Press & speaking.

Bruce Lisker was seventeen when his mother was murdered in their Los Angeles home, and he was wrongly convicted of her killing. He spent twenty-six years in prison before a federal judge overturned the conviction in 2009 and all charges were dismissed. Today he is a web designer, photographer and speaker on wrongful conviction and criminal-justice reform.

On March 10, 1983, seventeen-year-old Bruce Lisker came home to find his mother, Dorka, beaten and stabbed in their Sherman Oaks home. He tried to save her and called for help. Within hours, the detectives who should have found her killer decided it was him. He was convicted of second-degree murder in 1985 on mishandled evidence, a lying jailhouse informant and a police theory that could not be true, and sentenced to sixteen years to life.

For the next two decades, Lisker never stopped fighting. Private investigator Paul Ingels, LAPD Internal Affairs Sergeant Jim Gavin, Los Angeles Times reporters Scott Glover and Matt Lait, and the defense team of Nasatir, Hirsch, Podberesky & Genego uncovered the evidence of his innocence. On August 7, 2009, U.S. District Judge Virginia A. Phillips overturned the conviction; he walked free on August 13, 2009, after 9,653 days, and all charges were dismissed that September. In 2016 the City of Los Angeles settled his civil rights lawsuit.

His case has been featured on CBS’s 48 Hours, in more than fifty Los Angeles Times articles, and in the documentary Survivor’s Guide to Prison. Today Lisker designs and builds websites, makes fine-art photographs, writes, and speaks to universities, legal and advocacy groups and communities about wrongful conviction, resilience and reform.