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00:00:10>>From The Center for the Study and Teaching of Writing, this is
00:00:12Writers Talk.
00:00:14During his twenty-eight years as an elected office holder, Jim Petro
00:00:17has held a variety of positions including a 2003-2007 term as an Ohio
00:00:23Attorney General.
00:00:24In this role, he was the first Ohio Attorney General in nearly forty
00:00:27years to argue before the United States Supreme Court.
00:00:30His experiences as Attorney General led him to the conclusion that the
00:00:34legal system is flawed and sometimes convicts innocent people.
00:00:37With his wife Nancy, Mr.
00:00:39Petro wrote the book, False Justice, to explore what they see as the
00:00:42eight myths that convict the innocent and they are advocating for
00:00:45change.
00:00:47Welcome to Writers Talk, Jim and Nancy Petro.
00:00:49>>Thank you very much.
00:00:50>>Well let's talk about the writing of the book and where you
00:00:54started on the book.
00:00:55How did you begin with this book?
00:00:57What was your impetus other than being the Ohio Attorney General?
00:00:59>>Obviously it was an issue that was of concern to both of us.
00:01:03Wrongful criminal conviction is a heartbreaker and we'd experienced it
00:01:06first hand, Nancy, tell Doug what happened.
00:01:11>>Well, actually the concept for this book struck me in the middle
00:01:16of the night.
00:01:17In fact, it awakened me from a deep sleep with quite a bit of clarity
00:01:22and it was that we had to record these experiences that Jim was having.
00:01:26We were experiencing epiphanies, an awakening to wrongful criminal
00:01:31conviction.
00:01:33>>A literal awakening.
00:01:34>>This was literally an awakening.
00:01:39When Jim got up that morning I said, "Jim, guess what?
00:01:42We're going to write a book."
00:01:44>>That's a great way to wake up in the morning.
00:01:45>>We are? I can't write.
00:01:49>>So how did it go from there?
00:01:50What was the process you went through?
00:01:52You began to write things down?
00:01:54You began to follow cases?
00:01:56How did that work for you and how did you work with him bringing home,
00:02:01I assume, some of the material and then doing research together?
00:02:04>>Well Jim and I have been married for 38 years and we have a very
00:02:06chatty relationship, so other than privileged client information, Jim
00:02:11and I share.
00:02:13He shares his experiences and he was having some amazing experiences as
00:02:17Attorney General, which he can relate in, which are related in the
00:02:20book.
00:02:22There didn't have to be a lot of extraneous conversation.
00:02:26I stated actually trying to find the answers to the questions that
00:02:30these experiences prompted.
00:02:33How often does this happen?
00:02:34Why does it happen?
00:02:36The first iteration of this was more like a research paper that was in
00:02:40third person and it was probably very boring.
00:02:44It took awhile to evolve into what became Jim's memoir, focusing on the
00:02:50criminal justice system, his experience in it and, with a number of
00:02:53flashbacks, the transformation that he went through really as a person
00:02:59in his beliefs about this core institution that's been so much a part
00:03:03of his life.
00:03:04>>Ok.
00:03:06Let's walk through a couple of these myths that you address because
00:03:10you've got "The Eight Myths" as the sub-title and I was really struck
00:03:14by a number of them: "Everybody in prison claims innocence," and you
00:03:18say that's a myth.
00:03:20>>That's a myth!
00:03:21>>That's a myth; it doesn't seem to be true.
00:03:23>>I'll give you the best example of why it's not true.
00:03:26When I became Attorney General, I advocated aggressively, and
00:03:29ultimately the legislature adopted legislation that allowed for
00:03:32post-conviction DNA testing of those who were in prison, who professed
00:03:36their innocence, and really want to take whatever biological material
00:03:41may be left from the crime scene and take DNA tests.
00:03:44They want to try to prove their innocence using DNA.
00:03:48When that bill was pending, many, many in law enforcement were fighting
00:03:52it tooth and nail, basically saying there's going to be thousands,
00:03:56perhaps tens of thousands of people who come forward because everybody
00:04:00in prison says they're innocent. Well I knew that wasn't true.
00:04:03I knew that most people who are in prison accept their fate because
00:04:06they know they committed the crime.
00:04:09To date, from 2003 when that law was adopted, till today, eight years
00:04:14later, there have been 412 people who've requested post-conviction DNA
00:04:19testing. It's not overwhelming.
00:04:21>>What's the percentage, would you say, of convictions?
00:04:24I mean how many convictions are there?
00:04:26>>Well prison, at any point in time, there's over fifty thousand
00:04:27people in Ohio in prison and they're coming in and out.
00:04:30Every year I'm guessing we have probably thirty thousand people
00:04:34convicted of felony crimes in Ohio.
00:04:36>>Ok. So the other thing is our system.
00:04:40One of the other myths: "Our system almost never convicts an innocent
00:04:48person." Tell me about your walking through that, because what I'd like
00:04:51to look at is while you were writing the book, you said the first draft
00:04:53was sort of a research paper, right?
00:04:55Third person in it and then you began to walk through it and said, OK,
00:04:57I'm going to restructure this book.
00:04:59It's going to be first person and it's going to talk about these eight
00:05:01myths with some asides on other aspects of your memoir.
00:05:06I'm curious about how that arose.
00:05:10>>We basically wanted people to experience the same learning process
00:05:14that we did.
00:05:16The learning came with Jim's experiences, of course, but then the
00:05:19learning also came with research.
00:05:24As far as the structure of the book goes, it is really two ribbons
00:05:29flowing through the book.
00:05:30One of them is the memoir, storytelling, narrative, true crime
00:05:34analysis, and the other one is the research that we found out about.
00:05:39Actually, the eight myths are in the last twenty-five pages of the
00:05:43book, so even though it's titled with "The Eight Myths," you learn
00:05:47about the eight myths all the way through the book.
00:05:48You see them demonstrated and when they're finally presented to you in
00:05:51the last twenty-five pages I think most readers already know that these
00:05:54are truly myths.
00:05:55>>I think that it's fair that when we look at myth number two, "The
00:05:58system almost never convicts the innocent." The reason that becomes a
00:06:03myth, and I'm not saying for a moment that there's like ten percent of
00:06:07people wrongfully convicted, but it is a substantial number.
00:06:10We don't know what it is.
00:06:12If I had to guess I'd probably say half of a percent, one percent in
00:06:15Ohio.
00:06:16It might mean five hundred people are in prison that are wrongfully
00:06:18convicted. That's a big number for my mind.
00:06:21Nationwide we've got two point three million people in American
00:06:24prisons. That'd be twenty thousand people.
00:06:27That's a lot of people.
00:06:28So, there's no way of really quantifying it, but we know that it's not
00:06:33anecdotal. It's not something that just happens infrequently.
00:06:37There's two hundred and sixty-six DNA exonerations that have occurred
00:06:41over the last decade.
00:06:43All of those individuals have been proven unequivocally innocent by
00:06:46DNA. DNA only applies in very, very limited cases.
00:06:51Again, people are wrongfully convicted.
00:06:55The quick story I want to go through, and unfortunately you've got
00:06:59twenty-three minutes, I'm going to tell this one very quickly and that
00:07:02is beginning in 1989, the FBI began to track lab results of matching
00:07:07DNA technology.
00:07:09On the one hand, the labs would receive DNA from a crime scene,
00:07:14typically a rape kit, typically a vaginal swab of a woman who may have
00:07:19been sexually assaulted.
00:07:21They would match that with the DNA taken from the alleged perpetrator,
00:07:25the suspect who was principally identified by the victim with her
00:07:29eyewitness identification identified that individual as the
00:07:34perpetrator.
00:07:36There were ten thousand occasions over the first thirteen years where
00:07:41this matching occurred.
00:07:42Ten thousand cases!
00:07:43That's a pretty big sample.
00:07:46In twenty percent of those cases, two thousand, it was unequivocal.
00:07:50They couldn't figure out what the outcome would be, but in the
00:07:53remaining eight thousand, twenty-five percent of those didn't match.
00:08:01That's a big number!
00:08:03Because in the old days, before DNA, that person who'd been identified
00:08:08by the eyewitness would have been prosecuted and seventy percent plus
00:08:12percentage of the time would have been convicted.
00:08:14DNA exonerated them before the prosecution occurred.
00:08:19Twenty-five percent is a big number.
00:08:21In reality, in the two hundred and sixty-six exonerations I'd
00:08:29mentioned, seventy-five percent of the convictions occurred based
00:08:33solely on evidence of an eyewitness.
00:08:36You can see the difficultly with eyewitness identification.
00:08:38>>Right, and you've got a lot that talks about "An eye-witness as
00:08:41the best testimony," is another myth.
00:08:43>>Right.
00:08:45>>There's a lot in the book about even psychological tests that show
00:08:50that the memory isn't always as airtight as you would expect it to be.
00:08:54There's one line in here about a professor who came home, had been
00:09:00robbed, and thought he was able to identify everything.
00:09:02Turned out that several of the things he had thought he had identified
00:09:06correctly were wrong.
00:09:08What makes this an unusual case is that he was a professor of
00:09:12psychology who had done a lot of memory study.
00:09:14There's a line that says something like, "He wasn't just a forgetful
00:09:19academic; He was something else," which I thought was nice.
00:09:23OK, so tell me about the writing process for the book.
00:09:28How did you start working on it together? Who took which part?
00:09:32You had said a little before we got started that if you were to
00:09:36categorize yourself, it would be not necessarily as a writer.
00:09:39Nancy is the writer.
00:09:41>>And I'm a lawyer and if I would have written it, the lawyerliness
00:09:45would have come out as it has in the briefs I've written over the years
00:09:48and the reader would doze off in a matter of minutes.
00:09:52It's Nancy's prose because she's an excellent writer, I think, and
00:09:56basically it's my stories.
00:09:57I would talk to her about things and refresh my recollection and then
00:10:02go through the story as it evolved and Nancy would be the transcriber.
00:10:07>>So you had to transcribe these stories and make them interesting.
00:10:09I'd like to bracket that and come back to what it is about law writing
00:10:14that seeks to put the reader to sleep.
00:10:18But tell me about taking his stories and making them more interesting.
00:10:21What was your process for it?
00:10:24>>That's very interesting.
00:10:26I think when you write you get yourself in a room and you turn off
00:10:31everything, at least I do, and you just begin to tell the story and
00:10:34then you try to refine it.
00:10:36You try to give it some pacing and you try to make it interesting.
00:10:40That was one of the things that when we first sent this off to the very
00:10:44first publisher, it was still the third person version.
00:10:49He basically came back and said, you know I think you have something
00:10:52that might be interesting, but we have to get a real writer to do this.
00:10:56He used a few adjectives and I thought, ok, they really want this to
00:11:01read more like fiction and I thought the object is of course to have a
00:11:04lot of people read it.
00:11:06It was supposed to have enough substance in our view to be interesting
00:11:09to people in the criminal justice system, but we also really worked
00:11:13hard targeting the general audience: adults.
00:11:19I took a whole different approach and I realized if I did it from Jim's
00:11:24voice that would allow me to write what I know he was feeling and
00:11:30thinking about as he had these experiences.
00:11:32I then wrote them down and then Jim would review the writing because
00:11:36he could correct any errors, but basically I knew these stories.
00:11:40I had lived them with him.
00:11:42>>You said, "correct errors." Obviously there can be factual
00:11:45things, but there is also, as you said, you're structuring a narrative.
00:11:48You're creating something that will lead somebody through a story and
00:11:52part of that is his thoughts and feelings.
00:11:56I'm curious about the times when you said, "You know what?
00:11:58No, this isn't really what I was feeling or thinking at the time." How
00:12:01did you deal with those sorts of differences?
00:12:03What you thought he was thinking and what says he's thinking.
00:12:06How does that get worked out?
00:12:08>>Well, there were times when I would review what she's written and
00:12:12after we would talk and then she would write and then I would review
00:12:16it. There were times where my feeling was different and we then sat
00:12:21and kind of worked it all out and then she re-wrote.
00:12:23I mean, how do you correct it?
00:12:25>>Yeah. I mean it sounds like a
00:12:26really interesting marital moment, you know.
00:12:28My wife and I have been married for nineteen years and we had a job
00:12:33working together in a really terrible restaurant and it didn't go so
00:12:36well. This was many years ago, but
00:12:39we kind of got on each other's nerves.
00:12:41I'm very interested: When you're that close, you're under a lot of
00:12:44pressure.
00:12:45You're taking your own story and you're putting your spin on it to make
00:12:48it interesting to other people.
00:12:50It's like being at a party, and he starts to tell a story and you say,
00:12:52"No, you've got it wrong."
00:12:54>>I don't think there were that many of those.
00:12:56I think, for me, what would have been impossible when writing the book
00:13:00was to not have a true lawyer. I'm not a lawyer.
00:13:03We would speak about legal issues and I learned about these issues
00:13:07through the research.
00:13:09Just as Jim had done, I read all the trial transcripts, the police
00:13:12reports, law, legal decisions. I read all those things.
00:13:18You can read those things even if you're not a lawyer and you can
00:13:21understand them even if you're not a lawyer, but it was very helpful to
00:13:25be able to turn to a real lawyer and say, "What do you think about
00:13:31this? What do you think about Miranda? What do you
00:13:35think about the various things that we bring up in the book?"
00:13:37>>I should point out, also, we always work well together.
00:13:39In the course of my.
00:13:41I never expected to get into politics and we were married about five or
00:13:43six years when I first ran for the legislature, and I point out I would
00:13:46have never won without her.
00:13:48She's organized, she got the whole roots of the campaign message pool
00:13:52together, she gave me guidance that you need everyday and I had a very
00:13:56interesting career as a legislature, as a county commissioner, as a
00:14:00state auditor, state attorney general, all because of her political
00:14:03efforts. We work well together.
00:14:05I wouldn't be able to do anything without her.
00:14:08>>I'll say something else.
00:14:09I told you that I felt called to write this book and I somehow feel
00:14:15that followed us through this book.
00:14:18I felt empowered to do this in a way that shouldn't have been there.
00:14:24I had never taken a writing course.
00:14:26I had never gone to a writing convention and this book not only flowed
00:14:31well, I mean it was two and a half years in the making, but it flowed
00:14:35well, it flowed fairly easily. It found its structure
00:14:38fairly easily and we found a publisher amazingly pretty easily.
00:14:44I felt that there was just a lot of grace involved in this book.
00:14:49>>You've also got a background in publishing, so that helps the
00:14:54idea of the book through.
00:14:56It's not as though you're sort of stepping back and saying you felt
00:14:59called to this, I didn't necessarily have the background, but you did
00:15:02have a background in-
00:15:03>>I had a background in art. It was in graphic art design.
00:15:05>>Oh, ok.
00:15:06>>And I had a graphic design firm for 20 years and then after that I
00:15:09launched a national high school sports magazine, but my role in that
00:15:12was not so much writing, it was business management, including selling
00:15:18advertising and everything else you have to do to try to make a
00:15:20magazine float.
00:15:21>>Ok. You've got one other myth: "If the justice system has
00:15:25problems, the pros will fix them." It's a myth.
00:15:28You're saying it's a myth.
00:15:30Given that you represent it as a myth, tell me about how you see the
00:15:33problems getting fixed if the pros can't do it.
00:15:37>>We had an interesting battle beginning in 2008 in Ohio in the
00:15:42legislature. I work as the pro-bono lawyer for the Ohio
00:15:47Innocence Project, which is based at the University of Cincinnati.
00:15:50The director there is Professor Mark Godsey, who is a law professor at
00:15:53the university. Mark and I really set out to get some reforms
00:15:59adopted in Ohio and we did.
00:16:01It took about two years and the reforms that were adopted will take the
00:16:07justice system and fix it in some ways.
00:16:10We'd like to do much, much more.
00:16:12They tell us nationally that what we achieved in Ohio is more than what
00:16:17any other state has done, but I'm tell you it wasn't easy.
00:16:22The pros within the criminal justice system don't immediately just grab
00:16:25onto reforms and just say, "Oh, let's do them." They will basically say
00:16:28they don't believe they'll work.
00:16:30I'll give you a simple example: One of the reforms was to basically set
00:16:34a standard in Ohio law that says where you're going to have an eye
00:16:38witness identification procedure, the administrator, the law
00:16:42enforcement officer who administers the procedure, a line up or photo
00:16:45display, should not know who the perpetrator is.
00:16:51Not the perpetrator, the suspect, is because body language at the time
00:16:56that the witness is looking at this array can give the witness tips
00:17:00that makes their decision, that directs their decision.
00:17:05>>Right. And you talked about one particular one when there were a
00:17:07number of pictures and the background on the suspect was a different
00:17:09color. It was a close up and other people were further away.
00:17:12>>Much larger facial view, different color background, things like
00:17:16that that really do taint the process.
00:17:19We're striving to avoid tainting the process.
00:17:22>>A step further in that direction would be to show the victim each
00:17:28photo or individual one at a time. That requires absolute judgment.
00:17:33Did this person do it or not?
00:17:36Instead, if you have all five- or six-packs, I think is what they call
00:17:41it, at the same time, then you tend to think they wouldn't be showing
00:17:46me these pictures if they don't think they have the person, so I'm
00:17:48going to pick the one who is closest to what I remember.
00:17:52That can work if the real perpetrator is there, but if not, that's when
00:17:56you can have a wrongful identification.
00:18:00>>I don't want to call it a sense of outrage in the book, but maybe
00:18:03that's what it is, but as I was reading through it I thought it must be
00:18:07difficult to write a book like this when you see all the injustices,
00:18:11when you see the things that were done incorrectly, were done with
00:18:17prejudice on the part of the people working through it.
00:18:20For example, there's one which you identify the person in jail and the
00:18:27person I believe you think did it is just shown by initials.
00:18:31>>Right.
00:18:32>>For what I'm assuming are legal reasons.
00:18:35>>We did that at the last edit of the book. We chose to put the initials.
00:18:40Earlier we had the name.
00:18:41>>Really? So why did you go to the initials?
00:18:43>>And his name is in court records and everything like that.
00:18:46I think we just felt he's not been convicted or charged with any crime,
00:18:50we don't need to identify him to the extent it's in mass media.
00:18:58I'm hoping that it's in the tens of thousands, but who knows.
00:19:02We just made a decision to do that.
00:19:04I believe and I've argued in court and I will argue in the second
00:19:07district court of appeals probably in the next six months, that this
00:19:10individual whose initials we used actually is the perpetrator of this
00:19:14crime. Someone else has been in prison twenty years for it, but
00:19:19I believe the perpetrator is the person we've identified here.
00:19:22>>So I guess what I'm getting at then is if you have all that and it
00:19:26was enough to wake you up the idea, the idea to wake you up, when
00:19:29you've gone through all this does this give you, especially with an
00:19:32outstanding case, does it give you a sense of closure to have written
00:19:36the book or is it still there for you?
00:19:38Is it still something that you think you know maybe it's a second book?
00:19:43Maybe there's something else that we need to do.
00:19:45>>I think it's a beginning because I think it's going to take a
00:19:50long time for these reforms to be enacted and we've made tremendous
00:19:54progress in Ohio.
00:19:56Ohio is nation leading now in criminal justice reform, but other states
00:20:01have a long way to go and we still have many things we can still do in
00:20:04Ohio, so I think it's a beginning.
00:20:07There are many things that we can do: put together a CLE course over
00:20:09time for loss for lawyers.
00:20:13>>What are CLE courses?
00:20:14>>It's Continuing Legal Education courses, which lawyers have to
00:20:17take.
00:20:19That would be, I think, one iteration of the book that could help us
00:20:22get this message out.
00:20:24We hope that it's used in classrooms, criminology students and so
00:20:28forth.
00:20:29So there's I think a long way to go.
00:20:31This is one vehicle to try to get the message out.
00:20:34>>So you've got this as the first vehicle, what are the next steps
00:20:38then, just to go a little deeper? You've talked about CLE.
00:20:41Do you have a plan for that?
00:20:43Is that something that's really worked out on the horizon?
00:20:48>>No. I think we've talked about these things.
00:20:51Jim has a very important responsibility so they'll be delayed, but to
00:20:55the extent that I could be an advocate, I will.
00:20:57I will even work with other lawyers to try to do things that would
00:21:01extend the message of the book.
00:21:03>>Until this past week I was lawyer and private practice managing
00:21:06partner of a larger law firm dealing strictly with the law. Lot of
00:21:09time on my hands to advocate for the issues that we raise in the book.
00:21:15That's a little bit diminished now that the governor has named me to be
00:21:18chancellor of the university system.
00:21:21Now my advocacy really moves toward advocating for our higher education
00:21:25system, but I still, this is an issue as might you would imagine, is
00:21:30very close to my heart. It's the heart and soul of the justice system.
00:21:33If there is any lesson.
00:21:35Actually I'm speaking at Ohio State law school in Dean Michaels class
00:21:39this Friday morning and what the lesson I hope to be able to bring
00:21:43forth in every opportunity I have a chance to deliver this message and
00:21:47hopefully it will be to law students and hopefully it will be to people
00:21:50who are going to be our future prosecutors and future judges, is the
00:21:53criminal justice system is best served where it is a search for truth
00:21:58and where all of the participants, prosecutors, the judges, really
00:22:02strive to see the truth and find out what the truth really is.
00:22:07It's not just a contest to convince a jury to go one-way or the other.
00:22:12If we can bring that message to your lawyers, I think we will have
00:22:16taken the step in the right direction.
00:22:20>>Maybe I've watched too many court shows on TV, but given the
00:22:24inherently contestory nature of law cases, how does that come about?
00:22:30How do you get people to work for the truth instead of just for their
00:22:33side?
00:22:35>>We tell the story there and I was somewhat surprised.
00:22:38I became involved in it in part because I learned that the prosecution
00:22:44in the county where Clarence Elkins had been convicted.
00:22:47He's been convicted in murdering his mother-in-law and raping his
00:22:50six-year-old niece.
00:22:52He's been in prison for eight years based on these convictions.
00:22:55In the Attorney General's office, we had proof presented to us that
00:23:00indicated that the male DNA taken from the bodies of the murder victim
00:23:11and of the rape victim was of a male unknown, but not Clarence Elkins,
00:23:15the man who was in prison.
00:23:17That proof was submitted as part of a new trial motion and the
00:23:20prosecution fought tooth and nail to avoid a new trial.
00:23:27I wondered when I saw that whether that was the right course for a
00:23:31prosecutor or whether the prosecutors core should be to really dig in
00:23:36and investigate that themselves. And I say that because here
00:23:42you've got DNA evidence that's very compelling.
00:23:46You know that a male committed the crime.
00:23:48You know that the male, based on the DNA, was not Clarence Elkins.
00:23:51Folks, we've got a problem here. This guy's been sitting in prison
00:23:53for eight years, don't fight us; help us out.
00:23:57That's not necessarily the response you get within the criminal justice
00:24:01system, but I think perhaps it should be.
00:24:03>>How would you enforce that?
00:24:05>>You basically say the prosecutors
00:24:07understand the mission and the mission of the justice
00:24:10system is to find out what is justice. What is truth?
00:24:14>>We as everyday citizens play a role in this.
00:24:17We have some responsibility as citizens who have urged prosecutors to
00:24:22find closure quickly in this heinous crime that's occurred.
00:24:26We put a lot of pressure on such that when they run for public office,
00:24:31they're toting their conviction record.
00:24:33Someday it would be nice if they were toting their accuracy record.
00:24:37Some people say, "well what's worse, to convict an innocent man or let
00:24:42a guilty person go free?" Well, when you convict an innocent person,
00:24:45you've done both. This is not a conservative or a
00:24:49liberal subject, this is a public safety issue because when you
00:24:54get the wrong person, the perpetrator often, and this is also proven
00:24:59in DNA exonerations, continues to commit heinous crimes.
00:25:03>>We mentioned Clarence Elkins.
00:25:05This other individual whose DNA was at the crime scene, not Clarence
00:25:08Elkins, and when he was finally released and this individual was
00:25:12charged and ultimately pled guilty to the murder, he lived three doors
00:25:16down from the home of the victim. He subsequently raped three children.
00:25:24Had they gotten the right person in the first place, those three
00:25:27children would not have been victimized. That's one example.
00:25:30There's countless examples of the wrong person being convicted, the
00:25:38right person being out there committing lots of serious crimes,
00:25:40including murders, and they wouldn't have occurred if we would have
00:25:43gotten it right the first time. If we would have understood that
00:25:46our evidence wasn't very good, don't put blinders on.
00:25:50Keep the search alive. Don't stop just because you've
00:25:53got somebody and say this has got to be the guy.
00:25:56It's not always right.
00:25:58You've got to be more sure than that before you go and prosecute.
00:26:00>>Ok. Well in the very little time that we have remaining,
00:26:04just one other question. Who influenced you or taught you to write?
00:26:08Who was the most influential on you as you were going through school
00:26:12for when you came to something like this?
00:26:17>>I really can't say any particular person because my field of study
00:26:22was actually not writing. I guess I've always enjoyed writing
00:26:29and I enjoy reading and I enjoy a good story.
00:26:33I guess there was a latent desire to write.
00:26:36>>Can I just say something about Nancy?
00:26:38We went to college together. We were friends.
00:26:41We then kind of met a couple years after graduation and got together,
00:26:46started dating and got married. In college I had great admiration
00:26:50for her because she was really very smart and everybody knew it.
00:26:55She was the Phi Beta Kappa, I was not. In the course work that she
00:27:00did, I know that she wrote good stuff even though writing wasn't
00:27:04the principle part of her major, it was a significant part of her
00:27:09academic history and she has a very strong academic record.
00:27:12>>Thank you, that was very sweet.
00:27:15I would like to credit Mary Kate Campbell, who was my design instructor
00:27:19who didn't teach me how to write, but taught me so many other things.
00:27:22>>Well, I'll tell you if we had time I'd come back to it and ask
00:27:25who should we blame for your lawyer writing, but we don't have the time
00:27:29for that. I'm sorry. We'll have to come to that some other time.
00:27:31The book again is False Justice by Jim Petro and Nancy Petro, "8 Myths
00:27:35That Convict the Innocent." Thank you very much for being on Writers
00:27:39Talk.
00:27:39>>Thank you.
00:27:40>>Thank you. Good to be with you.
00:27:42>>From the Center for the Study and the Teaching of Writing at The
00:27:43Ohio State University, this is Doug Dangler. Keep writing.
00:27:45
Note : Transcripts are compiled from uncorrected captions