The air at Cornerstone Arts Center is thick with emotion as Ndume Olatushani spills his life story to nine opera singers seated in a half-moon in front of him.
Olatushani, whose birth name is Erskine Johnson, was 27 in 1985 when he was sentenced to death for a Memphis murder he didn’t commit. After 28 years in a Tennessee prison, 20 of which were on death row, he was released in 2012 after a trial indicated witnesses might have been motivated to protect other suspects in the crime.
“I never lost hope,” Olatushani said. “If not for a lot of good people who got involved, I’d have been one of those innocent people who got executed.”
Olatushani is here courtesy of the Korey Wise Innocence Project at the University of Colorado Law School in Boulder. The organization works to free those failed by the legal system and push for reforms to the criminal legal system to prevent wrongful convictions.
The opera singers, who come from the Pikes Peak region and around the country, are hearing Olatushani’s story to help them prepare for their roles in “Blind Injustice,” Scott Davenport Richards’ contemporary opera based on the true stories of exonerees. It premiered in 2019 at Cincinnati Opera.
“What was so impactful to me was the brightness and joy he was able to hold onto through all of this,” said Seattle-based singer Robert McPherson, who’s playing the role of the defense attorney. “It was so impactful to have a real, flesh and blood human story in front of you, especially as we’re going into production.”
Chamber Orchestra of the Springs and Opera Theatre of the Rockies, in partnership with the Korey Wise Innocence Project, will perform the opera Friday at Cornerstone Arts Center at Colorado College.
Based on the book, “Blind Injustice,” by Ohio Innocence Project Director Mark Godsey, a former prosecutor and law professor, the show relays the stories of five men and one woman who were wrongfully convicted in Ohio and their struggles to prove their innocence with the help of attorneys and law students at the Ohio Innocence Project.
“It’s an exciting piece to come to Colorado Springs,” said director Lynne Hastings. “We have opera supporters and fans, and we hope they embrace it like theater audiences embraced ‘Hamilton’ and the evolution of how our stories are told in the arts.”
While many operas typically clock in at several hours, “Blind Injustice” will likely run shy of 90 minutes. And its nontraditional musical score, influenced by jazz, blues and spoken word, as well as being sung in English with supertitles, make it an atypical opera.
About 40% of the show is based on interviews with its half-dozen wrongfully convicted subjects, including Clarence Elkins, who was wrongfully convicted of two rapes and a murder; Nancy Smith, a bus driver falsely accused of child molestation; and Laurese Glover, Derrick Wheatt and Eugene Johnson, known as the East Cleveland Three, who were convicted for murder based on tainted evidence and misidentification by an eyewitness.
“A lot of these people were wrongly convicted intentionally or unintentionally due to misinformation,” Hastings said. “It happens to so many people so often. We just hear about it more now. If not for (innocence) projects across the nation, there’d be lots of innocent people sitting in prison.”
Olatushani is simply grateful the opera exists and can help educate the masses.
“We are facing an enormous problem with the death penalty,” he said. “Innocent people are being executed and will continue to be executed. However we can talk about it and raise awareness — that’s how big the problem is.”
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