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April 18th 2005 • Printer version
Forty Years Later:
Civil Rights Lawyer Speaks of
Oregon's Early Exonerations
Lare Aschenbrenner's zeal for justice has always placed him in the
center of the action. In the course of a 45-year career, the 1957
University of Oregon law school graduate traveled from Grants Pass to
the deep South and the far North - all in the pursuit of equal rights
for all.
On April 25 he spoke about his cases, his
career as a civil rights lawyer, and his role in exonerating a young
Oregon black man who had been convicted of murder, a story which
recalls the case of Rubin "Hurricane" Carter.
The talk was sponsored by the Oregon Innocence Network, a group made up
of law and journalism students who are lobbying the University of
Oregon to support a clinic dedicated to freeing innocent people behind
bars in Oregon. The law school cosponsored the talk.
Lawrence A. Aschenbrenner was appointed Oregon's first Public Defender
in 1964, right after the US Supreme Court handed down several landmark
decisions expanding the rights of accused criminals.
In 1965, a cursory review of the trial transcript in one of Oregon's
most infamous cases revealed racial prejudice to Aschenbrenner, and his
office successfully won post-conviction review and a dismissal of a
30-year old murder conviction against a black man in Klamath Falls.
In 1932, Teddy Jordan, a 24-year-old employee of the Southern Pacific
Railroad, had been convicted by an all-white jury of murdering a white
train steward and sentenced to hang. After an outcry from the NAACP and
other groups, his sentence was commuted to life imprisonment the day
before his scheduled execution. Through Aschenbrenner's work, Jordan
was finally exonerated.
Aschenbrenner went on to represent black citizens of Mississippi during
the late 1960s when the rage of the old white power structure was at
its peak. In the 1970s, Aschenbrenner, co-founded Oregon's first public
interest law firm and worked on environmental issues. In the 1990s, he
led a successful fight for recognition of 226 Alaska Native villages.
He retired in 2002, after serving as the director of the Alaska office
of the Native American Rights Fund. Aschenbrenner was honored on April
15 with the Frohnmayer Award for Public Service, given by the UO School
of Law Alumni Association.
-Eliza Schmidkunz
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