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Tuesday, September 26, 2006 Writer: Morgan Duke, 706/542-2836, publicity@drama.uga.edu Exonerated man to join panel after production of The Exonerated on Oct. 13 at UGA Athens, Ga. – Shareef Cousin, who was exonerated after spending three years on death row, will join other experts and activists on a panel about wrongful death sentences at the University of Georgia. The panel will follow a performance of the play The Exonerated by UGA’s department of theatre and film studies on Friday, Oct. 13, at the Seney-Stovall Chapel on N. Milledge Avenue.
Cousin is now a program organizer for the center’s program Fairness for Prisoners’ Families. The panel also will include UGA law professor Donald E. Wilkes, Jr., who conducts extensive research into convicting and unconvicting the innocent in the United States and regularly teaches on the subject. Joining Cousins and Wilkes on the panel are Kristin Boudreau, associate professor of English at UGA and the author of numerous essays and books on U.S. murder trials – including Sympathy in American Literature: American Sentiments from Jefferson to the Jameses and The Spectacle of Death: Populist Literary Responses to American Capital Cases – and Gerry Weber, legal director for the American Civil Liberties Union of Georgia. Norman Ferguson, an MFA performance student who appears in the production, will moderate.
During its run in New York, the play won the 2003 Outer Critics Circle Award for Best Off-Broadway play, the Drama Desk and Lucille Lortel Awards for Unique Theatre Experience. It was nominated for three NAACP Theatre awards and received the Defender of Justice Award from the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers and the Justice in Media and Arts Award from Death Penalty Focus. The Exonerated runs approximately 75 minutes with no intermission. The play deals with adult themes and may not be suitable for young children. The play will open in the Seney-Stovall Chapel located at 201 N. Milledge Ave. on Wednesday, Oct. 11, at 8 p.m. Additional performances will be Oct. 12 and 13 also at 8 p.m., with a matinee on Sunday, Oct. 15, at 2:30 p.m. Talk-back sessions will be held after each show, with the panel discussion on Friday, Oct. 13. Regular admission is $8; admission for students and senior citizens with I.D. is $6. Tickets may be purchased beginning Sept. 27 at the University Theatre box office located in the lobby of the Fine Arts Building at the corner of Lumpkin and Baldwin streets (Monday through Friday, 12 to 5 p.m.) or at the theatre door beginning one hour prior to show time. Reservations may be made in advance by calling the University Theatre Box Office line at 706/542-2838. For more information about University Theatre or UGA’s department of theatre and film studies, visit www.drama.uga.edu. ## Note to editors: Pre-production photographs are available at http://drama.uga.edu/gallery/thumbnails.php?album=97. Click on a thumbnail once for web-ready photos. Clicking the web-ready photo will provide the full-resolution photo. |
Cousin was wrongly convicted of murder and sentenced to death in Louisiana when he was 16 years old. According to the Southern Center for Human Rights’ website, the “Louisiana Supreme Court overturned [Cousin's] conviction because of improperly withheld evidence and the District Attorney decided not to pursue the case further. Despite the fact that Shareef was at a city recreation department basketball game at the time of the crime, (with video evidence) and his coach testifying that he dropped him off at home just 20 minutes after the slaying, he was still incarcerated for ten years on these charges.”
The Exonerated compiles the true stories of six innocent men and women who each emerged from years on death row. “The stories in the play are true-life accounts of innocent people caught in a surreal nightmare,” according to Peach Pittenger, the production’s director and an assistant professor of theatre and film studies at UGA. “Each story reveals an ugly side of an American justice system that is fallible, racist, and sometimes purposely corrupt, where truth and innocence don’t always matter.”
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