Press Release: Barry Scheck at The Progressive Forum November 18, 2013

For release: June 13, 2013

Barry Scheck, cofounder of the Innocence Project, will speak at The Progressive Forum on Monday, November 18, 2013, at the Wortham Center, Cullen Theater at 7:30. Scheck will sign books and greet fans at the end of the evening in the grand foyer during a special reception with Houston exonerees, students and staff of the Texas Innocence Network, and our audience.

Tickets range from $19 to $79. Tickets are available at ProgressiveForumHouston.org or by calling 832-251-0706. There is no physical box office except at the theater on event night.

The event's associate presenter is the Texas Innocence Network based at the University of Houston Law Center, headed by David R. Dow who will introduce Barry Scheck at the podium.

The exclusive sponsor of this event is law firm Berg & Androphy, Houston, which has sponsored a number of Progressive Forum events.

Texas is a leader in wrongful convictions, and Barry Scheck has said, “For years, Houston has been ground zero in the national epidemic of faulty forensic science.” Scheck is the cofounder and codirector of the Innocence Project, a nonprofit organization created to exonerate the wrongly convicted and reform the criminal justice system. Scheck and Peter Neufield have pioneered the use of DNA evidence in court, and since its founding in 1992, the Innocence Project has been involved in 170 DNA exonerations. The Innocence Project also encourages reforms in many areas of the criminal justice system. These reforms include eyewitness identifications, interrogation methods, and forensic science research.

Scheck is also a partner in the law firm Neufeld, Scheck & Brustin, LLP, specializing in civil rights and constitutional litigation. Scheck has served as president of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers and as a Commissioner on New York State’s Forensic Science Review Board. He is the author of several publications, including Actual Innocence: When Justice Goes Wrong and How to Make It Right (2003) written with Peter Neufeld and journalist Jim Dwyer.

Scheck is a Professor of Law at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in New York City, where he has served on the faculty for thirty-four years. Before joining the faculty of Cardozo, he worked for three years as a staff attorney at The Legal Aid Society in New York City. He attended Yale University as an undergraduate before earning his law degree from Boalt Hall School of Law, University of California at Berkeley. He lives in New York City with his wife and two children.

David R. Dow founded the Texas Innocence Network in March 2000; it is Texas' oldest innocence network and represents both inmates facing execution as well as those in the general prison population. Its non-capital division works to exonerate inmates who did not commit the crimes for which they were wrongfully convicted. TIN works on cases involving DNA evidence, as well as those involving no physical or biological evidence. TIN receives hundreds of requests for assistance each year, and has participated in the exoneration of some dozen inmates. In TIN’s capital division, students assist TIN’s lawyers in representing inmates facing execution. In 2013 alone, TIN obtained last minute stays of execution for two of the six death row inmates it represented.    

Dow teaches at both the University of Houston and Rice University. He earned a B.A. magna cum laude from Rice University, an M.A. in history and J.D. from Yale where he was an editor on the Yale Law Journal. He clerked for Judge Carolyn King of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, and subsequently practiced law at Susman Godfrey, in Houston. He is author of numerous scholarly articles, as well as six books, including The Autobiography of an Execution (2010), which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the winner of the 2010 Barnes & Noble Discover Award for nonfiction. His newest book, Things I've Learned From Dying, will be published in January 2014.

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