Key author helps free man wrongfully convicted of murder
This post was written by Jean Maess, vice president of Legal Editorial Operations – Analytical Editorial at Thomson Reuters
Last week, I was fortunate to be able to attend an offsite meeting with executives and other leaders in the legal business of Thomson Reuters. We spent most of the meeting discussing how people make a difference, and one of our colleagues made a great point about the importance of reminding ourselves of the larger view of what we do and who we are.
On Friday, I got a great reminder in our own backyard when one of our criminal law authors asked for an extension on her submission. Laurie Levenson, author of the Federal Criminal Rules Handbook, California Criminal Jury Instruction Companion Handbook, California Criminal Law, California Criminal Motions, and Levenson on California Criminal Procedure, needed one additional day to return her page corrections.
Requesting an extension is not an unusual event for any author, but Levenson, who served for eight years as an assistant U.S. attorney in Los Angeles before joining the faculty at Loyala Law School, had the best justification I have ever heard – she’d been working on freeing a man wrongfully convicted of murder 34 years ago.
In 1979, Brenda Anderson testified that a young man with whom she had gone to high school shot her elderly neighbor to death. Thirty-four years later, Anderson’s sister Sharon took the stand and said the account, which helped send the young man to prison, was a lie.
And so last week, a Los Angeles County Superior Court judge sided threw out the conviction of Kash Delano Register, who maintained his innocence for more than three decades.
Now we all know that we publish the information that helps support our legal system, but what a great example of the kind of work our authors and our customers do every day. Click here to read more about the case in the LA Times.
