early hours of March 20. She was robbed and forcibly raped.  The victim identified Webb from a photo line-up. She had been unable to identify anyone from the first photo spread, and a second spread included only two photographs from the original one: Webb and someone who did not resemble her description of the attacker.  In the 1983 trial, Webb was convicted and sentenced to 60 years in prison.  In 1996, DNA testing of forensic evidence from the scene eliminated Webb as a potential perpetrator, and he was released from prison on May 24, 1996, after being locked up nearly 14 years.

This panel will be composed of individuals who are family members of either individuals who were wrongfully convicted and later exonerated or family members of victims in a case where someone was wrongfully convicted and then later exonerated.

Born in Jonesboro, Arkansas, John Grisham dreamed as a child of being a professional baseball player. Realizing he didn’t have the right stuff for a pro career, he shifted gears and majored in accounting at Mississippi State University. After graduating from law school at “Ole Miss” in 1981, he went on to practice law for nearly a decade in Southaven, specializing in criminal defense and personal injury litigation. In 1983, he was elected to the state House of Representatives and served until 1990.  Long before his name became synonymous with the modern legal thriller, John Grisham was working 60-70 hours a week at a small Southaven, Mississippi, law practice, squeezing in time before going to the office and during courtroom recesses to work on his hobby—writing his first novel.  Grisham spent three years on A Time to Kill, finishing it in 1987.

Since first publishing A Time to Kill in 1988, Grisham has written one novel a year, and all of them have become international bestsellers. There are currently over 300 million John Grisham books in print worldwide, which have been translated into 40 languages. Nine of his novels have been turned into films. The Innocent Man (October 2006) marked his first foray into non-fiction. In 2018, it became a Netflix docuentary.

When he’s not writing, Grisham devotes time to charitable causes, including most recently his Rebuild The Coast Fund, which raised 8.8 million dollars for Gulf Coast relief in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. He also keeps up with his greatest passion: baseball. The man who dreamed of being a professional baseball player now serves as the local Little League commissioner. The six ballfields he built on his property have played host to over 350 kids on 26 Little League teams.

This panel will be composed of individuals who were wrongfully convicted and later exonerated.