Part Two: Dr. Death: The Texas Death Row Psychiatrist Who Killed So Many People

We conclude the story and life of "Dr. Death", which culminates in, predictably, a lot of dead people.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Also media, and we're back to Behind the Bastards, the
podcast that's about people who are bad, which is today
this week doctor James Grigson and the broader industry cottage industry.

Speaker 2 (00:17):
He helps ignite of psychiatrists who go to court and
be like, yeah, man absolutely killed that motherfucker, which is
only slightly less direct than the actual job was. With
us again, our guest Stephen wanta SELLI, Stephen, how you doing.

Speaker 3 (00:34):
I'm you know, I'm doing You're doing? I'm doing well, Yeah,
I'm here.

Speaker 2 (00:40):
What are you doing?

Speaker 3 (00:42):
We're about to talk about some really really uplifting, heartening,
trust inducing stuff like makes me really love the system
and the medical profession as a whole.

Speaker 2 (00:56):
It's good. I mean, you know, Here's what's frustrating is
the medical profession as a whole is trying to do
the right thing here, Like they keep being like this
guy's a crank, this sky's a crank. It just doesn't
matter for a long time. This is kind of an
early example of the hell where in now, where it's
like all of the people who know anything about for example,

(01:17):
climate or for example, how infectious diseases work, or anything
else to do with like vaccines, and medicine. All of
these people who know things space travel, people who know
things about that are being like, nah, this is all
this is really fucked up, Like you're shooting us in
the foot. All of these different cuts to research are horrible.
Everything that's being done is going to make life worse

(01:39):
for everybody. But the only people that matter are the
ones who are saying nuhuh. And you kind of get
an early version. This is like a prologue for all
of the hell that we're in right now, this like
anti science bullshit. Well, I feel like a good psychiatry
should be able to say, oh, yeah, this man is
definitely going to kill again because I've diagnosed him with
something I believe thanks to TV as a real diagnosis.

(02:03):
This is our like Star Wars prequel of the anti
science hell that we're all trapped in now.

Speaker 3 (02:08):
Yeah. The sort of non expert expert, the person who
is more than willing to set aside all of the
good things about whatever field they nominally belong to in
order to like push some sort of quackery or ideology.
Yeah it's yeah, it's We've seen it in a lot
of fields, unfortunately, and to horrible extents, like the Russians

(02:30):
with their was it Lamarckism?

Speaker 2 (02:33):
Oh god, no, no, no, think Lisenkoism.

Speaker 3 (02:37):
Sorry, sorry, Licinkoism. I'm certainly not an expert in the
history of genetic research, but I digress. Yeah, really really
horrible person here that we're talking about today.

Speaker 2 (02:47):
It is interesting to compare it to la Senkoism, which
is like, you had obviously actual agricultural scientists in the USSR,
and then you had this guy being like, no, plants
work the same way. We're pretty sure people do, you know,
and you can like freeze a crop and you'll it'll
pass down cold resistance to It's like, no, that doesn't
And there were a lot of people saying, now that

(03:08):
doesn't work. But the scientists who happened to be in
alignment with the politics of the people you know in
charge was the scientist who got declared to be right
and damn the consequences. And likewise, here you've got the
whole APA being like, at no point should psychiatrists ever
do what this guy is doing, right, But you've got
people in Texas and prosecutors and the government of Texas

(03:30):
being like, no, this is pretty much how we think
it should work. So this guy's right, and he gets
to make a lot of money.

Speaker 3 (03:36):
It's a tool of the state and its interest at
the time.

Speaker 2 (03:40):
Yeah, yeah, it's great. So from this point forward in
the story, our boy, doctor Griggson aka Doctor Death is
going to continue to expand and extend his practice throughout
the eighties, will also dealing with constant and mounting criticism
from organized psychiatry as a field. Now, the core of

(04:03):
the complaints against him have to do with his continued
insistence on using the results of competency tests, which he's
not supposed to be doing, right, but there's some evidence
that he keeps doing it after he's told not to
by the Supreme Court, And then kind of the bigger
issue is again that he's he's making predictions about the future,
which he shouldn't be doing. Even after being chided by

(04:23):
the APA in that Supreme Court case, he continued to
rank sociopathy on a one to ten scale, with ten
being the worst, and as noted in an article by
the Death Penalty Information Center, he would regularly rank people
higher than ten, like the one through ten seem to
be like mostly pointless because he would always go above
ten right and up to twelve thirteen at even fourteen,

(04:45):
which is just what like again, like if you're going
to go above ten on a one to ten, yeah,
you just say, like he's an eleven, like a fourteen,
So why even have a one to ten scale? If
someone could be that high above it? What are you doing?
Like why even introduce that idea from begetting I promise
I'm not going to beat on that the whole time.
It's just very frustrating to me. Now, these numbers are

(05:06):
again infuriating if you know anything about psychiatry or probability.
But they get even more sickening when you dig into
the actual stories of the people that doctor Grigson diagnosed
as a one hundred percent sociopaths who would one hundred
percent kill again. He is often saying a ninety nine
percent chance they'll kill again. Sometimes he says one hundred
percent chance they'll kill again. Right, And we know that

(05:29):
in a lot of cases he was objectively wrong, and
because we have examples like and this is probably the
most prominent case of him being wrong, the tale of
Randall Dale Adams. In nineteen seventy seven, Adams was convicted
of the murder of a Dallas, Texas police officer Robert Wood.
Officer Wood was shot to death in late nineteen seventy six,

(05:50):
the same year that Texas finally established its new rules
for deciding death penalty cases. Now we know who the
actual shooter was. It was a guy named David Harris
who framed Randal Adams to avoid being convicted of the crime.
Adams Is conviction relied heavily on testimony from three witnesses
who were illegally hidden from the defense until they showed
up in court and said testimony we also know was

(06:13):
at least partially perjured. So not only did the defense
hide these witnesses when they shouldn't have, but the witnesses
were coaxed and bribed into giving false testimony. And we
know this right, So we're already starting with crimes on
the part of the prosecution in this case. Now that
begs the question, why are the police and why is

(06:33):
the prosecutor so gung ho to go after a guy
with evidence they know like that they know they're having
to cook up right, that they know isn't true. And
you would assume, just knowing cops, it's because, like you know,
police just for whatever reason, decided this was the guy
and we're like, well, we can just kind of coax
the truth into making sure that we are able to
like make a stronger case, and the prosecutor went along

(06:55):
with it. Right, That's actually not what happened. So what's
really going on here is that David Harris, the guy
who actually kills this person and this robbery gone wrong,
is sixteen years old, right, And they know Harris does
it from the beginning. He's the first guy they take
into custody. They find that he, like the gun that

(07:18):
was used in the shooting was his dad's gun that
he had access to that night. So it's very clear
that this is Harris. But you can't give a sixteen
year old the death penalty in Texas, right, And it's
a cop. He's murdered, and so the police, even more
than making sure the right guy gets executed, the police
want to make sure that when a cop gets murdered,

(07:40):
someone gets executed, right. And when it becomes clear Harris
can't be executed, Harris is like, well, I'll give you
this other guy who like drove me there, right, And
Randal Adams. Part of why Adams is a good patsy
dependent on is that Darryl Harris is like a kid.
He like lives with his parents, so he's someone who
has something of like a normal life. And Randal Adams

(08:02):
is a drifter, right, he's like doing day labor. He
doesn't come from the state. He's kind of you know,
he's he's I think he has a car, but he's
essentially a homeless man, right, And so it's really easy
to kill him, right, and really easy to like kill
him because he's not going to have any kind of
money for defense, and because he's not the kind of
person anyone's going to care about. Right. So this kind

(08:24):
of fits what the cops want, which is we want
to make a show of force against somebody for the
death of this cop. Now, there's a lot of fucked
up details in the case. Everything that happens here, there's
a lot of like rule breaking and illegality. We don't
have enough time to go into. But every detail of
this case stinks about as much as it's possible for
a case to stink from the get go. In the end,

(08:44):
the jury declares Adam's guilty after almost no deliberation. And
as you know, because we've done our little clinic on
how the Texas death penalty worked. The next step is
they have to decide should this man die, right, and
this always comes down to will he commit an their
violent crime if we leave him alive. Determining this case
came down to doctor Grigson and another colleague testifying about

(09:07):
whether or not Adams was, in doctor Grigson's terms, a
maximum sociopath. Again not a diagnosis, but Grigson testified that
Randall would one hundred percent kill again if left alive. Adams,
he insisted, was an extreme sociopath, so we can't even
keep his terms straight. Adams is sentenced to die in

(09:28):
nineteen seventy nine, and the years tick by agonizingly. You know,
he's from this court case until three days before his execution,
the US Supreme Court stays it right. They give him
a stay of execution because Justice Lewis Powell writes that
there is grave concern regarding potential jurors in the case
who were excluded for being anti death penalty, even though

(09:50):
they promised to follow Texas law if appointed. Right, So
that's the whole thing that saves his life initially, is
that there's an appeal based on like jurors who are
weren't pro death penalty were excluded illegally from service, right,
and so that that's the only reason he's saved initially.
It has nothing to do with his innocence, nothing to
do with other aspects of the case. It's just this
issue with the jury. Now by rights, because this has

(10:13):
been found by the Supreme Court, Adam should have gotten
a new trial, right, it's been determined that his trial
was like not valid because the rules were broken here
enough that they stayed as execution. You should have a
new trial. But the Dallas DA at the time Henry Wade.
And does that name sound familiar to you, Henry Wade.

Speaker 3 (10:30):
Yeah, we talked about him. I'm pretty sure doctor Phillips
and I on one of the episodes on it could
happen here.

Speaker 2 (10:36):
Yeah, he Wade from Roe v. Wade, Right, Like that's
that's the and he's on the bad side of the case, right. Yeah.
So doctor Wade or Henry Wade, not doctor Wade. The
DA comes in and he's like, we don't need to
give this guy a new trial. It would be a
waste of money, right, And it'll be a waste of
money because I'm going to have the governor commute Adam's

(10:57):
a sentence to life in prison. Right, So he's not
going to get killed anymore, so why do we care
about giving him a new trial?

Speaker 4 (11:01):
Right?

Speaker 2 (11:03):
So Adams's people are still like, we want a new
trial because he's innocent and he doesn't want to spend
the rest of his life in prison, but a Texas
Criminal Court of Appeals insists that, like, well, now that
he's not going to be executed, there's no longer any
error in the case. So it's fine, right, because you know,
those jurors were just being excluded because of their opinion
on the death penalty. No death penalty, everything's good here.

(11:24):
So that's what the Court of Appeals decide. Come on,
and so Adams, a man everyone knows has been railroaded
and do a guilty verdict. A lot of this is
out now and had been nearly executed due to a
crooked case, seemed set to spend the rest of his
life behind bars. And this is the case that he
stays in until March of nineteen eighty five. And the

(11:44):
reason why he gets another shot and ultimately, thank god,
I'm going to spoil it a little bit, gets freed
is because of we can thank documentarian Errol Morris. So,
Errol Morris is paying attention during that nineteen eighty three
Supreme Court case against doctor Griggson, and he's like, this
seems really fucked up. Like this doctor death guy seems

(12:05):
like a real asshole who's killing a shitload of people.
I wonder if we can do anything about that, you know,
me being literally Errol Morris. So he starts working on
a documentary that's initially supposed to be primarily about doctor Grigson.
And the documentary that comes out is called The Thin
Blue Line, right if you've heard of that, Like, that
is the documentary that he makes about this case. Ultimately,

(12:27):
So Morris starts working on this case, and that obviously
brings a lot of attention to it, and you know,
he's able to put some resources behind it and to
talk about what happened next. I'm going to quote from
an article by the Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern University.
Morris's intent had not been to question the guilt of
defendants and whose cases Grigson had testified, but only to
question his psychiatric conclusions. When Morris met Adams, the focus

(12:48):
of the project changed. Morris learned from Randy Schaeffer a
volunteer Houston lawyer who had been working on the case
since nineteen eighty two, that Harris had not led an
exemplary life. After helping to convict Adams, Harris, which is
the guy who gives Adams up, had joined the army
and been stationed in Germany, where he had been convicted
in a military court of a series of burglaries and
sent to prison in Leavenworth, Kansas. A few months after

(13:09):
his release, Harris had been convicted in California of kidnapping,
armed robbery, and related crimes. So Morris is like, well,
the guy who said Adams was guilty in the first
place and had been the initial suspect really seems like
the kind of guy who'd murder a cop, whereas Adams doesn't.
And there's a bunch of other irregularities in the case.
The more he looks into it, the more he finds.

(13:30):
For one thing, it comes up again that Harris's father
had owned the gun that was likely used in the
shooting and that Harris had stolen it. Now, this is
all looking pretty bad, but what comes up next is
even worse. And I'm gonna continue. Quoting from that article,
Morrison Schaeffer discovered that Officer Turko, who's one of the yachts,
the officer that survives her partner is killed and she
testifies about the murder. That Officer Turko had been hypnotized

(13:53):
during the investigation and initially had acknowledged that she had
not seen the killer, facts that the prosecution had illegally
withheld from the defense. Morrison. Schaeffer also found that robbery
charges against the daughter of IWitness Emily Miller had been
dropped after Miller agreed to testify Adams as Woods's killer.
The new information, coupled with the fact that Miller initially
had described the killer as Mexican or African American, became

(14:15):
the basis for a new trial motion. Right, So they
find all this shit is fucked up and like there's
not really any evidence whatsoever that ties Adams to the murder,
and ultimately, you know, there's a new trial motion. The
case becomes a major cornerstone for the Death Row Innocence
Project like movement, right for the people who are are
trying to you know, especially as forensic science is advancing

(14:39):
and we've got DNA now trying to look at a
lot of these people who are definitely innocent and get
them off death row, get them out of prison. So
nineteen eighty eight, during a three day hearing in a
Dallas district court, Harris finally recants and admits that he
killed the cop that Adams was convicted of murdering. The
judge in that case recommends a new trial for Adams
and that Adams be paroled in immediately. In the meantime,

(15:01):
the Board of Pardons and Appeals initially refuses to let
Adams out, but agrees to a new trial, and then
after like a couple of weeks, he gets released anyway,
and then a few days later all charges against him
are dropped. And I think this is a case of
as soon as they looked back into it, they're like, oh,
there's no case whatsoever without the shit that the cops
and the prosecutors falsified. There's absolutely nothing. We can't even

(15:24):
give him a new trial, Like, there's not enough to
even try and accuse him of here.

Speaker 3 (15:30):
It's ridiculous.

Speaker 2 (15:31):
Yeah, I mean it's good, right, this is an innocent
man gets out of prison, you know, after having his life.

Speaker 4 (15:37):
Still Yeah, it got that had to get to that point.

Speaker 2 (15:42):
Yeah, So it's a major win. Obviously Randal Adams and
everyone who believed in his innocence, you know, scratch up
a w. But this represents a serious problem for doctor
Grigson because he had guaranteed in court that this man
was an incurable sociopath who what one hundred percent kill again?
So people start asking him like, hey, you said this

(16:04):
innocent guy was definitely associopath. Were you wrong? And this
is part of why I love that Vanity Fair piece
where Rosenbaum spent like weeks traveling with doctor Death because
you know, this is written in nineteen ninety, but it's
during a period of time in which he keeps getting
questioned about Adams because Adams is just like Freedom eighty eight.
So Grigson is still testifying constantly, and defense attorneys are

(16:26):
using this against him. Unfortunately, it's less successful at hurting
his testimony than you might imagine. Now, this part in
that Vanity Fair article comes after Griggson is just testified
in one of three death penalty cases. He's doing in
like a long weekend with the goal of getting three
people killed. Right, He's trying to kill the most people
that he's ever killed in his career in the shortest

(16:46):
period of time, like, that's what this article is about.
He's got like three cases in a couple of days.
He's got he's like, can I break my record of,
you know, getting people executed by the state. So during
one of these cases, he's testifying and the defense attorney asked,
do you recall the Randall Dale Adams case. The doctor
nodded warily and said, I recall it. Well, yes, sir.
Are you as sure about this defendant as you were

(17:08):
when you declared Randal Dale Adams was guilty and would
kill again again? The courtroom tensed up, even out on
the prairie the papers had reported on the Adams case.
Looking totally unperturbed, the doctor said dramatically, those people that
were involved in the case know that he is guilty.
I examined, mister Adams, there is no question in my mind,
as well as the mind of the jury who convicted him,
that he is guilty. And did you say, if Randal

(17:28):
Adams that he will continue his previous behavior? I most
certainly said that, the doctor said, defiantly, and he will, right.
So that's two years later He's like, no, they were wrong.
He's definitely still guilty. I know it because of my
psychiatry brain, and I guarantee you he's going to kill again, right.

Speaker 3 (17:47):
It just hasn't happened yet.

Speaker 2 (17:48):
It hasn't happened yet, but at one hundred percent will
right now. Rosenbaum talks to the doctor after this case,
which the prosecution wins, even though this gets brought up,
and talk to him about Adams. He's like, it just
seems really weird that you're insisting this guy is still
guilty after all the evidence that Morris uncovered and the
fact that the legal system backpedaled, And doctor Grigson is like, no, no, no,

(18:12):
the guy's guilty. Harris only Recanton took credit for the
murder because he wanted to jack the system around, right,
And in another trial a week later, when asked the
same question, doctor Grigson continued to insist that not only
was Adams guilty, but again he will one hundred percent
kill again like that. I am one hundred percent sure
this now freeman will commit another murder like he testified that.

(18:34):
So that seems like a pretty good case to judge
his credibility on, given that this is happening in nineteen
ninety and we have twenty five years of additional data
into this guy's life, right, seems like something we should
look into, which we will after these ads.

Speaker 3 (18:50):
Wow, that was so professional. That was a good one.

Speaker 2 (18:53):
Thank you. I try. We're back. So you could say,
I think it'd be fair to say that a lot
of doctor Grigson's credibility rests on the Randall Adams case, right,
because number one, this is a guy he said was
definitely guilty who then got exonerated. And number two, he

(19:15):
has now provided In nineteen ninety he said one hundred
percent he'll kill again now that he's free. That's a
falsifiable statement. And we have a lot of time since
nineteen ninety to kind of look at And about fourteen
years after he made that statement, in two thousand and four,
there was a study I found an article about it,
based on the study by the Texas Defender Service into

(19:38):
the records of one hundred and fifty five convicted killers
to determine how often they actually engaged in violent behavior
post conviction and what doctor Grigson and other experts had
predicted they would do. Right, So these guys are looking
into like, what can we actually tell based on the
predictions made about these convicted killers and what they actually
did how accurate these predictions were, right, So you know

(19:58):
that's good. I'm gonna quote from that now. Adams fifty
five is exhibit A in a study to be released
today that found experts witnesses predictions of violent behavior were
wrong ninety five percent of the time.

Speaker 1 (20:10):
Oh god, so that's way worse than a third, right exactly.

Speaker 3 (20:15):
That's like, you know, statistically significant confidence interval, like you
basically can say it's gonna happen.

Speaker 2 (20:23):
Yeah, Like that is you would think if if you
and I were just guessing, if we just got to
go to court and like flip a coin and be like, yeah,
that guy, I'll kill again, like you'd expect us to
be righter than that. Yep. Oh boy, that's an incredible
degree of wrong.

Speaker 4 (20:38):
Right.

Speaker 2 (20:39):
So, of the one hundred and fifty five convicted killers studied,
only eight engaged in later behavior that resulted in serious injury.
So eight out of one hundred and fifty five seriously
hurt another person after their conviction. A full twenty percent
of these convicts had zero disciplinary violations while in prison
of any kind, and seventy five percent had only minor
non violent day fractions like owning lottery tickets, right, So like, yeah,

(21:03):
a bunch of them got in trouble after a conviction,
but it was because they had an illegal lottery ticket.
It wasn't because they were killing or hurting anybody. Not
one of the one hundred and fifty five convicted killers
ever murdered again, right, So very bad like rate of
accuracy here. Now, it's important to note this is two
thousand and four, which is after doctor Griggson dies and

(21:26):
well after he stopped practicing. But it's important to note
that even at the end of the nineteen eighties the
early nineteen nineties, there's good documented evidence that not only
had Griggson been wrong on a case, but during his
whole career he'd very likely been wrong on a grand scale.
I want to quote from a two thousand and three
article for the Washington Times. Here Andrea Kellen, an attorney

(21:47):
with the Texas Defender Service, said she knew of dozens
of former death row inmates whose sentences were reduced for
various reasons and who have never been involved in any difficulties,
though doctor Griggson testified they should be executed because they
would likely commit murder again. In nineteen eighty eight, a
report compiled by an assistant district attorney in Dallas concluded
that after the study of eleven specific death penalty verdicts

(22:07):
where the defendant's terms had been reduced, not a single
one had been anything other than a model prisoner. Mister
Halpern and a brief for other prisoners concluded that despite
doctor Grigson's near identical predictions that each inmate would beyond
an need doubt, absolutely and without any question, commit acts
of dangerousness in the future, that prosecution prepared report proved
the psychiatrist was seldom accurate. So a DA report, this

(22:30):
is a prosecutor did a study of eleven death penalty
verdicts where doctor Grigson said they will definitely continue to
commit crimes if not executed, and these people were not executed,
their sentences were reduced and none of them did violence. Again,
that's one hundred percent wrong for doctor Grigson, right, based
on those eleven cases, you know, Jesus, So I'm not

(22:54):
overly optimistic that he was right a bunch of the
time that we don't have data on based on that
and based on the Adams case, so you know, going
into the nineties here though, despite the fact that there
is evidence building that doctor Grigson is wrong an awful lot.
He is continuing to do a shitload of these cases

(23:14):
and to be very prominent in the media, and the
Adams case does nothing initially to slow his career or
halt his body count. There was, however, a minor uproar
as a result of Morris's documentary and Adams's exoneration. In
nineteen ninety three, the Texas State Supreme Court responded to
the epidemic of junkt science experts, but only in civil cases.

(23:36):
So they ruled that expert testimony could only be admitted
if it was proven to be both relevant and reliable,
a bar that doctor Grigson's work could not pass, as
if any psychiatrists not named doctor Grigson were consulted on
the matter. However, this only applied the civil cases, like
I said, not capital cases. So there's an uproar, but
it only stops psychiatrists from testifying in the cases that

(23:58):
doctor Grigson isn't testifying in. Now there is still an
uproar even in Texas about this. There are a lot
of professionals that are angry about what Grigson is doing.
It's just not able to stop things. Like one of
the things I found that was really wild is John Edens,
who was a professor of psychiatry at my alma mater,
Sam Houston State, said, in the wake of this ninety

(24:19):
three decision of doctor Grigson, It's hard to imagine this
kind of testimony would be allowed. It does not meet
the criteria of reliability. There is a known error rate
which is remarkably high. So Sam Houston State not a
liberal university. This is the criminal justice school in Texas. Right, Like,
this is not it's set. It's located right next to

(24:40):
death row.

Speaker 3 (24:41):
Right, why is there nothing? Why are we just letting
this happen?

Speaker 2 (24:45):
Then, because any ruling against doctor Grigson could be seen
as attempting to like slow the death penalty, and it's
really popular, unfortunately, and these are We're coming into the
Bush years now, right, doctor Grigson is going to be
really active during Bush's time as governor, and so like

(25:06):
we're kind of ramping up in the nineties to the
period where Texas is like considering its ability to continue
its death row. As like, this is like something that
is really important to the state, Right, It's something we
take a degree of pride and like, my family did
you know? So it's it's not like the fact that
all of these experts are very much saying this guy

(25:27):
is not reliable is not hurting his business yet, so crazy.
And it's also prosecutors have a lot of power, a
lot of political power, right, Das have a lot of
political power, and they find him useful.

Speaker 3 (25:41):
So he was too important of a cog in a bouder,
bigger machine.

Speaker 2 (25:47):
Right, He's really politically useful, and he's useful to all
their careers, right because a lot of these prosecutors part
of what they're building their careers on, a lot of
them want to go into other politics. Is like, not
only do I have this many convictions, but I sent
this many danger risk sociopaths to death row right, I
made our states safer? Yeah okay, yes, yeah yeah.

Speaker 3 (26:07):
And it's one of those things where, yeah, if you
put numbers up on the board, it sounds good. You
can claim that you took dangerous repeat criminals who would
have been threats to their communities off the streets, and
then if you succeed in actually killing them, you don't
face the scrutiny of what you just described, whether or
not they actually would live up to that potential future

(26:30):
that's been predicted by this expert.

Speaker 2 (26:32):
Yep, sheesh. Yeah, okay, so this is cool, right, We're happy.

Speaker 3 (26:37):
Yeah, works works as expected? Right. The purpose of a
system is what it does.

Speaker 2 (26:43):
Right, And in this case, yeah, the system is doing
exactly what the people who set it up wanted to do.
Doctor James Grigson in nineteen ninety five was finally drummed
out of the APA for his continued insistence on diagnosing
subjects without ever talking to them. The next year, the
Texas is Xiety of Psychiatric Physicians expelled him. In nineteen
ninety six, New York University psych professor Michael Wiener wrote this,

(27:07):
the problem with doctor Griggson was not that inmates were
placed on death row, but that he was fundamentally biased
in his assessments and was performing cursory evaluations and drawing
broad and damning conclusions from only limited information. A problem
of credibility and objectivity. And you know, I would say
part of the problem is that people were being placed
on death row based on bad evidence. But I think
he's making the point that, like doctor Griggson isn't responsible

(27:29):
for the way prosecutions work for how that, like lying
about the evidence is incentivized in these cases and stuff.
He's responsible for this aspect of it, which is probably
fair to say. Now, it is impossible for us to
know to a point of certainty how often he was wrong,
but something like a hundred of the people he testified
about for money were put to death, and most of

(27:51):
those cases were never revisited. However, we do have a
few more case studies on times when he was proven wrong.
Back in nineteen eighty six, a carpenter named David Wayne
Stoker was charged with the murder of a convenience store
clerk north of Lubbock. Five months after the murder, a
man described by prosecutors as low life scum snitched a
police that Stoker had done the murder and handed over

(28:13):
what he claimed to be the murder weapon. Well, this
low life scum had the murder weapon and says, this
other guy did it. That's all I need to know.
Why would he have a bias?

Speaker 4 (28:23):
Right?

Speaker 2 (28:24):
So, Stoker did have an assault prior, and he had
a drug issue, right, and was arrested in short order. Again,
it's one of these like, oh yeah, this guy doesn't
have any way to fight this, Yeah, let's go after him.
Like many such death penalty cases, his was dogged by
poor quality representation in a system in which people like
him who are expected to be guilty get railroaded through
to a conviction. Per an article by the Death Penalty

(28:46):
Information Center. Felty, the lead lawyer, the defense attorney, and
a former prosecutor, later gave up his law license in
the face of disciplinary action. Felty forced the signatures of
two clients on a settlement check, then pocketed the money.
Record show he also lead guilty to felity charges for
forging a judge's signature on a court order and falsifying
a government document. He was sentenced to five years of

(29:06):
community service. So that's this guy's defense attorney. And again
not shitting on the concept of defense attorneys, but it's
a major problem that a lot of these guys, in particular,
these are like the kind of the lowest of the low,
and they benefit from the very worst service on average, right,
they are very likely to get the defense attorneys who
are not competent. It's, as we'll talk about, weirdly common

(29:29):
for death penalty cases for the defense attorneys to later
get disbarred for incompetence or other similar issues. The guy
who had snitched on Stoker claimed in court to not
have been given anything for his testimony, that just like
I wanted the truth to come out, I didn't get
any kind of special deal. But the day he testified,
charges he had for drug possession and for possession of

(29:52):
a firearm illegally in the next county over were dropped
and he received one thousand dollars from crime Stoppers as
there were all ward for turning this guy in, and
further documents made it clear that there had been a
written quid pro quote with the DA for one thing,
that county didn't have a crime Stoppers program until it
was started for this by the DA, and the check

(30:15):
was sent to him by an investigator for the DA's office.

Speaker 3 (30:20):
Lovely stuff.

Speaker 2 (30:21):
Not bribery, though not bribery.

Speaker 3 (30:24):
No, not picking cases that you think can win, even
if it might not be the right guy. And certainly
no Shenanigan's or bribery with regard to acquiring potentially suspect
testimony or evidence.

Speaker 2 (30:36):
Not at all, Absolutely not no, that would be that
would be unethical.

Speaker 3 (30:40):
There's no gambling in this casino. That's yeah, that's crazy.

Speaker 2 (30:43):
And this casine. No, so there's much more that reeks
about this case. But things really got nasty once doctor
Grigson entered the arena. Quote during sentencing, the prosecutor called
doctor James P. Griggson, the psychiatrist nicknamed doctor Death. But
Grigson never examined Stoker. He testified Stoker was associopath who
would absolutely be violent. Again, with Stoker's life in the balance,
Felty put on only one witness a sentencing, Stoker's mother.

(31:07):
She testified briefly about the most superficial aspects of the
Stoker family. Felty, who works as a supervisor at home Depot,
defended his work. When we went to trial, we were
a hell of a lot better prepared than the DA's office.
Felty set, so not a lot of winter. He's not
necessarily wrong because the DA's just lying and bribing somebody.
But also, when your lawyer gets disbarred for felonies and

(31:29):
winds up working at a home depot, that's not a
great sign in terms of the quality of representation you received.

Speaker 3 (31:35):
Yeah, the look at my lawyer, dog.

Speaker 2 (31:38):
My lawyer, dog, I'm getting executed. Yeah, unfortunately, that is
just such beautiful shade on that article too, just noted
that he's working at home depot now. Almost kind of
unnecessary except for the point they're trying to make here,
But it's good color. It is good color now. Unfortunately,

(31:58):
unlike Adams's story, this story does not end with an
eleventh hour stay of execution and eventual exoneration. Stoker was
executed in nineteen ninety seven during George W. Bush's governorship,
when he pushed Texas to execute inmates at a rate
not before seen in modern times. Even within the ranks
of Bush appointees, though the Stoker case was looked at

(32:18):
as egregious. Thomas Moss had been appointed by the governor
to the Board of Partons and Paroles, and he voted
to give Stoker clemency. That he only did this twice
in his entire career, and once was with Stoker, because
he was like, yeah, this is just too messy a case.
This is you know, a lot kept coming out. The
local police chief eventually testified that no, the Crime Stoppers

(32:39):
Group wasn't real. You know, we founded it expressly for
this purpose. Basically, a DA's investigator made the payment, and
as this stuff came to light, eventually like the local
sheriff testified that there was no direct tie between Stoker
and the crime he'd been executed for committing. Now, had
Stoker been put under life imprisonment, had his execution basically commuted, right,

(33:02):
but given life imprisonment at this point, he likely would
have lived long enough to get retried, right. That probably
would have happened eventually, because there was just enough, you know,
good evidence on his side of things for this. But
doctor at Grigson helped to ensure that this could not happen,
right by testifying he would definitely kill again. One juror
in the Stoker case later said, you couldn't help but
listen to what he was saying. He's a doctor. He

(33:24):
had a lot of influence on what we decided. And
several jurors later said, yeah, if I'd known these other
facts about the case, I wouldn't have voted for the
death penalty. So, yeah, this guy gets executed, And a
big part of why is that Grigson said he needed
to be and we can say fairly confidently that this
was an innocent man who doctor Griggson helped put to death. Here, Yeah,

(33:47):
throughout the Bush years and the bloodiest period for Texas's
death Row. Doctor Grigson was prolific and influential even in
cases where he personally did not testify. That death Penalty
Information center Piece discusses another psychiatrist, doctor Eclake Griffith, who
often testified along the same lines as doctor Griggson and
had clearly built his profession in the other man's image.
Like Grigson, he used a one to ten scale for

(34:09):
judging defendants and regularly went above ten in order to
make his point, as he did when reviewing the nineteen
eighty four case of David Wayne Spence. Now, Spence again
was not tied to the triple homicide that he was
accused of committing via any evidence, just the testimony of
seven informants, all of whom had good reason to lie
about what had happened. Several of these people later confessed

(34:30):
to being fed information by investigators and being shown crime
scene and autopsy photos, as well as being bribed behind
bars with privileges and leniency. Like Stoker, Spence was executed
in nineteen eighty seven or nineteen ninety seven. The issues
we've discussed in all these cases have been proven via
subsequent study to be rampant within Texas's criminal justice system,

(34:52):
particularly death row cases. An investigation of the one hundred
and thirty one executions during George W. Bush's time as
governor showed that in at least twenty nine cases, the
prosecution had presented testimony from a psychiatrist, often doctor Griggson,
that the defendant would commit future violence. In most of
these cases, the psychiatrists had not seen or examined the

(35:12):
defendant beyond the issues most relevant to Grigson. In forty
three of those cases, the defendant was represented at trial
by an attorney who was later suspended. Again, I want
to really go into that one hundred and thirty one executions.
Of those, in forty three of the cases, the defendants
defense attorney was later disbarred or suspended.

Speaker 5 (35:32):
That's insane, Yeah, like so like he not only destroyed
people's lives and got them killed, but then he also
destroyed defense attorneys in the process.

Speaker 2 (35:45):
I think the point that this is more a broader
point about the fact that most of the people on
death row did not benefit from a vigorous defense, like
you were entitled constitutionally one, and they clearly didn't get
it right.

Speaker 3 (35:56):
I'm completely misunderstood. Yeah, No, that makes a lot more
sense that just you. You're dealing with a very poor
level of representation where it is clearly falling underneath the
bar time and time again, and at a very large scale. Okay.

Speaker 2 (36:10):
And part of the problem is that because in so
many of these cases, at least twenty nine, doctor Grigson
and others are testifying, you don't have these kind of
checked out defense attorneys don't have the wherewithal and often
don't have the funding to properly counter the expert that
the prosecution has brought up.

Speaker 4 (36:26):
Right.

Speaker 2 (36:28):
They also found this is getting into another set of pseudoscience,
but I think it's worth bringing up. In twenty three
or more, at least of these one hundred and thirty
one cases, the prosecution's case relied on the visual comparison
of hairs, which is not real science and has now
largely been banned as being wildly ineffective. One study of
sixty two convictions that were later cleared by DNA evidence

(36:48):
found that in at least eighteen of those cases, prosecutors
had used hair analysis to get the initial conviction.

Speaker 3 (36:53):
Wow.

Speaker 2 (36:54):
And this brings me to an important point, which is
that while doctor Grigson is the most colorful of these
experts testify in favor of the death penalty during this
golden age of executing people in Texas, he was not
the only or the most obviously fraudulent one. In their
review of the role fake forensic experts play in these cases,
the Death Penalty Information Center also cited the case of

(37:14):
Charles Lynch. Now, this is an expert hair analysis guy right,
and his expert hair comparison analysis was used in the
cases of two people who were executed under Bush. So
he helps with two executions as a result of matching
hairs and this is not a DNA match. I really
need to emphasize that he's looking at hairs and saying, oh, yeah,
these hairs come from that guy right, Like that's what

(37:37):
he's literally doing.

Speaker 3 (37:39):
So I just have to bring up this one bit
that seems somewhat relevant to how much of a shit
show Texas court systems in criminal law has been for
some time. It wasn't until the past like five years
or so. I'm trying to remember the exact year, but
very recently that hypnosis as a tool for testimony and

(38:00):
in criminal investigations was banned.

Speaker 2 (38:02):
So many people got convicted by on the with that
as a factory.

Speaker 3 (38:06):
Yeah, yes, yeah, someone allowed hypnotists to come in and
then do hypnosis as if it were a legitimate, repeatable
scientific approach for acquiring legitimate testimony or uncovering forgotten memories
or whatever that is being used for. So yeah, I
mean that was recently. That was in this century, not

(38:29):
last century.

Speaker 4 (38:30):
Now.

Speaker 2 (38:30):
It took a shocking amount of time for us to
be like, no, we shouldn't be doing this.

Speaker 4 (38:36):
I mean, when did the FBI stop doing that fucking
gene pattern thing. We're like they this made yeahb.

Speaker 2 (38:45):
As we've talked about it, forensic science is rife with bastardy.
But I want to talk about Charles Lynch a little more.
I want to read another quote from that Deaf Culty
Information centerpiece because it's so funny. Again, this guy's hair
analysis has used in the case to execute two people.
The Dallas News reported that Lynch had been committed in
nineteen ninety four to a psychiatric war due to concerns
about his depression and drinking. Lynch was considered it danger

(39:07):
to himself and others, but he was temporarily released to
provide incriminating hair analysis testimony against Kenneth Myth Duff, who
was executed in nineteen ninety eight. The prosecution did not
disclose Lynch's status to the defense, even though Lynch's residence
in the psychiatric ward might have been used to challenge
his credibility.

Speaker 3 (39:23):
It's incredible.

Speaker 2 (39:25):
I don't want to people who you know, wind up
in a psychiatric war. That doesn't mean they can never
do a serious job again, but if you probably shouldn't
be releasing someone from a ward to testify and then
putting them back in because they're a danger to themselves
and others. But they can definitely testify. This guy needs
to fry, right, that seems like a stretch.

Speaker 3 (39:45):
Listen, you gotta do what you gotta do.

Speaker 2 (39:48):
You gotta do what you gotta do. Yeah, get this
guy out. We can't let this guy have his own
like fucking butter knife, but let him. Let him tell
this jury that a man needs to die, Like holy shit, insane.
That's that's like just coming across that story, Like, Wow,
it really was the wild ass West for a while. Huh,
you could get away with anything.

Speaker 3 (40:09):
Kind of still can't, kinda still can yeah.

Speaker 2 (40:13):
Now. Another of doctor Grigson's colleagues was doctor Ralph Erdman,
who testified in numerous capital cases until nineteen ninety four,
when he pled no contest to seven felonies over a
falsifying evidence and fucking up autopsies. He had claimed to
have examined organs in deecedents that had been removed in
surgery before their deaths. For one thing, right, Like in
his autopsy reports, he's like writing about the appendixes of

(40:35):
people who had no appendix when they died, despite claiming
to be a scientist providing his unbiased opinion no matter
who hired him. A special investigator appointed to examine Erdman
found if the prosecution theory was that death was caused
by a martian death ray, then that was what doctor
Erdman reported, right, Yeah, which is you're talking here about
the same thing we're seeing with doctor Grigson. Right, this

(40:58):
is a guy who's not doing science. He's coming in
and he's saying, like, yeah, based on my expertise, whatever
the prosecution says is true. Right now, because Erdman is
working in autopsies, he gets caught, but there's no kind
of there's nothing to catch doctor Gregson on really, right,
because psychiatry is largely like yeah, is this psychiatrist think

(41:18):
this person has something. You know, there's more rigor built
that's supposed to be built into the system. But when
it comes to the way these court cases are working,
it's really just this guy saying, yeah, I'm a doctor,
and I say this is what's going on.

Speaker 3 (41:30):
It's kind of like the medical equivalent of a mob lawyer.
They're playing this role that is pre defined for them,
and they know what they're supposed to do, and they
just go along with whatever the request is, whatever the
need is, they'll say, yeah, sure, go for it. I mean,
in the case of Gregson, it seems like, yeah, he
may have claimed there were cases which he was not

(41:52):
eager to do so, but yeah, I don't know. Maybe
he just knew how to pick a winner.

Speaker 2 (41:56):
Maybe he knew how to pick a winner. And also
when he says a third of the case I didn't
take because I didn't think you know the person, we
don't know that. There's no evidence of that. Sure, we're
just trusting this guy, you know, right, and I don't
trust him. Now. Doctor Erdman did have to surrender his
medical license, you know, doctor Gregson never did. And we're
going to talk about what else happens with doctor Gregson.

(42:18):
But first let's have our second ad break. Okay, we're back.
So over the years, when he was pushed on this,
he would repeatedly say, hey, I didn't always testify for
the prosecution, right, and sometimes I just wouldn't take cases.

(42:39):
And we can't back up the ladder, but we can
back up the amount of times that doctor Gregson testified
for the prosecution versus the defense. During his career. He
testified in one hundred and sixty six capital like death
penalty cases in Texas, and in nine of those times
he testified for the defense. So I think it's fair
to say, basically all a prosecution witness. And by the way,

(43:03):
we'll talk later about what some of those other nine
times would have been, because it's not like he just
really thought the defense was right in that situation. So
we'll get to that. During the busiest period of his
career in the nineteen eighties, he was making one hundred
and fifty thousand dollars a year with this business, which
was equivalent to someone making somewhere between five and six
hundred thousand dollars a year today, right like he is

(43:23):
making fucking bank in the eighties. That nineteen ninety Vanity
fair piece finds him it close to the peak of
his career and his sense of impunity over what he
was allowed to do. In thousands of words of recorded conversations,
he refers to his colleagues in psychiatry as liberal fools
and seems to take a great degree of joy and
like righteous pleasure in getting people executed. His stated goal

(43:47):
to the journalist in that article is that he wants
to execute like three people in three days, basically something
like that, and break his personal record for most death
penalty convictions scored in a short window of time. One
of these cases was the case of galand Bradford, who
definitely shot and killed a security guard during a robbery.
There is recorded on video. There's no doubt about whether

(44:07):
or not he committed a murder, But once he wasn't
in bars, the jail tested his IQ and found it
to be sixty eight. The defense psychologists who examined him
said it was seventy five. Either of those, and again
I have my issues with IQ, but this isn't the
place to really bring it up. The point is that,
based on the way the system works, either of those
findings could be low enough to count his diminished capacity

(44:28):
and spare him the death penalty. Right, Both of those
are potentially low enough to do.

Speaker 3 (44:32):
So for sure.

Speaker 2 (44:34):
So during a dinner after winning his first two cases,
but before the Bradford case, this is like the night
before he testifies in this guy's case, doctor Griggson, while
hanging out with Rosenbaum, that journalist gets hammered. He has
like four Martinez in an hour, like celebrating that he's
gotten two people killed. And then he winds up hungover
in court the next morning. And he kind of fucks
up his testimony in the Bradford case a little because

(44:56):
he doesn't just say Bradford is associopath, but he also
insists he's of normal intelligence. I can tell he wasn't
being asked this, but he's like, I know he's of
normal intelligence, and I'll guarantee you he's killed more than once.
We just didn't catch him, right, And then he tells
the jury based on nothing, literally nothing, Galen Bradford is
one of the most dangerous killers I've ever examined or

(45:17):
come into contact with. Right, And again, there's not any
evidence of this, and he certainly did not do anything
that would allow him to determine whether or not this
guy was competent to stand trial. He just does not
do that work. And in this one instance, the defense
attorney calls him out on it and questions like, well,
based on what aspects of doctor Bradford's personality, since you

(45:37):
have not talked to him, have you concluded all of
this that he killed someone before and is hiding it?
And doctor Grigson ultimately the only specific thing he cites
is that the guy is a weird haircut with a
lightning bolt in it, and the defense attorney, I know,
first off, holy shit. The defense attorney, Paul Brockley responds,

(45:58):
pretty good reason to kill him, right, And there's like
this silence in the courtroom. I go to quote from
that Vanity of Therapies. The doctor himself was speechless for
a moment something I'd never seen before. Then lamely plaintively
he volunteered, well, I'd never seen a haircut like that,
great medical science, did you say?

Speaker 3 (46:18):
The defense attorney's name was Paul Brocli.

Speaker 2 (46:20):
Yeah, B R A U C H L E.

Speaker 3 (46:23):
Okay.

Speaker 2 (46:24):
I don't know how else it would be pronounced.

Speaker 3 (46:25):
Okay if I had a different spelling in my head.
It's still really funny rocle Maybe.

Speaker 2 (46:30):
I don't know, I'm calling it broccoli. Yeah, I'm going
with Brocley.

Speaker 3 (46:35):
Yeah for the justification to be this guy looks fucking weird.
I don't like it.

Speaker 2 (46:39):
Wait his fucked up hair. Yeah, he's definitely criminally insane.

Speaker 4 (46:43):
Wow.

Speaker 2 (46:44):
Yeah. Now the bad news is again this guy still
gets convicted. James Grigson in no way pays for his crimes.
The best I can say is that his career does
take a hit in the late nineteen nineties, in part
as the result of the fallout from the Adams case
and in part out of the fact that he has
now been drummed out of every professional organization in his field. Now,

(47:05):
another reason why he stops testifying as often is that
some of the savvier Texas defense attorneys develop a strategy
for mitigating the harm he could cause. Per an article
by Mike Tolson for the Houston Chronicle, defense attorneys fearful
of the effect of Grigson's testimony began to call him
and discuss their clients, with the result being that Grigson
could not be hired by the state in those cases.
I love this shit, Like, well, look if this guy's

(47:29):
talked about this case before being brought on. He can't testify,
so let's just call him and talk about it, and
then we know he's fucked. It's very funny stuff. Grigson
eventually like figures out what's going on, and he gets
angry because this is costing him money. So several defense
attorneys agree to, like, hey, what if we just pay

(47:49):
you as a consultant as soon as we think we
have a case you might get involved in, and that
way you don't have to do anything. You're not going
to actually testify, You're not going to do any work
for the defense usually, but once we're hiring you, the
prosecution can't hire you, right, And he's okay with this
because he's still getting paid.

Speaker 1 (48:05):
Wow.

Speaker 2 (48:07):
This snowballs into prosecutors adopting a similar tactic out of
fear that he might show up and help the defense.
So he starts getting hired to not work as long
as like oneside can lock him down first. Like that.
He spends kind of the latter chunk of his career
doing this, like getting paid to not do his job,
and you know, eventually this practice dies out during the

(48:28):
two thousands, particularly the practice of bringing in forensic psychiatrists
like doctor Grigson declines in popularity the kind of late
nineties early two thousands, and there's there's several reasons for this,
but a big one is the constant professional animus that
Griggson and others who followed his example like started to
get right, Like, this has just kind of been poisoned
as a field. Now. Another reason that's less optimistic for

(48:52):
why this dies out is that prosecutors realize, we don't
need to spend money on these guys. Texas jury's love
killing people, right, Like, you don't actually need this guy
to testify to convince them that someone needs to die, right,
you know, like you could usually just kind of talk
him into it, which is less optimistic. Okay, yeah, okay,
that's less fun. So in two thousand and three, doctor

(49:15):
James Grigson, a lifetime chainsmoker, was diagnosed with lung cancer.
In one of his last interviews, he told a reporter
he had zero regrets about his life or career. He
insisted he had just been there as a medical professional,
separating the truly ill from the fakers who needed to
be locked up and executed. By the end of his career,
he was just working in civil law. But after his
death in two thousand and four, a number of experts

(49:37):
came out to state that his impact on the legal
system had been far reaching. Cynthia Or, president of the
Texas Criminal Defense Lawyer's Association, told The Chronicle he had
a tremendous impact on Texas death penalty litigation. He really
provided ammunition to the state to try and establish one's
future dangerousness when ordinarily it would have been pretty tough
to do. He was willing to go further than anyone else.

Speaker 3 (49:58):
Yeah, so horrible. Yeah, and he ended up just getting
to chill, just getting to chill, yep, and get paid
to not work, get.

Speaker 2 (50:07):
Paid to not work. Nice retirement.

Speaker 3 (50:09):
I hate to say it, kind of a dude's rock moment,
but yeah.

Speaker 2 (50:13):
It is the dream, right.

Speaker 4 (50:14):
You got to die of lung cancer, so that's you know.

Speaker 2 (50:17):
He does die of lung cancer on June third of
two thousand and four, after what his family described as
seventy two great years. Yeah. Alas, Now, the nature of
the death penalty and the time involved clearing such cases
meant that a lot of people that he had helped
to put there remained on death row after his death.
And in fact, the most recent case I can find

(50:39):
of someone he put there like having, you know, basically
widening up in the news is in twenty sixteen. Jeffrey Wood,
aged forty three, was like scheduled. He was supposed to
be executed in twenty sixteen over a nineteen ninety six
robbery in which a man was murdered. Grigson had testified

(50:59):
against him and stated that would would be violent in
the future, and he obviously did not examine Wood. Now,
Wood had never actually murdered in the first place. He
didn't fire the gun in the nineteen sixty ninety six
robbery that he was being executed for, right, but obviously accomplices.
He was like driving the car, can be convicted of murder,
but still like the fact that he's saying he'll definitely

(51:19):
kill again. Well, he never killed him the first place, right,
Like not really, so Wood was supposed to be executed
in twenty sixteen. The actual gunman was executed in two
thousand and two, but Wood's case, like his execution was
stayed by the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals because of
doctor Grigson, right because he had been part of getting

(51:40):
the guy on death row. And the fact that he
has been so burned, like convinced the Texas Court of
Criminal Appeals in twenty sixteen like, yeah, we probably shouldn't
execute this guy, right, So the court ruled seven to
two to stay the execution, and uh, yeah that just
you know, this guy's impact outlasted him. But it is

(52:01):
kind of at least nice that now he is So
he's been so discredited that in twenty sixteen a court
voted seven to two that like, yeah, we can't execute
a guy based on this dude's testimony. So at least
he's completely discredited and dead and dead, yeah, and dead.

Speaker 3 (52:19):
He innovated in the field road the wave and died
before it became fully discredited. Sorry to say, but yeah,
he's at least dead.

Speaker 2 (52:31):
He's at least dead. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 3 (52:33):
I'm just glad to hear that we no longer have
legal hypnosis as a form of testimony and that, yeah,
quacks like this guy are not being taken seriously anymore.
So I guess there's a silver lining.

Speaker 2 (52:45):
Like you said, yep, things are good forever now. We
figured out how to not do bad stuff with executing people,
and there's no more longer any problems with death row
or capital crimes at all.

Speaker 3 (52:58):
It's all don't need to worry about it, kittens, it's
all good.

Speaker 2 (53:01):
Don't look into it. Don't look into it. Yeah, you
anything to plug at the end here, Steven.

Speaker 3 (53:07):
You know, just follow me on Blue Sky or I
don't post on Twitter anymore, So don't don't go there.

Speaker 2 (53:13):
That's good. Yeah, bad to post on Twitter.

Speaker 3 (53:15):
I'm writing for a few different outlets. The Barbed Wire
Texas Observer just had something in MESNBC and hell yeah,
I post all that on Blue Sky. It's probably the
easiest way to follow my shit. So go there, or
go read the literary magazine. I published Protein Magazine. It's
got some good shit in it.

Speaker 2 (53:31):
Yes, Protean has a lot of good shit in it. Stephen.
You can also find and it could happen here from
time to time talking about Texas, which continues to be
one of the most important subjects in the country. Why
is Texas the way it is? What's going on there? Yeah,
like it's it's been. It was happening there before, it's

(53:51):
happening wherever you are, odds.

Speaker 3 (53:53):
Are, it's been happening. It's been happy to be happening.
Still and yeah, if we can figure out what the
folk going on here, I feel like we could figure
out a lot. Yeah, no, working on it.

Speaker 2 (54:05):
Well, this has been Behind the Bastards and you have
been listening to a podcast. Shame on you.

Speaker 4 (54:15):
Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media.
For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website Coolzonemedia
dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
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Bastards is now available on YouTube, new episodes every Wednesday
and Friday. Subscribe to our channel YouTube dot com slash

(54:36):
at Behind the Bastards