Education
This July, 2017, Tyra Patterson, also known as prisoner number 037737 in the Dayton Correctional Institute in Dayton, Ohio, will go before a parole board to argue for her release. Tyra’s been imprisoned for 23 years for a murder that, according to overwhelming evidence that includes a statement by the women who actually fired the fatal shot in this case, Tyra did not commit. Her participation in other crimes that occurred that night, September 20, 1994, is less clear. But those secondary crimes, according to her lawyer, David Singleton, as well as many other advocates that include Republicans and Democrats in the Ohio House and Senate, do not justify Tyra’s decades-long prison sentence. Singleton, who also serves as the executive director of the Ohio Justice and Policy Center as well as a law professor at Northern Kentucky University’s Chase College of Law, joins us to talk about Tyra’s case, our overwhelmed criminal justice system, and the Constitutional Litigation Clinic he started at NKU more than a decade ago.