Cara Drinan, law professor at Catholic University, says “Governor [Terry] McAuliffe should be commended for commuting Mr. Teleguz's sentence to life without parole.”
Drinan was working with a team of lawyers who filed a clemency petition on behalf of Mr. Ivan Teleguz on Friday, April 7, 2017. Teleguz was scheduled to be executed in Virginia on April 25, 2017, unless Governor McAuliffe intervened. The governor, a 1979 graduate of Catholic University, announced the commutation this afternoon.
The clemency petition, supplemented by a statement from Drinan as an expert on criminal justice matters, offered substantial evidence of Teleguz's innocence and highlighted sentencing phase errors, as well as deficiencies in Teleguz's trial representation.
“As the Governor recognized, the sentencing phase of the trial was "terribly flawed" and permitting the execution to go forward would have undermined public confidence in our criminal justice system,” Drinan said this afternoon.
Read an op-ed she published in the Huffington Post last week on the scheduled execution.
MEDIA: Drinan is available for comment. Contact the Office of Communications at communications@cua.edu or 202-319-5600 to arrange an interview.