The Exonerated-- False Confessions

One of the factors that led to my decision to become a lawyer was a long-standing fear of going to prison for a crime that I did not commit. I am not sure, but my guess is that many people have this fear. It is an irrational stand-in for the very rational preoccupation with the contingency of life. We are all but one chain of events from extreme misfortune. Though being a lawyer does take out some of the bite out of this particular manifestation of that concern, the fear is still there.

In part, as a response to that fear, I have been working on a series of plates depicting persons who falsely confessed to their crimes. The subject matter also appealed to me because conviction-- and, one presumes, execution-- of the innocent turns notions of justice completely on its head, implicating us all in the complete devastation of actual people.

Alejandro Hernandez, depicted here, confessed to murder and a number of sex-related crimes. He served over ten years on death row in Illinois, before his attorneys were able to prove that he could not have done the crimes he was convicted of. The lead attorney in the post-conviction proceedings in which he ultimately won his freedom was the novelist, Scott Turow. Turow, writes about the case in a short book on the death penalty, Ultimate Punishment.

I have done about seven different plates depicting exonerated persons. To make the drawings, I blow up low resolution pictures of people, then work from the pixelated images. On one level, the idea is that the large pixels become reminiscent of DNA; but more than that, I like the optical effect. On the best plates from the series, the face only emerges from a certain distance; closer in, the image dissolves into a collection of abstract hatch marks.

I still have not decided what do with the plates. I don't feel comfortable trying to profit from them. I think that they could be used effectively for fund-raising but have not invested the time necessary to get that ball rolling.