MADISON, Wis.
On Christmas Eve 1996, Christopher Ochoa went back to his Texas prison cell and pressed a razor blade to his forearm. He was serving a life sentence for a murder he did not commit and was ready to end it all.
But Ochoa didn’t follow through. And on Friday, he will have a new life awaiting him when he graduates from the University of Wisconsin-Madison Law School the same institution that rescued him from his worst nightmare.
Ochoa, now 39, was the first person exonerated by the Wisconsin Innocence Project, a UW law school course that investigates possible wrongful convictions.
“He was this sort of caged animal and the contrast now with him getting a law degree, the contrast is just amazing,” said John Pray, the project’s co-director.
Ochoa and another man, Richard Danzinger, were convicted in the 1988 rape and murder of Nancy DePriest, a 20-year-old Pizza Hut worker in Austin, Texas. He was 22 when he was found guilty through a confession he says detectives forced him to make up. He spent 12 years behind bars before DNA tests proved someone else killed her.
Ochoa, who grew up in El Paso, hopes to one day become a prosecutor so he can control investigations. He calls American justice the best system in the world, but says corrupt investigators and prosecutors have broken it.
