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By Katy Reckdahl   

"The bottom line is that The Exonerated is not a piece of fiction," says local defense attorney Billy Sothern. The play is especially relevant in Louisiana, he says, a state with a history of wrongful convictions and one that national Innocence Project attorney Vanessa Plotkin recently called "a hub of exoneration."

Sothern believes that this week's performances at the Saenger Theatre bring one main point to mind: "They should force us to consider whether the state of Louisiana should have the death penalty," he says.

Through his work at the Louisiana Crisis Assistance Center, Sothern defends people who receive the death penalty. On June 19, Sothern and a client's mother were flown to New York for a performance of The Exonerated at the Bleecker Street Theater.

Afterward, Sothern and Pauline Matthews took questions from the audience about the case of Ryan Matthews, a current death-row inmate who was 17 when he was arrested for the 1997 murder of a Bridge City grocer. Matthews is now awaiting an exoneration hearing ordered by the Louisiana Supreme Court after Sothern's investigation found that DNA evidence left at the scene matched someone else.

At the Bleecker Street Theater, audience members asked very basic questions. If Matthews is innocent, they asked, why is he still in prison? (The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled, answered Sothern, that innocence alone is not grounds for a new trial.) Can Ryan sue for damages? (Not in Louisiana, where district attorneys generally have immunity.) What was Matthews' defense attorney like, asked one person? (Matthews, like almost all death-row inmates, was represented by court-appointed attorneys, who work under overwhelming caseloads and with insufficient resources to devote to a capital case.)

Center for Equal Justice attorney Nick Trenticosta has heard similar questions during his nearly 20 years defending death-row inmates, including John Thompson. He points out that, since 1973, there have been 111 death-row exonerations. Six have come from Louisiana.

"When a plane goes down, $100 million goes into investigating why it happened," says Trenticosta. "We've got 111 exonerations, but nobody's doing anything. That's what astounds me."  

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