Randy Steidl spent 17 years, three months and three weeks in prison – 12 years on Illinois’s Death Row – for a crime he didn’t commit.

He told his story to Creighton students and faculty on Wednesday.

“I was one of 18 in Illinois that was wrongly convicted. I watched 12 being executed before the governor put a moratorium in place.”

Steidl had been charged with the 1986 murder of a newlywed couple, Dyke and Karen Rhoads. Local police and prosecutors framed Steidl and fabricated evidence against him, which resulted in wrongful conviction and a death sentence.

In 2003, Michael McCuskey, a federal judge, overturned Steidl’s conviction after new evidence that proved his innocence was uncovered by a group of Northwestern University journalism students. After 12 years on Death Row and five years with a life sentence, Steidl was released.

“That was a bright, sunny day when I walked out of there,” Steidl said. “I’ve got to tell you, it was like being reborn again.”

Steidl was in Nebraska to testify at a Nebraska Legislature Judiciary committee meeting on Thursday.

Nebraska, a death penalty state, has had no means of execution since February 2008 when the electric chair was ruled unconstitutional. On Thursday, two bills were introduced to the Legislature’s Judiciary committee: one to change the method and procedure for inflicting the death penalty and the other to repeal the death penalty and replace it with life imprisonment without possibility of parole.

Nebraskans Against the Death Penalty, a nonprofit organization, asked Steidl to testify during the committee hearing.

“You have the death penalty on the books, but you don’t have a method. Now is the time to repeal the death penalty,” Steidl said. “I watched 12 men go to their deaths with lethal injection. They didn’t go kicking and screaming.”

He said his five years of a life sentence were worse than 12 on Death Row.

“Those 12 years on Death Row were harsh – being put in cells with pedophiles, child killers, the scum of the earth that corrections makes you live with,” Steidl trailed off. “If you really want to punish somebody, don’t put them on a gurney and kill them, lock them in a cage for the rest of their life, 23 hours a day. That’s punishment. They’re liable to live another 30, 40 years.”

Dr. Rebecca Murray is an assistant professor of sociology and president of the Nebraska Innocence Project, a nonprofit organization that works to try to free people who have been wrongly convicted. NADP contacted her about having Steidl speak at Creighton.

“I thought that was a great opportunity,” Murray said. “I think that one of the most compelling things about his story, and this is actually true for a lot of stories of actual innocence, is that we sort of get overwhelmed with not only sympathy for the victim, which is absolutely appropriate, but we sort of get overwhelmed with this frenzy of making the criminal justice system do what we want it to do.

“I think that it really demonstrates that our want, our need for the criminal justice system to act quickly and to act decisively sometimes overrides the need for it to act fairly and justly and truthfully,” Murray said.

The Skutt Student Center’s Room 104 was packed with Creighton students, faculty, high school students and other visitors for Steidl’s talk.

Matt Munro, a senior at Skutt Catholic High School, went to the presentation for a project on social injustices.

“One of the topics was on capital punishment, and part of the project is getting to know a victim of injustice that you’re researching,” Munro said.

“I just thought this was the perfect opportunity to find someone who experienced some of the true injustices of capital punishment.”

Daniel Humphrey, Business junior, came to the talk as an outside project for his world literature class.

“I thought it was interesting. I think the death penalty has serious issues with being able to be overturned because of what happened in his case.”

Murray said stories like Steidl’s are “a hard pill for Americans to swallow.”

“It’s not going to get any better until we admit there is a serious problem – until we go back and try to look at the cases.”