We received a copy on March 9, 2009 of Jeanette Popp's long-anticipated new book in the mail. Mortal Justice: A True Story of Murder and Vindication. It was published March 1. Jeanette has worked long and hard for many years against the death penalty. She served several years as chairperson of Texas Moratorium Network. Her book tells the story of her daughter's murder, the wrongful conviction of two innocent men Chris Ochoa and Richard Danziger, their eventual exoneration, the subsequent conviction of the real killer, and Jeanette's long activism against the death penalty, including a jailhouse meeting with the real killer and her successful efforts to prevent him from being sentenced to death.

The book can be bought on Amazon.

In her new book, Jeanette includes an account of a jailhouse meeting with the man who actually killed her daughter before his trial because she wanted to convince him to take a plea bargain and accept life in prison istead of going to trial and risking the death penalty. In the jailhouse meeting, she told him, "Mr Marino, you know I don't want you executed?"

"Ive heard that," he answered stoically.

"It's the truth. I don't want you to die."

He shook his head and told her, "Mrs Popp, I'd rather be executed than spend the rest of my life in prison."

A recent Dallas Morning News article said

Ms. Popp asked prosecutors not to seek the death penalty, because she says she did not want her daughter's memory stained with someone's blood. "I'm not a bleeding heart liberal," she says. "But I do have a heart."

Since the exoneration, she has been an outspoken opponent of the death penalty. That doesn't mean she wants Mr. Marino to ever walk free.

By JANET ELLIOTT

Dec. 13, 2001

Copyright 2001 Houston Chronicle Austin Bureau

AUSTIN -- Jeannette Popp looked her daughter's killer in the eyes Thursday and came to one conclusion.

"I don't want him to die," said Popp after meeting Achim Josef Marino at the Travis County Jail.

"If they kill this man they will be victimizing me yet again," Popp told reporters at the Capitol.

Popp of Azle has lived a nightmare since her 20-year-old daughter, Nancy DePriest, was raped and shot to death at the Austin pizza restaurant where she worked in October 1988.

Two innocent men were convicted of the crime based on a false confession obtained by Austin police. Christopher Ochoa and Richard Danziger served 12 years of their life sentences before being released earlier this year after DNA evidence cleared them and implicated Marino.

Ochoa now is attending college in El Paso and wants to become a lawyer. Danziger, however, suffered a severe prison beating that left him unable to care for himself. He is living in Florida.

The wrongful convictions, which received national attention, prompted Texas legislators to pass a law giving inmates access to DNA testing that might help clear their convictions.

Popp's appearance at the news conference was arranged by two anti-death penalty groups, the Texas Moratorium Network and Murder Victims' Families for Reconciliation.

Popp fears she might have to sit through another trial and watch Marino, who has confessed to raping and murdering DePriest, be sentenced to death. Popp is avidly opposed to the death penalty for religious reasons.

"The saving of his life is the most important thing to me at this time," she said. "I will not dishonor my daughter with the taking of another life in her name."

Marino, 42, is serving three life sentences for other aggravated robberies. He began writing letters confessing to DePriest's murder in 1995 after embracing Christianity as a result of a prison 12-step program.

One of those letters was written in February 1998 to then-Gov. George W. Bush. He told Bush that he wanted to "come clean about this terrible crime, a crime which has been enlarged and magnified by the arrest and conviction of two innocent men."

Popp wanted to met Marino. Earlier this week, Marino's lawyer called and said that Marino wanted to ask her whether she wanted him to live or die. Attorney Larry Sauer said Marino is weighing an offer from the Travis County District Attorney's Office that he plead guilty to murder and aggravated robbery for two consecutive life sentences.

Popp said that Marino told her that accepting a life sentence would be the easy way out.

"I told him that he had that backwards. Assisted suicide at his request by the state would be the easy way out," said Popp.

Sauer said he doesn't believe that Marino wants to be executed, but that he is struggling with prison life and not thinking clearly.

Popp said she told Marino that he might be able to help other inmates reach out to God, something he couldn't do if he was on death row.

Although Popp has forgiven Marino, she remains angry for the false confession that she believes police coerced from Ochoa.

She said she learned from Marino that the details of her daughter's death were not as horrible as those contained in Ochoa's confession.

"I certainly believe this was a day of healing for me," she said. "What actually happened was not as bad as my nightmares and certainly not as bad as I was led to believe in the beginning.

I think that now I can go on."

Death penalty supporters long ago figured out an easy way to dismiss their opponents. Rather than addressing the relevant issues point-by-point, they tend to equate opposition to the death penalty with sympathy for criminals. It's a disingenuous tactic, but it's loaded with go-for-the-jugular impact.

Conservatives certainly don't have a market on this kind of demagoguery, but they usually do it better than anyone else. Classic case: the 1988 presidential campaign ads which practically depicted Michael Dukakis in bed with convicted killer Willie Horton, all because Massachusetts was one of 45 states experimenting with a prisoner-furlough system.

Yet death-penalty advocates can't fling mud so easily at Jeanette Popp. For her, violent crime isn't an abstraction, it's an emotional scar that will never go away. For her, the death penalty isn't something that affects someone else, it's a matter of personal anguish.

In 1988, Popp's daughter, Nancy DePriest, was raped and murdered in Austin. Two men - Richard Danziger and Christopher Ochoa - were wrongfully convicted of her murder, spent 12 years in prison, and were exonerated only when another man - Josef Marino - stepped forward to confess his guilt.

If anyone had a right to want revenge, to seek an eye for an eye, Popp did. Instead, she's become a crusader for the abolition of the death penalty, speaking around the country and testifying before the Texas State Legislature. Grassroots activists want to
draft her for a run at a legislative seat in 2004, and there's talk of Meryl Streep playing her on film. At a Sunday, May 4 downtown march led by anti-execution activists, Popp was the unquestioned feature attraction.

A middle-aged woman with long platinum blond hair, Popp wore a pink blouse, blue jeans, and white tennis shoes. She shielded her occasionally tear-filled eyes with dark shades. She spoke with a down-home drawl, and talked about her devotion to God. She advocated the idea of being tough on criminals. In short, she was a conservative Texan's nightmare, because she conveyed none of the snooty elitism that conservatives delight in pinning on their opponents. Speaking to about 40 death-penalty abolitionists at Main Plaza, Popp made the intriguing argument that capital punishment is wrongheaded for reasons that go beyond cases of mistaken identity, junk science, and flaws in the judicial system.

"By the time we get around to executing the person who committed the crime," Popp said, "they're not the same person anymore."

Popp dealt with that reality when she and Marino met to talk about her daughter's murder. She says Marino - now a self-proclaimed born-again Christian - never apologized for his crime, but did try to explain his warped state of mind when he killed Nancy.

"The second hardest thing I've ever done in my life was to sit across the table and look that man in the eye," she said. "He told me that he was a Satanic worshiper at that time, and he was having horrible headaches and hearing voices in his head. His Satanic advisers told him a human sacrifice would make that stop, and that's why he killed my daughter."

Popp said she and her daughter always shared an opposition to the death penalty, and after her daughter was murdered, she never felt that killing the killer would serve justice. "The only feelings I had were of such a deep emptiness that still has yet to be filled. She just took part of me with her. And I was suicidal right after my daughter's death.

"It took me a while to snap out of that, but I never had that, 'I want somebody to die for this.' I certainly had no love for them, but I never had that need for revenge. I think a lot of that is because I had such great family support, I had my faith in God that all things happen for a reason."

Popp said that she became outspoken about the death penalty after grappling with the fact that the lives of Ochoa and Danziger had been shattered for a crime they didn't commit. "Now there were two more victims instead of just my daughter and their families," Popp explained. "And I met other people who'd been on death row for crimes they didn't commit, and I thought, 'My God, this is not an isolated case. This is happening over and over again.' And I decided I wasn't going to stand still anymore. This has got to stop." •


BY GILBERT GARCIA
May 8, 2003
©San Antonio Current 2003

Moratorium At Our Request

My daughter, Nancy, was brutally raped and murdered October 24, 1988 in
Austin, Texas. My life too felt as though it had ended.

The following year, Christopher Ochoa and Richard Danziger were both
sentenced to life. Christopher Ochoa confessed and implicated Richard
Danziger. Justice served.

On October 24, 2000, the 12th anniversary of my daughter's death, I
discovered there is little justice served in Texas. Another man had come
forward. He too had confessed. He’d been writing letters of confession for
four years! He wrote to the Austin Police Dept. and the Travis County
District Attorney's office. He even wrote to then Governor George Bush. He
told the police where to find the murder weapon, volunteered for a DNA test.
No one listened until 1998. Why??

After Christopher Ochoa heard of the confession of Josef Marino, he wrote to
the Wisconsin Innocence Project. He told them he and Richard were innocent.
He said he had confessed after being threatened with his life by
interrogating officers. Their weapon, the death penalty!

Christopher and Richard were both released in 2001, after serving 12 years
in prison. Chris is attending law school. Richard was beaten by another
inmate in prison. His condition was so serious that a part of his brain had
to be removed. He is no longer able to care for himself. He is still serving
the life sentence the State of Texas gave him - for Richard Danziger is a
prisoner of his own mind.

The death penalty in the State of Texas is seriously flawed!

It executes people with mental retardation and juvenile offenders.

It snubs its nose at the rehabilitated.

It doesn't care if a person is a future danger to society or not.

It doesn’t care if a person has had incompetent representation.

It doesn’t even know the guilty from the innocent.

It can’t, you see. It’s only a killing machine. The busiest one in the
United States. It’s breaking international laws few others would dare to
break. Killing children and the mentally retarded by record numbers.
Shouldn’t this killing machine also receive the ultimate sentence? After
all, we know beyond a reasonable doubt, it will continue to kill. How do we
stop this indiscriminate killing?

A MORATORIUM NOW!

Let us take out two years to contemplate where this system has gone so
wrong. Prosecutorial misconduct, police brutality, false testimony, mistaken
eye witnesses, junk science, sleeping lawyers, black offenders being tried by all-white juries. This is not a jury of their peers. If we allow this, we
must also allow all black juries to hear cases of an accused white
person. We must have justice for all, rich or poor, black or white, the
accused and the innocent. We must demand a judicial system that saves the
innocent and properly punishes the criminal

I cannot believe, we are so blood thirsty, that we can’t wait two years to
have an execution. Are we afraid we'll go through some type of withdrawal?
Or are we afraid of what we'll find? Have we already executed innocents?
Probably. If not, at the rate we're progressing, we most certainly will.

Can’t we temper our justice with a little mercy? Maybe some forgiveness
thrown in would be nice. We don’t have to become murderers to stop
murderers.

Please, in loving memory of Nancy DePriest, my daughter. I beg you to help
me stop executions until real justice can be executed.

Peace and Love in the Struggle,

Jeanette Popp

Click below to read Marino's Confession Letter.

Page One, Page Two, Page Three, Page Four

Jeanette and Chris Ochoa outside the Pizza Hut where Jeanette's daughter was murdered.