"I think it's created a sea change in the way a lot of people have viewed the death penalty," he says. The death penalty, after all, is irrevocable. Find out later the person is innocent, after you've already administered a lethal injection, and there's no way to rectify the mistake.

Wrongful convictions have forced lawyers and academics to look at what sometimes goes wrong. The culprits include mistaken eye-witness identifications, false confessions, jailhouse informants, ineffective defense counsel, police misconduct, forensic fraud and junk science, Medwed says.

Typically, eyewitnesses are asked to look at a six-person lineup or a series of six photos. "If you look at a group of six and you're not told the perpetrator may not be there, you often make a relative judgment and pick the person who most closely resembles the person you saw," he says. "So one reform is to abandon that approach."

Instead, witnesses would be asked to look at one photo or one person at a time, and to decide yes or no, making an absolute judgment each time. Studies, he says, suggest that this can minimize misidentifications by as much as 50 percent, although some in the law enforcement community have taken issue with those studies.

Videotaping investigations could help eliminate false confessions like the one police claimed Gary Gauger gave after the murder of his elderly parents in 1993, Medwed says. And increasing sanctions against police and prosecutors who are found guilty of misconduct would also help.

Gauger blames police misconduct for his arrest and conviction in his parents' slayings. "The police perjured themselves about 150 times at my trial," Gauger said recently in a phone interview from the Illinois organic farm where he grows heirloom tomatoes. "The police tend to take the easiest way out. They focus on a primary suspect, and they actively discourage and ignore other leads." He accuses the police of making up details about his involvement and his "confession."

And, too, there's the case of David Wong, a New York prisoner who spent 10 extra years in prison after being convicted of a jail yard murder he didn't commit. Medwed will discuss Wong in a presentation called "Anatomy of a Wrongful Conviction."

"There are cases like Gary Gauger's, where you look at him and your heart just breaks," says Medwed. "But oftentimes the folks who have been wrongfully convicted have a criminal record. So one obstacle a lot of us in the reform movement want to overcome is that many of these stories have a catch." But just because an innocent person may have a sketchy past, he says, "doesn't means they deserve less protection. It's a slippery slope between those kinds of cases and Gary Gauger."

Death Penalty Symposium

Utah Valley State College

Faculty Seminar Room (LC 243)

Monday

• Gary Gauger, former death row inmate, Monday, 10 a.m.

• Michael Radelet, conservative opposition to the death penalty, 11 a.m.

• Daniel S. Medwed, "Anatomy of a Wrongful Conviction," noon.

• Panel discussion, post-conviction litigation in Utah, 1 p.m.

• Panel discussion, personal and academic perspectives on capital punishment, 7 p.m.

Tuesday

• Panel discussion, death penalty and public policy, 10 a.m.

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E-mail: jarvik@desnews.com