Seventeen years ago, Christopher Ochoa told a Texas jury exactly how he and a friend repeatedly raped 20-year-old Nancy DePriest and then shot her dead at the Pizza Hut where she worked.
The details were so gruesome that DePriest's mother, Jeanette Popp, fled the courtroom and threw up in a bathroom. Ochoa and his co-defendant, Richard Danziger, who steadfastly maintained his innocence, both received life sentences.
But Ochoa's story was a lie -- a total lie.
He had been threatened with the death penalty by a police detective if he did not admit that he and Danziger murdered DePriest; he also had to testify against Danziger. The two young men worked at a different pizza place and came under suspicion after they toasted DePriest's memory with beers at the scene of the murder.
But the fact that Ochoa confessed falsely did not come to light until 2000, four years after the real killer, already serving three life terms for other crimes, told police in Austin, Texas, that he was responsible for the young woman's death.
The account by Achim Joseph Marino, by then a born-again Christian, had for several years been given short shrift. Eventually, with the help of pro bono attorneys, DNA tests were performed and the two men were exonerated.
Today, Ochoa, 39, and Popp, 56, are testifying in Los Angeles at a hearing of the state's Commission on the Fair Administration of Justice about the ramifications of their experience for California. In particular, they want to express their strong feelings about a subject that many people find difficult to grasp: that innocent people sometimes really do confess to crimes they did not commit.
Ochoa and Popp said they would urge the commission to recommend legislation requiring that police be required to videotape every moment of their contact with a suspect to avoid false confessions.
False confessions "do happen, a lot more often than people think," Ochoa said.
Added Popp: "I have heard lots of people say I would never do that -- never confess to something I didn't do. How do you know what you would do if you were in that interrogation room with the man I call 'El Diablo'? " referring to the lead police investigator.
"Cases like this reveal in very dramatic terms that this does happen -- not just with people who are mentally ill or of limited intelligence or otherwise vulnerable, such as children," said Keith A. Findley, a University of Wisconsin law professor and co-director of the school's Innocence Project. He played an instrumental role in securing freedom for Ochoa and Danziger.
