Chuck Murdoch

My name is Chuck, I am 67 years old. I exist inside a Roman wilderness. My wilderness is a place I call the DARK HOUSE. I’m not supposed to be here. For 10, 884 days I have been lost here.

Chuck Murdoch was found guilty of murder in 1995 in a cold-case prosecution, begun over 12 years after the fact–without any physical evidence tying him to the crime, based solely upon statements by two unreliable witnesses that completely contradict all evidence from the initial investigation.  The People’s Commission for Integrity in Criminal Justice is leading his innocence case and challenging his life without parole plus one year sentence.

His lawyer Jen Sheetz writes in the afterword to his book: 

Chuck maintains his innocence as he has done for three decades now. As noted in Ninth Circuit Chief Justice Kozinski’s dissent almost 15 years ago, the government’s careful coordination between law enforcement, the prosecution and the judiciary restricted the jury’s review to unreliable and mostly false evidence.  This is the mendacious house of cards that the government built his conviction upon. Now, 30 years on, Chuck is still trying to knock it down.

As a post-conviction criminal defense attorney, I have intimately understood arbitrariness. Over the past two decades, in my post-conviction practice throughout the state of California – from San Diego to Shasta – I have come to understand that your zip code fundamentally dictates your access to the constitution and its protections. This is a principle that is not as apparent as the racial, ethnic and class-based constitutional disparities. And, as one might imagine, it exacerbates those disparities. The limited access to constitutional protections deprives individuals of liberty in a very arbitrary manner. I have always seen this elsewhere, in other parts of the country. I saw it in places like Ada, Oklahoma, throughout Louisiana, Texas, etc. As someone who claimed to be Californian, I initially resisted seeing the systemic injustice in California. Two decades later, I am extremely familiar with the constitutional deserts in California. Truly.