On May 10, The Salt Lake Tribune interviewed Dan Medwed, Professor of Law at the University of Utah S.J. Quinney College of Law, on the exoneration of Debra Brown, who was recently released after serving 17 years in the Utah State Prison after a judge found her “factually innocent” of murder based on new facts.
Brown’s was the first case brought under a new Utah law that allows convictions to be challenged on the basis of new evidence, even non-DNA evidence. Witnesses testified to seeing the victim alive after the time prosecutors in Brown’s 1995 trial claimed she committed the murder.
Medwed is a board member of the Rocky Mountain Innocence Center, a nonprofit organization that championed Brown’s case. He told The Tribune that, “Those of us involved in this work see this is a pivotal moment in history to implement some key reforms to facilitate the exoneration of innocent people through non-DNA cases.”
The Tribune article is available here.