Oct. 20, 2023 

By Alexandra Nadolski
OTE Assistant Editor

Ray Krone spent three years of solitude on death row housed in a 6- by 8-foot concrete cell in the hot Arizona desert for a crime he didn’t commit.

Edgewood College students can hear his harrowing story of two trials for sexual assault and murder of an Arizona woman and a surprising rescue that has led to a life of speaking and advocacy for wrongly convicted. Krone was wrongfully arrested in 1990 and served a decade inside Arizona prisons until DNA evidence showed that another Arizona man had killed the woman in 2002.

The Social Science Department and the student organization Criminal Justice Association (CJA) will sponsor a free event, open to the public, called “Witness To Innocence” on Nov. 14 at 5:30 p.m. in Sonderegger 108.

After Krone tells his story, University of Wisconsin Law School Professor Keith Findley will speak about the legal case from an academic standpoint. Findley has expertise in wrongful convictions, criminal law and procedure, law and forensic science, and appellate advocacy. He is also the Co-Director of UW-Madison’s Innocence Project.

Krone was the 100th person exonerated from death row in the United States in 2002. He also co-founded Witness To Innocence, a non-profit death row prisoner advocacy organization in 2003 with Sister Helen Prejean, author of “Dead Man Walking.” Krone lives in Tennessee and through Witness To Innocence, he speaks throughout the country to influence states to abolish the death penalty.

“I would not trust the state to execute a person for committing a crime against another person,” he says on the Witness to Innocence website.

“I know how the system works. It’s not about justice or fairness or equality. Any chance I can, whether I start with one or two people or a whole auditorium filled with people, I’ll tell them what happened to me. Because if it happened to me, it can happen to anyone,” he said on the Witness to Innocence  website.

For more information on the event, go to Witness to Innocence or contact Associate Professor Carolyn Field at cfield@edgewood.edu. Field works in Edgewood’s Criminal Justice and Sociology Programs in the Division for Social and Behavioral Sciences. Those interested can also contact, CJA President Jenna Kohl at jkohl@edgewood.edu.