Prison work fuels professors’ passion for justice

The seeds of social justice were sown early in the lives of clinical associate professors of law Keith Findley and John Pray.

Both children of the 1960s, they were raised by parents who fought for civil rights and against the Vietnam War — Findley’s father an activist Methodist minister, Pray’s father a UW–Madison professor.

Those seeds reaped a huge harvest earlier this month, when Texas convict Christopher Ochoa was exonerated for a rape and murder he did not commit. Findley and Pray, along with three UW law students, led the effort to convince authorities to test DNA evidence that proved Ochoa was not guilty.

Ochoa’s exoneration was the first for the Wisconsin Innocence Project, run by Findley and Pray out of the Law School’s Frank J. Remington Center. The center is comprised of several clinical projects focused on teaching, service and research in criminal justice.

“There is no needier population than the prison population,” says Findley, a former state public defender. “If you want to work for people who really need your help, prisons are a good place to do it.”

Formed by Findley and Pray 2 1/2 years ago with the assistance of noted attorney Barry Scheck, the Wisconsin Innocence Project investigates claims of innocence by convicts in state and federal prisons, mostly in Wisconsin. And, based on the evidence, sometimes they go to court to overturn what they believe to be wrongful convictions.

Scheck’s Innocence Project, based at Yeshiva University’s Benjamin N. Cardozo Law School in New York, has used modern DNA technology and testing to overturn more than 30 wrongful convictions.

Findley and Pray point to their upbringings as critical to their choice of profession today — and why they started the Wisconsin Innocence Project.

From 1963-66 Findley actually lived in the Philippines, where his father served as a Methodist missionary. After returning to the states, Findley’s dad worked as a campus minister at Wichita State University.

“I grew up around service and justice to the needy,” he says. “On the Fourth of July as a kid, I remember handing out peace balloons.”

Following undergraduate work at Indiana University and law school at Yale, Findley joined the UW Law School’s Legal Assistance to Institutionalized Persons Program in 1985. By 1990 he worked his way up to deputy director of the program and was a clinical assistant professor.

He left the law school for the Wisconsin Public Defender’s Office, where he stayed for 6 1/2 years before returning to the law school in 1997.

Pray, meanwhile, grew up in Madison as his father taught geology at UW–Madison. He, too, remembers the struggle for civil rights, anti-war protests, and his parents’ involvement.

“My parents’ commitment to social justice rubbed off on me to some extent,” he says.

After earning undergraduate degrees at Cornell College and UW-Eau Claire, Pray worked with mentally disturbed children at a group home. He went on to earn a master’s in social work at the University of Georgia, after which he was employed as a social worker before enrolling in the UW Law School.

He earned his law degree in 1986 and immediately was hired at the Remington Center, where he and Findley began working together.

“To me, there’s not a huge jump from working with disturbed kids to working with disturbed adults to working with the prison population,” Pray says. “Some of my old kids are in the prison population.”

Since the release of Ochoa Jan. 16, Findley and Pray have been inundated with phone calls, letters and e-mails requesting their assistance. Pray alone had more than 200 e-mail messages after returning from Texas.

They say the successful outcome has renewed their energy for their work and given the Wisconsin Innocence Project “instant credibility.” Still, they take a pragmatic approach to their jobs.

“It’s not true that everyone in prison is innocent. Most are not,” says Findley. “But we have to listen to people in their situations, be willing to suspend judgement and take them seriously, at least long enough to look into their cases.”

That’s what Findley, Pray and their students did with the Ochoa case. Because critical evidence from the case had been saved, they pressed ahead with their request for DNA testing — and set a captive free.

They realize they won’t always be so fortunate.

“It’s very improbable that most inmates will get out,” adds Pray. “Chris Ochoa had one chance in a billion. I’ve got a file full of letters with requests, and I wonder where the next diamond in the rough is in there.”