April 30, 2024 • 46 mins
At 16 years old, Jeff was wrongfully convicted of raping and murdering a classmate. And after sixteen years in prison, he was finally exonerated. Rather than being dominated by victimhood that no one would have blamed him for, Jeff went to work fighting to free others who’ve been wrongly convicted and he's already freed 11 folks!
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:03):
They took the crime scene DNA evidence which didn't match me,
and put it in the DNA data bank and it
matched it hit It matched the actual perpetrator whose DNA
was in that data bank. Because left free while I
was doing time for his crime, he killed a second
victim just three and a half years later, who was
(00:25):
a school teacher and had two children.
Speaker 2 (00:28):
The very thing we talked about happening happened, which is yes,
by railroading you. They ignored that there was a murder
on the loose, and he did it again. Oh my goodness.
Speaker 1 (00:38):
So on September twentieth, two thousand and six, the convictions
of returned I was released. I went back to court
November two, two thousand and six, at which point all
the charges were dismissed against me on actual innocence grounds,
and he was subsequently arrested and convicted of the crime.
Speaker 2 (01:00):
Welcome to an army of normal folks. I'm Bill Courtney.
I'm a normal guy. I'm a husband, a father, I'm
an entrepreneur, and I've been a football coach an inner
city Memphis. And the last part it accidentally led to
an oscar for the film about our football team. It's
called undefeated guys. I believe our country's problems will never
(01:23):
be solved by a bunch of fancy people in nice
suits using big words that nobody ever uses on CNN
and Fox, but rather by an army of normal folks US,
just you and me deciding hey, I can help. That's
what Jeff Deskovic, the voice we just heard, has done.
At sixteen years old, Jeff was wrongfully convicted of raping
(01:49):
and murdering a classmate, despite overwhelming evidence that he was innocent,
and after serving sixteen years for crime that he did
not commit, Jeff was finally exonerated, and rather than being
dominated by anger or as he puts it, victimhood that
(02:09):
no one would have blamed him for it all, he
went to work fight him for the freedom of others
who'd been wrongfully convicted. He has already freed eleven people.
I cannot wait for you to meet Jeff. Right after
these brief messages from our Genner sponsors, Jeff Deskovic from
(02:45):
the Bronx all the way from New York down here
to Memphis. How are you?
Speaker 1 (02:50):
I'm great? How did you be here?
Speaker 2 (02:52):
How's the flight in?
Speaker 1 (02:53):
Uh? Scary? I thought I was going to die on it.
The plane like for about what seemed to me to
be ten minutes is you know, up and down movement
on the plane, and you know, I thought it was
close for ten minutes and I thought I was gonna die.
My stomach got upset. Then I felt too hot, so
I turned on double air, you know, for me and
(03:15):
the passenger next to me, and that helped the warming part.
But then I quickly got cold, so it was short
of fatality.
Speaker 2 (03:24):
This was like the airplane trip from Hell. We were
seventy six degrees yesterday and we're gonna be thirty three
to day. So I guess the Hogll low pressure systems
probably created a lot of turbulines all the way down
from New York and you were the beneficiary of all that. Well,
thanks for making it. Yeah, absolutely, you didn't have to
(03:45):
use a little bag in front of you.
Speaker 1 (03:47):
No, thank god it didn't come to that, although I
felt I wasn't that far away from it, just to
be clear.
Speaker 2 (03:53):
Don't know, don't know if you paid any attention while
you were getting over your green gills coming into the
Crosstown concourse. But you're in the Memphis Listening Lab, which
is a cool thing that goes back to as you know,
I've assume you know Memphis is Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee
Lewis and a lot of rich Memphis heritage music, and
(04:17):
Memphis Listening Lab is where we're recording from and kind
of cool digs it.
Speaker 1 (04:22):
Really really is. I'm I'm a historian and I'm also nostalgic,
so I'm kind of in.
Speaker 2 (04:27):
Awe right now. That's cool. What you walked in. This
was the Southeast Region Sears Tower, and it was when
Sears went down, it became empty, and this place was
dilapidated and completely empty and homeless people living in it
only ten years ago. Wow, And this whole area around
(04:48):
it was suffering, and some investors in Memphis came together
refurbished and repurposed this entire building. And Memphis Listening Lab
is only one of a thousand tenants in this massive
building that there's a school here, there's a grocery store here,
restaurant businesses, all kinds of things, so kind of a
cool revitalation revitalization project. And one of the places there
(05:12):
is a Smith's Listening Lab. So anyway, welcome to mephis.
I'm glad you can see a little bit of our history.
Thank you very much. Your story is amazing, and it
really starts when you're sixteen. But just quickly, how'd you
grow up? Did you grow up in the Bronx. No.
Speaker 1 (05:27):
I grew up in Peak Skill in west Chester County.
I grew up in an apartment complex known as Crossroads.
I would describe Peak Skill as a middle class, ethnically
diverse city with the population of approximately twenty five thousand people.
Speaker 2 (05:42):
How far is that you know, geographically, so I can
picture it in the map from like New York Manhattan.
Speaker 1 (05:49):
One hour Peak Skill is one hour north of Manhattan. Okay,
it's suburbs, suburb correct, got it?
Speaker 2 (05:56):
Now, what'd your mom and dad do for a living?
Speaker 1 (05:58):
Yeah, my mother was a was a typist. My father
was actually never in my life in any aspect. Before
I was even born. He wanted out of financial responsibility,
so he denied that I was his. So I grew
up really with my mother. My grandmother, serving who lived
with us, served kind of like the second parent, but
she was in a way a combination of both dad
(06:18):
and mom, So she was mom because Mom was the breadwinner.
So Grandma stayed home took care, but grandma was also
like the father in the sense that she was the
disciplinarian who kept me and my brother who's three and
a half years younger than me in line.
Speaker 2 (06:34):
Got it. I think many of us have had grandmother's
like that, and in the South in particular, those grandmothers
are not to be trifled with.
Speaker 1 (06:43):
Exactly neither was mine back nor so I can relate.
Speaker 2 (06:47):
I got it, And so I guess you went to
public high school and public schools.
Speaker 1 (06:52):
Well, I went to Catholic school from grades two through eight.
The Peakskill High School, which was public actually literally was
a the street from the apartment complex that I grew
up in, and hence my deciding to go there rather
than the My mother wanted me to go to Catholic
high school, but they had like the high school version
(07:12):
of an entrance exam, and you know, being smarter than
my parent not, yeah, I decided to purposely flunk the
entrance exam so that I could go to the public
high school. And as a story will unfold, I mean
that really kind of shape my life and everything that
happened after that.
Speaker 2 (07:31):
Of course, I know, you purposely tank the test because
you wanted to go to public school, not Catholic school. Correct, Yes,
kids will do what kids do, right, that's right. If
your grandmother found that, she'd have probably whooped your.
Speaker 1 (07:42):
Butt, exactly right, exactly right.
Speaker 2 (07:46):
Okay, so until you're sixteen, I guess in sixteen, are
you a junior in high school?
Speaker 1 (07:53):
Well I would have been. So, you know, I wanted
to go to public high school, not just because of
the geographic locale out but in the apartment complex where
I grew up at, there were a lot of kids
that lived in the buildings and in the surrounding areas.
I was kind of like one of the main kids,
so that whatever I suggested would generally be what I
would do. For what we're gonna do, well, we're gonna
(08:14):
play basketball, stickball, Monopoly, Whard's Movie Night, you know whatever,
half dozen games we made up, and we even played
tackle football without pads on the on the grass. But
whatever I would suggest would generally be what we all did.
But that was my life after school, my life in
high school. I thought that I was going to be
mixed in with those kids since they all went to
(08:35):
public school and not the Catholic grade school. But actually
they were not. They were kids that were one or
two years older than me. I had skipped first grade
and I kind of caught up with me in going
to high school. So everybody was like older than me,
so I didn't quite fit in. I was kind of
like on the fringes of the society, and so that
my first year as a freshman really was I was
(08:57):
kind of picked on in school, and so my grades
suffered a lot, and it came to the point that
I had to go to summer school to do two
classes in order to pass. But I knew that if
I did then I would be in with these sane
kids again, and so I didn't go to summer school.
I got left back, so I repeated freshman year. So
(09:19):
at sixteen years old, I was a sophomore, not the
junior that you correctly point out. Mathematically I should have been.
Speaker 2 (09:25):
Okay, So what were you into in high school? You're
a freshman and sophomore year.
Speaker 1 (09:32):
Yeah, I mean I played I played basketball. I liked
video games. I was kind of an athlete, but not
in the school, not in organized sports, not with the
kids there. It was after school. I was into all
those games that we used, you know. I loved playing kickball,
for example. I liked playing basketball. I lived in the
(09:53):
swimming pool. We had a twelve foot pool with a
diving board in it, you know, so that was available
on the summer. I would describe myself as pretty athletic,
pretty energetic.
Speaker 3 (10:03):
So after school, So what you're describing as a kid, correct,
Just a kid exactly, from a middle class neighborhood. Yes,
no affluence whatsoever, what none, whatsoever.
Speaker 2 (10:16):
But you had food on the table. Correct. You had
a mother and a grandmother that cared for you, loved you,
and disciplined you, and keep just kept straight as they could. Yes,
you weren't in a whole lot of trouble. Absolutely not.
Speaker 1 (10:26):
No.
Speaker 2 (10:26):
Did you do any drugs? Never, not a day of
my life, not even now as an adult. Did you
ever get picked up shoplifting? Not even nothing? Nothing. You're
just a blue collar New York kid, yes, exactly, nothing
really remarkable and nothing really You're just a normal folk exactly. Yes,
(10:48):
that's true. And then your life changed, and then my
life changed. So on November fifteenth of nineteen eighty nine,
your classmate Angela Korea, Korea, Korea, was murdered. Yes she was,
and they found her strangled and raped. I believe, yes
(11:08):
they did. Two days later, on November seventeenth. How did
that affect the school and a community of only twenty
five thousand people.
Speaker 1 (11:16):
It rocked the community because murders were very rare. It
was there were periodic town hall meetings where safety tips
and progress on investigation were held. Many people, you know,
there were four sessions of wake. Many people attended three
or four of them. It impacted everybody so much to
the point that free mental health counseling was offered to
(11:39):
everybody in Peakskill who wished to avail themselves of it.
Speaker 2 (11:44):
Do you remember her family? I do. I met the
family afterwards.
Speaker 1 (11:48):
So I went to wake sessions, I went to the
funeral the cemetery, and there was an announcement made at
the at the cemetery grounds at anybody that wished to
come back to the Korea Home have coffee, there would
be some cookies and talk to the family was free
to do so. And so I availed myself of that,
and so I met the family. But that was that
(12:11):
was afterwards. They seemed like a really tight, warm, close
knit family. There was a stepfather in the home, which
was a new thing. Just the idea of living with
an adult male and they to me, they it all
seemed to like work and click, and it was. It
was something foreign to me somewhat because again I didn't
have a father in the in the household, and it
(12:33):
was sad. It was very sad, Yes, it was. And
I was a sensitive teenager, and you know, this did
affect me emotionally. This was my first real brush with death,
and I did have an emotional reaction to that. That's
important in the unfolding of the story because so they
(12:53):
it was one of the factors that put me on
the police radar. So the police interviewed many students from
the high school, and some of them told the police
they might want to talk with me because I didn't
quite fit in. I guess the theory in their head
was people that are quiet into themselves are more likely
to commit a heeneous crime. So I was suggested to
(13:13):
the police to look at for that reason. And secondarily,
the police thought that given my actual relationship with the victim,
which is to say, really no relationship.
Speaker 2 (13:24):
She was in two of my.
Speaker 1 (13:25):
Classes, a freshman one as a sophomore, I knew her name,
she knew mine. The police interpreted my being emotional as
some sort of outward sign that I was sorry for
what I had done. So those two factors put me
on the police radar, and that was buttressed by a
psychological profile that the Peak Skill Police obtained from the NYPD,
(13:50):
which purported to have the psychological characteristics of the actual perpetrator.
And I had the misfortune of matching that. What was
that that knew the victim that was in high school
and that was a loner? Well, congratch, you really narrowed
that down quite a.
Speaker 2 (14:10):
Bit, right, I can't believe I'm laughing.
Speaker 1 (14:13):
No, it's okay. We do dark humor and we laugh
at stupidity and other stuff. So that's what gots beyond
the police radar. And so for about six weeks, the
police play this cat and mouse game with me in
which half the time they would talk to me like
I'm a suspect, and when they would push too hard
and I'd become frightened and I'd want to get away
from them, they would switch up the conversation and Jeff
(14:38):
is this junior detective helper theme was developed somehow or another.
They learned that, prior to being a teenager, the career
that I dreamed about having was to be a cop,
so they would say things like, well, the kids won't
talk freely around us, but they will around you.
Speaker 2 (14:58):
Let us know if you hear anything. Stop in.
Speaker 1 (15:00):
From time to time they did the They would ask
me opinion questions and congratulate me that my opinion was correct.
They made me feel important. They did the good cop,
bad cop routine, and that intersected with growing up without
a father or a stepfather in the household. I began
to look up to the cop who was pretending to
(15:22):
be my friend as a father figure.
Speaker 2 (15:24):
And Thisslee, you trusted him, and thusly I trusted him.
So how long did this cat and mosk game go on?
Six weeks? So, six weeks after this girl's ripe and murder,
they had solved nothing right. And I gotta believe in
a town of twenty five thousand, with grief counselors and
(15:49):
a very rare murder and everything else, there was an
enormous amount of pressure on the police to figure out
who did this thing correct.
Speaker 1 (15:57):
And I want to add that bed on that general pressure.
Another element of that was that the Correa family didn't
think the Peak Skill police knew what they were doing,
and so they went to the state police and asked
the state police to take over the investigation. The State
Police did not, but they let that be known to
the Peak Skill Police, so that ratcheted up the pressure
(16:20):
to solve. And I want to add also talking about
how this impacted the community. Peak Skill, for most intents
and purposes, shut down. I mean, parents were driving their
kids to school, picking them up right after school, you know,
bringing them straight home. There was a general atmosphere of fear, rumor,
(16:44):
and to some extent, paranoia in Peak Skill.
Speaker 2 (16:48):
Were you your mom and your grandmother's carret a little bit?
Speaker 1 (16:51):
Yes, we were.
Speaker 2 (16:53):
We were.
Speaker 1 (16:53):
My mother didn't want me to go out for a while,
and if I was, then eventually when she let up
a little bit and allowed us to go out, you know,
I had to go out with my brother or or
with another one of my friends. She didn't want me
to go outside or go anywhere by myself.
Speaker 2 (17:11):
It's a bad time. It was a very bad time. Yeah.
During the six weeks of the cat and mouse, were
you discussing these conversations with your mom and grandmother? I
was not.
Speaker 1 (17:22):
I knew that, so I knew that my mother didn't
want me to talk and interact with the police, so
I told her about it. She trust them, She did
not know she did not trust them. I told my
mother about my first encounter with the police, and then
she made clear to me that she didn't want me
to talk to them because she knew that, yeah, they
were asking me questions and then they wanted me to
(17:42):
try to help them with the case, but then that
they also were asking me questions that suggested that I
was I was a suspect, so she didn't want me
to be to have anything to do with them. But
I was also sixteen years old, and that's an age
where many people we start to think that you know,
we know everything, we know more and our parents are
(18:04):
stupid and to my way of thinking, well, I don't
understand what your concern is. They telling me that they
want me to help them solve the crime. I didn't
do anything. What could possibly go wrong with my interacting
or helping the police, So I hid that from them,
and the Peaskill police also knew that that my mother
(18:25):
didn't want to have anything me to have anything to
do with them, but they know facilitated that.
Speaker 2 (18:30):
How is that legal for a police department to mess
with a minor without their parent.
Speaker 1 (18:37):
Well, I mean you're at sixteen, you're considered to be
an adult for purposes of waiving your rights and speaking
to the to the police without a parental author is sixteen?
Speaker 2 (18:49):
Yes, yes, right, Yeah, that's right. I didn't even know that.
So eventually understand they said, you know, why don't you
take a pie graph test and just go ahead and
rid yourself of any suspicion?
Speaker 1 (19:04):
Correct, exactly right. And they also added that once not
only that, but that they had some no information that
come into their file and they wanted to share that
with me. And that sounds like it was, of course,
but I didn't realize that. So both of why don't
you just rid yourself with a suspicion and also let
(19:25):
us be able to share this extra info with you,
and that's going to allow you to be more helpful
to us.
Speaker 2 (19:33):
Yeah, you're going to be a better junior cop when
we share this with you. Correct. So you go in
to this polygraph test kind of thinking I'm going to
help out and I'm gonna go ahead and remove myself
from the name, and that way I can really be
good junior cop. Exactly. Yes, all fed to you by
this father figure cop that you're beginning to trust, yes,
(19:57):
having not had a father in your home as a child,
exactly right, all behind your mother and grandmother's back because
they didn't trust them and you didn't want to let
your mom know what you're doing.
Speaker 1 (20:07):
Yeah, you've got it all right?
Speaker 2 (20:10):
What could go wrong? Right? And now a few messages
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(20:34):
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Tell me about the day you took the polygraph.
Speaker 1 (20:51):
So it was a school day and rather than go
to the high school, I went to the police station
for the test. I expected a test to be at
the police station because number one, they kind of implied that,
and number two, the rumor mill in Peace Gill was
that a few other people had been polygraphed at the
police station. So I'm expecting it to be at the
police station. I go there with one of my one
(21:14):
of my best friends. Because it's a school day. My
mother and grandmother think I'm in school. They don't have
a clue that anything's wrong. Therefore, there is no phone
call or coming to my rescue or intervention. That's off
the table because they don't know. I got to the
police station. The police lieutenant had told my friend just
to go home, get out of there.
Speaker 2 (21:35):
And what was your friend going to do with you?
Speaker 1 (21:38):
No, he was. I wanted him to go with me
while I had this idea that he could sit next
to me while I was being tested.
Speaker 2 (21:45):
That was more sixteen year old thinking. But I get it.
Speaker 1 (21:48):
Yeah, right, So when they sent him off, But.
Speaker 2 (21:51):
Do you think just hearing that, do you think somewhere
in the deepest recesses of your mind and you were
worried about getting set up, which is why you had
your friend go with you. Yeah, I was that was
true without being maybe consciously cognizant of it. Yes, why
else would you have a friend go with you except
(22:12):
that you had this tinge of fear?
Speaker 1 (22:13):
Correct? Yeah, you're right. No one's ever brought that out before.
But yes, you're right.
Speaker 2 (22:17):
Well, just listening to you that kind of.
Speaker 1 (22:19):
Yeah, it's true. And so therefore, when the lieutenant told him,
you know, go ahead and get it, get out of here,
I briefly entertained the thought of not going ahead with
things at all, But then I thought, well, the idea
of being an even better junior detective cop.
Speaker 2 (22:35):
Oh, thus, if you say no, you probably think, well,
that makes them suspicious of me.
Speaker 1 (22:40):
Yes, that's true too.
Speaker 2 (22:42):
Yes, so you go with this friend and the cops
tell your friend to beat it? Yeap, what's he going
to say? They're the cops exactly, And now you're there,
you can't exactly beat it. I can. I can already
feel the grip of this happening. I'm putting myself in
a sixteen Well you know, I'm fifty five years old,
but I've got about the mentality of the sixteen year old.
(23:04):
So I'm relating real well to all of this right now.
But I mean, I can almost I feel that.
Speaker 1 (23:10):
So I learned quickly, well, in fact, the test is
not going to be at the Peakskill police station. Why, well,
they're bringing me to the Well I know the answer now,
but I didn't at the time. But they so they
told me, look, We're going to stop at a diner
and eat something, and then I was going to be
(23:32):
brought to the location for the polygraph. I realized now
the reason for that is so the polygraphist was a
Putnam County sheriff's investigator named Daniel Stevens.
Speaker 2 (23:41):
But I didn't know he.
Speaker 1 (23:43):
Was a cop. He was dressed like a civilian. He
never identified himself as law enforcement. He never read been
right rights in terms of the transportation. The psychological intrigue continued.
So they put me in the car by myself with
the good cop the bad cop, but the lieutenant were
in a different vehicle, so there can He reads me
my rights again, but I don't understand them because I'm sixteen,
(24:05):
and plus you're telling me that I'm here to help you,
so that to the extent I could grasp anything at all,
that was all completely out the window. So we get there.
I just described the polygraphists. There's no I'm not giving
anything to eat. The entire time i'm there, there's no
lawyer present. He gives me a four page brochure which
(24:27):
explains how the polygraph works. But it has a lot
of words in it that I don't understand. But I figure, well,
I'm here to help the police, so what does it matter.
Let's just get on with it.
Speaker 2 (24:39):
Why did they drive you somewhere else.
Speaker 1 (24:41):
To bring me into his hands? He carried out this
procedure which he testified to was called GtC. Get the confession,
and you know, he had a knack for getting confessions
all over the place, and that was why they brought
me to him.
Speaker 2 (24:58):
So what was the polygraph like?
Speaker 1 (25:00):
They put me in a small room and he give
first a polygraphist gives me countless cups of coffee.
Speaker 2 (25:06):
I was right, get jamped up?
Speaker 1 (25:08):
Correct, And then he wired me up.
Speaker 2 (25:11):
Are you serious, sixteen year old? A bunch of coffee? Yes?
Speaker 1 (25:14):
No, so on of when I finished one cup that
he was up here pouring away you want another one?
And he'd you know, I think he gave me between
sixty eight cups. It was a lot. Then he wires
me to the machine and then he launches into his well.
First he pretends as he's turning the dials, oh, I'm
gonna I'm gonna fine tune the machine into your body's
(25:36):
bio feedback.
Speaker 2 (25:37):
Right.
Speaker 1 (25:37):
He does that routine for about five minutes, and then
the nature of the beast comes out and he launches
his third degree tactics. So he invades my personal space.
He raises his voice at me. He's asking me the
same questions over and over again, you know, and it's
really frightening. I mean, I'm not He's a mountain of
a man. I'm sixty sixteen, I'm one hundred and fifty pounds.
(26:00):
I'm not used to talking, much less interacting with an
adult male, much less one who's carrying on in a
ferocious manner like he is. And each hour that passes
by with him.
Speaker 2 (26:11):
Doing this, each hour, how long were you there?
Speaker 1 (26:13):
Six and a half to seven hours? Towards the end,
I guess he had had enough of my denials and
he said, you know, he said, what do you mean
you didn't do it? You just told me through the
polygraph test result that you did. We just want you
to verbally confirm it. And when he said that to me,
(26:35):
that ratcheted my fear up. And that's when he left
the room, and the cop pretending to be my friend
came in the room and said, look, they're going to
harm you. I've been holding them off. I can't do.
Speaker 2 (26:47):
That any longer. They're going to harm you. Yes, I
in other words, they're going to beat you.
Speaker 1 (26:53):
Well, I mean yeah, I mean, I mean your harm
is what it is. I mean, yeah, they're going to
beat me. I don't know that it would be limited
to that I don't know how far they're going to go.
I have no idea of where I'm at. No one
else knows where I was at. I felt in fear
of my life, and I felt intimidated. So I felt
like everything was on the table in terms of that,
(27:14):
you know so, and then he says, just tell them
what they want to hear. You can go home afterwards.
You're not going to be arrested. So, being young, naive,
frightened sixteen, I wasn't thinking the long term. I was
just concerned with the safety in the moment. I was
overwhelmed emotionally and psychologically, and so I made up And
(27:36):
then on one hand this possibility of harm and on
the other this false life preserver that he threw me.
And so I took the out which he offered, and
I made up a story based on the information he
gave me that day and that I received in the
six weeks run up to everything. By the time it
was all said and done, I had collapsed on the
(27:57):
floor into a fetal position, crying uncle rollably. Obviously I
was arrested. You know, I was charged with the murder
and rape. This whole thing was not audio taped. It's
not videotaped, there's no signed confession. It's all just the
cops work. And that would be a crucial factor later
(28:18):
on because when a case went to trial, they left
the threat and false promise out of their testimony, and it's.
Speaker 2 (28:25):
Your word against theirs, right, And who's going to believe
a raping, murdering sixteen year old over a good.
Speaker 1 (28:30):
Old cop, right, So that's the arrest.
Speaker 2 (28:34):
I've been in business since two thousand and one, so
twenty three years. When I first started in business, I
didn't have any money. I didn't come from anything, and
so I started my business literally riding up with every
little money I could and bind used equipment. Literally the
(28:56):
first line, the first line of chain lumber comes down
what's called a pool chain, and it's just a big
heavy chain that lumber comes down that you pull boards
off of. I literally drug out from behind out of
some weeds behind an old furniture plant, North Carolina, and
paid like five hundred dollars cash for it and brought
it back to Memphis to put it together. I put
(29:18):
my plant together those first five six years with used
equipment whatever I could buy. And I needed a front
end loader, and they're expensive I mean, a new one
today is one hundred and thirty grand. Back then a
really good, you know, two or three year old when
was seventy five thousand dollars. I can afford that. And
(29:41):
this guy who was a truck driver said he had
some used equipment that he was getting rid of, and
he said he'd bring him down for me to look at.
On his flatbed. It was this old baco. It was
a Ford Baco that didn't look like much. And he
sold it to him for like six thousand dollars and
(30:04):
that was a good deal and I needed it, so
I bought it. Six months later, members of an FBI
task for showed up at my office unannounced with guns
on their hip and badges and said, we need to
speak to you in private. And we went in and
said how long have you been trafficking stolen equipment? And
(30:27):
I said how long I've been doing what? This truck
driver apparently had been stealing equipment from used rental equipment
places all over the United States. He would take loads
to their destination, and then on the way back home
to Tennessee during the night, he would pull over rental
companies and steal stuff and put on his truck, and
(30:48):
he had a ton of stolen stuff out on some
land somewhere, and then he would just sell it as
used equipment to guys like me. And I was like,
what are you talking about? Travel? I don't even know
what you're talking about. And I didn't know that this guy,
I didn't know. And they showed the vend number, and
sure enough, it was stolen from somebody in Alabama. And
(31:11):
this guy had been selling used equipment all over the place,
and everybody that'd been buying it me, you know, by
the letter of lall broke the law because we were
buying stolen equipment, but I wasn't trafficking in it. And
once I finally convinced them showed them the paperwork. I
had a bill of sale and everything else, they switched
gears immediately. It's like, look, man, we see now that
(31:32):
you're not trafficking in this stuff and you're not part
of this ring. But you're out sixty five hundred bucks
because that's not yours, and we've got to take it
right now. And I said, better yet, I'll return it
to the owner. I mean, I'll pay to have it
freight it down, which is exactly what I did. The
whole reason I'm telling this story is the hour that
those men were in my office. Now, I'm a grown
(31:52):
up man at thirty eight years old, homeo own business,
and you know, I've been through a lot in my life.
I remember trembling talking to those guys, because it never
really dawns on you until you're in the position you're
staring at a person that could take away your liberty.
You're staring at a person that has all the power
(32:15):
in the world to slap handcuffs on you, take your
out of your home or your business, put you in
a car, and throw you in jail, whether they prove
you've done anything or not. They have that ability because
if they have suspicion, they can do it, and it
can up end your life. And I remember, just in
that situation how scared I was. I was frightened. I
(32:40):
didn't know whether to call a lawyer. I didn't know
who to talk to. I didn't I searched every word
very carefully because I didn't want to misspeak. I didn't
want to give these men any reason to doubt me.
I knew I'd done nothing wrong. I didn't intend to
buy somebody's stolen equipment I trusted the guy I sold it,
that's told it to me, and it was terrifying. I
(33:06):
cannot imagine what it must be like for a sixteen
year old kid with no parent, no lawyer, no friends,
for six and a half hours, being drilled by grown
adults who you think are there to protect and serve
you and trust. I'd imagine you did on anything to
(33:30):
get out of that room. Yeah, I would have, and
you did, and I did. We'll be right back.
Speaker 1 (33:54):
I didn't ever even actually realize I was under arrest
and back to the police station. So when we once
they obtained this confession, I was crying uncontrollably. They finally
calmed me down, and at that point they gave me
something to eat and it was time to go back,
and you know, in the in the car, and you know,
(34:14):
they put handcuffed they had rearcuffed me, you know, and
I asked, well, why why are you putting me on handcuffs.
I was told that I wasn't going to be arrested,
and Lieutenant just said safety and they put me in
the car and they drove me back to the police station.
The good cop disappeared, Lieutenant disappeared. They said they were
(34:35):
going to call ahead and get order pizza at the
at the police department. And so I'm eating pizza at
the police department and periodically I'm interrupted by a uniformed
police officer that's carrying out different facets of the processing.
And you know, eventually he you know, did the fingerprints
and put the ink on the fingers, my fingers, and
(34:56):
I remember being pretty angry at that point, and I
just I saw the cop that his role had been
like the bad cop, and I just said, you know what,
what is you know, what is he doing? I've got
ink on my fingers. I'm over here trying to eat pizza.
And he said, well, oh, he has the right to
do that. I said, well, what do you mean he
has the right to do that. I was told I
(35:17):
wasn't going to be arrested, and he said, oh, you
are being charged with the crime. And that was how
I realized I was under arrest. So the police called
my mother from there, and she came down to the
police station.
Speaker 2 (35:33):
This how was this girl that was fifteen? And she
was right, and she was raped and murdered. Okay, ned
in the first reader. Didn't they have DNA? They did?
Speaker 1 (35:45):
They did, And so before I went to trial, the
results of the DNA came in from the FBI lab,
which showed that seminal fluid found in and around the victim.
Speaker 2 (35:55):
Didn't match me. It did not match.
Speaker 1 (35:57):
It did not match me. No, So to a explain
away the DNA, the prosecutor got this medical examiner to
commit fraud. They commit perjury. So when as an autopsy's done,
there they take the written and audio notes as they're
making their findings. So it was only six months after
doing the autopsy, hundreds of autopsies, leader only after the
(36:18):
DNA doesn't match me, there's this medical examiner suddenly says,
try to follow this. Now he remembers that he forgot.
Speaker 2 (36:31):
He remembers that he forever the topic. I feel like
an app for laughing. It's okay, No, it's not okay.
But he remembered that he forgot.
Speaker 1 (36:41):
To document medical evidence, which it is almost I think.
Speaker 2 (36:44):
It depends on what the definition of is is the
most ridiculous thing.
Speaker 1 (36:50):
And he claimed that that, yeah, he forgot to document that.
And he and you know, so he's saying he found
medical evidence to show the victim had been promiscuous, which
was a lie.
Speaker 2 (36:59):
They made paid that up. How can you find medical
evidence that the victim had been promiscuous before she died
when she was raped? He that it is stupid.
Speaker 1 (37:08):
He claims that on her He claimed that on a
slide he saw a perforated hymen. So she was raped, right,
And that's what opened the door for the prosecutor to argue, Aha,
that's how the DNA doesn't match Deskovic, and yet he's guilty.
Speaker 2 (37:25):
Oh, sheuating that she had consensual sex before she was raped. Correct,
this fifteen year old? Correct, So he's stolen the victim
under the bus.
Speaker 1 (37:36):
Too, Yes, he is, and then he takes it. Then
he is. And then he took it a step further
and mentioned another youth by name, But he claimed had
slept with the victim, but he never had a DNA
test performed to prove that. He didn't even call him
as a witness to give verbal testimony.
Speaker 2 (37:54):
He just made let's say, if that's who had sex,
we're calling that what and we're going to get a
DNA test from them to disprove.
Speaker 1 (38:03):
That because of a conflict of interest. The conflict of
interest the other youth that the prosecutor was falsely saying
had slept with the victim was represented by another member
of that public defender office, and specifically by a lawyer
that was supposed to be supervising him on my case,
and so that conflict prevented the defense from asking him
(38:24):
for a sample, of preventing the defense from calling him
as a witness.
Speaker 2 (38:30):
I got to say this to you, so far, hearing
this story sounds like a non affluent kid living an
apartment without a father or without the means to defend himself,
(38:52):
simply checking a box as someone to prosecute for this
crime to get everybody offer, So we settled it. I
agree with that his. I mean socioeconomics has something to
do with this too.
Speaker 1 (39:12):
Because the lawyers that we spoke to wanted fifty thousand
dollars as a retainer just to get started.
Speaker 2 (39:18):
And that was no way.
Speaker 1 (39:20):
There is no way. There was no way.
Speaker 2 (39:24):
Your grandmother and mother had to have been well. First
of all. Wow, I'm going ninety different ways right now.
But was a medical examiner proficient enough to establish atom
of death? Yeah? Where were you during the time of death?
You had to have it? Just an alibi?
Speaker 1 (39:42):
I did. I had one. I told, I told my
public defender I was playing with football with one of
my friends at the time of the crime. Okay, and
he never he never interviewed or called called the person
as my alibi. He never introduced the evidence why. I
asked him that after I don't get too far ahead.
(40:04):
But I asked him that after I lost the trial,
and he said, oh, well, I don't prosecute. I don't
do cases like with a shotgun approach.
Speaker 2 (40:13):
You know.
Speaker 1 (40:13):
That was his answer, which didn't really make any sense.
This lawyer essentially didn't defend me so quickly. He rarely
met with me. When he did meet with me, and
I tried to explain to him that I was innocent
in what happened in interrogation room, he was always shutting
me up. One time he told me he didn't care
if I was guilty or innocent. He never explained to
the jury the significance of the DNA not matching me.
(40:35):
He never used that to argue that that proved that
this confession was coerced than false. When it came time
to cross the gamin of the medical examiner, my lawyer
stood up in open court and with a big smile
on his face, like they were friends from back in
the day, said to him, You're going to be pleased
to know that I don't have a single question for you.
(41:00):
He wouldn't allow me to testify either. He said that
his personal one loss record was significantly better when his
clients didn't testify compared to when they did. That's probably true,
but most of his clients probably have a record, and
if they took the stand, they could be asked questions
about that. But I had never been arrested for even
(41:21):
a violation. And the other quick thing that he said
to me was, and this is a very naive way
to practice law. It's not up to me to prove
that you're innocent. It's up to the prosecution to prove
that you're guilty. And I don't think they did that.
Speaker 2 (41:45):
Did the judge not see the lack of defense and
inequity that was happening here?
Speaker 1 (41:55):
I think that he did, because when I was found
guilty and I was at the sentencing hearing, I begged
him to overturn the verdict because I was innocent, and
I referenced the DNA and he said to me, maybe
you are innocent. But instead of him overturning the conviction,
he took the easy way out, which was to give
me a fifteen to life sentence. I have been charged
(42:18):
as an adult and sentence as an adult and sent
to an adult prison. So, first of all, polygraph test
results are not admissible because it's not scientific, and you
know it would be prejudicial for a jurity here.
Speaker 2 (42:30):
I'm a psychology major, and I will tell you that
polygraphs are around seventy eight percent accurate. You can't take
somebody's life away from them. On seventy eight percent, they
should be inadmissible. And if you happen to sweat a lot,
they'll give false readings, and if you're nervous, they'll give
(42:51):
false readings. And if you're cold hearted and don't get nervous,
you can also beat them on the Otherwise, you can
be trained to be polygraph test. There's a reason they're inadmissible,
and one of them should be. A scared less sixteen
year old card up in a fetal position has no
business plugged up to a machine that's going to say
(43:13):
whether or not he's lying, because it's going to register
everything you're saying is lying.
Speaker 1 (43:19):
So have you having said that? The judge let the
polygraphists repeatedly tell the jury that I failed the polygraph
and that I lied when I denied committing the crime,
while at the same time he prohibited my lawyer from
asking him questions about the methods he used to arrive
at his opinion. So you're right, the polygraphs inadmissible unless
(43:43):
both sides agree. We didn't agree, but the judge created
this backdoor role. He said, well, this alleged confession took
place while you are being polygraphed, so it's coming in
that way. So that was an irregularity, and I got
one that's arguably better than that. So the victim's clothes,
including her bra, had been entered into evidence by the prosecutor.
(44:08):
The jury asked to see the bra, and that was
important because that was one of the statements that the
cops coerced out of me was I said that I
ripped her bra off. So when the jury asked to
see that, I mean, we thought they were thinking, like
we wanted them to think, there's some bras that you
can't rip the way that they're made. And it was
at that moment that the judge announced, he said, well,
(44:29):
the bra and the rest of the victim's clothes had
been left in the courtroom over the weekend, and apparently
the janitors thought it was garbage, so it's been thrown out.
Speaker 2 (44:40):
It's not available anymore.
Speaker 1 (44:42):
And he substituted the bra with a photo in which
he said, you can almost see the bra in the photo.
Speaker 2 (44:54):
Unbelievable. This is a kangaroo cord.
Speaker 1 (44:58):
The last thing is on the third day of the
jury deliberation, they sent out a note asking if we
can't come up with a verdica, we're going to be
kept sequestered over the Christmas holiday, and the judge said yes,
and I learned many years later at that point it
was eleven to one for a conviction in the jury.
In the jury room, but there was a holdout Duror
(45:21):
that thought I was in a sympath They were all
pressing him, and when they found out that they would
be sequestered, nobody wanted to be sequestered, and he didn't either,
so that ratcheted the pressure up, and then he switched
his vote based on that, and I was found guilty
of a murder and rape, which I didn't commit.
Speaker 2 (45:37):
Have you spoken that, juror, I haven't, but.
Speaker 1 (45:39):
He spoke to my civil rights lawyers. He had saw
on the news that I had been exonerated and released,
and he said, well, I'm glad because I never thought
he was guilty. And so my lawyer asked him the
obvious question, which well, why did you vote that way?
Speaker 2 (45:55):
And then they told you that story correct. And that
concludes part one of my conversation with Jeff Dskovic, and
you do not want to miss part two that's now
available to listen to the Redemption part. It's coming soon
and it will floor you together. Guys, we can change
(46:15):
this country, but it starts with you. I'll see in
part two
They took the crime scene DNA evidence which didn't match me,
and put it in the DNA data bank and it
matched it hit It matched the actual perpetrator whose DNA
was in that data bank. Because left free while I
was doing time for his crime, he killed a second
victim just three and a half years later, who was
(00:25):
a school teacher and had two children.
Speaker 2 (00:28):
The very thing we talked about happening happened, which is yes,
by railroading you. They ignored that there was a murder
on the loose, and he did it again. Oh my goodness.
Speaker 1 (00:38):
So on September twentieth, two thousand and six, the convictions
of returned I was released. I went back to court
November two, two thousand and six, at which point all
the charges were dismissed against me on actual innocence grounds,
and he was subsequently arrested and convicted of the crime.
Speaker 2 (01:00):
Welcome to an army of normal folks. I'm Bill Courtney.
I'm a normal guy. I'm a husband, a father, I'm
an entrepreneur, and I've been a football coach an inner
city Memphis. And the last part it accidentally led to
an oscar for the film about our football team. It's
called undefeated guys. I believe our country's problems will never
(01:23):
be solved by a bunch of fancy people in nice
suits using big words that nobody ever uses on CNN
and Fox, but rather by an army of normal folks US,
just you and me deciding hey, I can help. That's
what Jeff Deskovic, the voice we just heard, has done.
At sixteen years old, Jeff was wrongfully convicted of raping
(01:49):
and murdering a classmate, despite overwhelming evidence that he was innocent,
and after serving sixteen years for crime that he did
not commit, Jeff was finally exonerated, and rather than being
dominated by anger or as he puts it, victimhood that
(02:09):
no one would have blamed him for it all, he
went to work fight him for the freedom of others
who'd been wrongfully convicted. He has already freed eleven people.
I cannot wait for you to meet Jeff. Right after
these brief messages from our Genner sponsors, Jeff Deskovic from
(02:45):
the Bronx all the way from New York down here
to Memphis. How are you?
Speaker 1 (02:50):
I'm great? How did you be here?
Speaker 2 (02:52):
How's the flight in?
Speaker 1 (02:53):
Uh? Scary? I thought I was going to die on it.
The plane like for about what seemed to me to
be ten minutes is you know, up and down movement
on the plane, and you know, I thought it was
close for ten minutes and I thought I was gonna die.
My stomach got upset. Then I felt too hot, so
I turned on double air, you know, for me and
(03:15):
the passenger next to me, and that helped the warming part.
But then I quickly got cold, so it was short
of fatality.
Speaker 2 (03:24):
This was like the airplane trip from Hell. We were
seventy six degrees yesterday and we're gonna be thirty three
to day. So I guess the Hogll low pressure systems
probably created a lot of turbulines all the way down
from New York and you were the beneficiary of all that. Well,
thanks for making it. Yeah, absolutely, you didn't have to
(03:45):
use a little bag in front of you.
Speaker 1 (03:47):
No, thank god it didn't come to that, although I
felt I wasn't that far away from it, just to
be clear.
Speaker 2 (03:53):
Don't know, don't know if you paid any attention while
you were getting over your green gills coming into the
Crosstown concourse. But you're in the Memphis Listening Lab, which
is a cool thing that goes back to as you know,
I've assume you know Memphis is Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee
Lewis and a lot of rich Memphis heritage music, and
(04:17):
Memphis Listening Lab is where we're recording from and kind
of cool digs it.
Speaker 1 (04:22):
Really really is. I'm I'm a historian and I'm also nostalgic,
so I'm kind of in.
Speaker 2 (04:27):
Awe right now. That's cool. What you walked in. This
was the Southeast Region Sears Tower, and it was when
Sears went down, it became empty, and this place was
dilapidated and completely empty and homeless people living in it
only ten years ago. Wow, And this whole area around
(04:48):
it was suffering, and some investors in Memphis came together
refurbished and repurposed this entire building. And Memphis Listening Lab
is only one of a thousand tenants in this massive
building that there's a school here, there's a grocery store here,
restaurant businesses, all kinds of things, so kind of a
cool revitalation revitalization project. And one of the places there
(05:12):
is a Smith's Listening Lab. So anyway, welcome to mephis.
I'm glad you can see a little bit of our history.
Thank you very much. Your story is amazing, and it
really starts when you're sixteen. But just quickly, how'd you
grow up? Did you grow up in the Bronx. No.
Speaker 1 (05:27):
I grew up in Peak Skill in west Chester County.
I grew up in an apartment complex known as Crossroads.
I would describe Peak Skill as a middle class, ethnically
diverse city with the population of approximately twenty five thousand people.
Speaker 2 (05:42):
How far is that you know, geographically, so I can
picture it in the map from like New York Manhattan.
Speaker 1 (05:49):
One hour Peak Skill is one hour north of Manhattan. Okay,
it's suburbs, suburb correct, got it?
Speaker 2 (05:56):
Now, what'd your mom and dad do for a living?
Speaker 1 (05:58):
Yeah, my mother was a was a typist. My father
was actually never in my life in any aspect. Before
I was even born. He wanted out of financial responsibility,
so he denied that I was his. So I grew
up really with my mother. My grandmother, serving who lived
with us, served kind of like the second parent, but
she was in a way a combination of both dad
(06:18):
and mom, So she was mom because Mom was the breadwinner.
So Grandma stayed home took care, but grandma was also
like the father in the sense that she was the
disciplinarian who kept me and my brother who's three and
a half years younger than me in line.
Speaker 2 (06:34):
Got it. I think many of us have had grandmother's
like that, and in the South in particular, those grandmothers
are not to be trifled with.
Speaker 1 (06:43):
Exactly neither was mine back nor so I can relate.
Speaker 2 (06:47):
I got it, And so I guess you went to
public high school and public schools.
Speaker 1 (06:52):
Well, I went to Catholic school from grades two through eight.
The Peakskill High School, which was public actually literally was
a the street from the apartment complex that I grew
up in, and hence my deciding to go there rather
than the My mother wanted me to go to Catholic
high school, but they had like the high school version
(07:12):
of an entrance exam, and you know, being smarter than
my parent not, yeah, I decided to purposely flunk the
entrance exam so that I could go to the public
high school. And as a story will unfold, I mean
that really kind of shape my life and everything that
happened after that.
Speaker 2 (07:31):
Of course, I know, you purposely tank the test because
you wanted to go to public school, not Catholic school. Correct, Yes,
kids will do what kids do, right, that's right. If
your grandmother found that, she'd have probably whooped your.
Speaker 1 (07:42):
Butt, exactly right, exactly right.
Speaker 2 (07:46):
Okay, so until you're sixteen, I guess in sixteen, are
you a junior in high school?
Speaker 1 (07:53):
Well I would have been. So, you know, I wanted
to go to public high school, not just because of
the geographic locale out but in the apartment complex where
I grew up at, there were a lot of kids
that lived in the buildings and in the surrounding areas.
I was kind of like one of the main kids,
so that whatever I suggested would generally be what I
would do. For what we're gonna do, well, we're gonna
(08:14):
play basketball, stickball, Monopoly, Whard's Movie Night, you know whatever,
half dozen games we made up, and we even played
tackle football without pads on the on the grass. But
whatever I would suggest would generally be what we all did.
But that was my life after school, my life in
high school. I thought that I was going to be
mixed in with those kids since they all went to
(08:35):
public school and not the Catholic grade school. But actually
they were not. They were kids that were one or
two years older than me. I had skipped first grade
and I kind of caught up with me in going
to high school. So everybody was like older than me,
so I didn't quite fit in. I was kind of
like on the fringes of the society, and so that
my first year as a freshman really was I was
(08:57):
kind of picked on in school, and so my grades
suffered a lot, and it came to the point that
I had to go to summer school to do two
classes in order to pass. But I knew that if
I did then I would be in with these sane
kids again, and so I didn't go to summer school.
I got left back, so I repeated freshman year. So
(09:19):
at sixteen years old, I was a sophomore, not the
junior that you correctly point out. Mathematically I should have been.
Speaker 2 (09:25):
Okay, So what were you into in high school? You're
a freshman and sophomore year.
Speaker 1 (09:32):
Yeah, I mean I played I played basketball. I liked
video games. I was kind of an athlete, but not
in the school, not in organized sports, not with the
kids there. It was after school. I was into all
those games that we used, you know. I loved playing kickball,
for example. I liked playing basketball. I lived in the
(09:53):
swimming pool. We had a twelve foot pool with a
diving board in it, you know, so that was available
on the summer. I would describe myself as pretty athletic,
pretty energetic.
Speaker 3 (10:03):
So after school, So what you're describing as a kid, correct,
Just a kid exactly, from a middle class neighborhood. Yes,
no affluence whatsoever, what none, whatsoever.
Speaker 2 (10:16):
But you had food on the table. Correct. You had
a mother and a grandmother that cared for you, loved you,
and disciplined you, and keep just kept straight as they could. Yes,
you weren't in a whole lot of trouble. Absolutely not.
Speaker 1 (10:26):
No.
Speaker 2 (10:26):
Did you do any drugs? Never, not a day of
my life, not even now as an adult. Did you
ever get picked up shoplifting? Not even nothing? Nothing. You're
just a blue collar New York kid, yes, exactly, nothing
really remarkable and nothing really You're just a normal folk exactly. Yes,
(10:48):
that's true. And then your life changed, and then my
life changed. So on November fifteenth of nineteen eighty nine,
your classmate Angela Korea, Korea, Korea, was murdered. Yes she was,
and they found her strangled and raped. I believe, yes
(11:08):
they did. Two days later, on November seventeenth. How did
that affect the school and a community of only twenty
five thousand people.
Speaker 1 (11:16):
It rocked the community because murders were very rare. It
was there were periodic town hall meetings where safety tips
and progress on investigation were held. Many people, you know,
there were four sessions of wake. Many people attended three
or four of them. It impacted everybody so much to
the point that free mental health counseling was offered to
(11:39):
everybody in Peakskill who wished to avail themselves of it.
Speaker 2 (11:44):
Do you remember her family? I do. I met the
family afterwards.
Speaker 1 (11:48):
So I went to wake sessions, I went to the
funeral the cemetery, and there was an announcement made at
the at the cemetery grounds at anybody that wished to
come back to the Korea Home have coffee, there would
be some cookies and talk to the family was free
to do so. And so I availed myself of that,
and so I met the family. But that was that
(12:11):
was afterwards. They seemed like a really tight, warm, close
knit family. There was a stepfather in the home, which
was a new thing. Just the idea of living with
an adult male and they to me, they it all
seemed to like work and click, and it was. It
was something foreign to me somewhat because again I didn't
have a father in the in the household, and it
(12:33):
was sad. It was very sad, Yes, it was. And
I was a sensitive teenager, and you know, this did
affect me emotionally. This was my first real brush with death,
and I did have an emotional reaction to that. That's
important in the unfolding of the story because so they
(12:53):
it was one of the factors that put me on
the police radar. So the police interviewed many students from
the high school, and some of them told the police
they might want to talk with me because I didn't
quite fit in. I guess the theory in their head
was people that are quiet into themselves are more likely
to commit a heeneous crime. So I was suggested to
(13:13):
the police to look at for that reason. And secondarily,
the police thought that given my actual relationship with the victim,
which is to say, really no relationship.
Speaker 2 (13:24):
She was in two of my.
Speaker 1 (13:25):
Classes, a freshman one as a sophomore, I knew her name,
she knew mine. The police interpreted my being emotional as
some sort of outward sign that I was sorry for
what I had done. So those two factors put me
on the police radar, and that was buttressed by a
psychological profile that the Peak Skill Police obtained from the NYPD,
(13:50):
which purported to have the psychological characteristics of the actual perpetrator.
And I had the misfortune of matching that. What was
that that knew the victim that was in high school
and that was a loner? Well, congratch, you really narrowed
that down quite a.
Speaker 2 (14:10):
Bit, right, I can't believe I'm laughing.
Speaker 1 (14:13):
No, it's okay. We do dark humor and we laugh
at stupidity and other stuff. So that's what gots beyond
the police radar. And so for about six weeks, the
police play this cat and mouse game with me in
which half the time they would talk to me like
I'm a suspect, and when they would push too hard
and I'd become frightened and I'd want to get away
from them, they would switch up the conversation and Jeff
(14:38):
is this junior detective helper theme was developed somehow or another.
They learned that, prior to being a teenager, the career
that I dreamed about having was to be a cop,
so they would say things like, well, the kids won't
talk freely around us, but they will around you.
Speaker 2 (14:58):
Let us know if you hear anything. Stop in.
Speaker 1 (15:00):
From time to time they did the They would ask
me opinion questions and congratulate me that my opinion was correct.
They made me feel important. They did the good cop,
bad cop routine, and that intersected with growing up without
a father or a stepfather in the household. I began
to look up to the cop who was pretending to
(15:22):
be my friend as a father figure.
Speaker 2 (15:24):
And Thisslee, you trusted him, and thusly I trusted him.
So how long did this cat and mosk game go on?
Six weeks? So, six weeks after this girl's ripe and murder,
they had solved nothing right. And I gotta believe in
a town of twenty five thousand, with grief counselors and
(15:49):
a very rare murder and everything else, there was an
enormous amount of pressure on the police to figure out
who did this thing correct.
Speaker 1 (15:57):
And I want to add that bed on that general pressure.
Another element of that was that the Correa family didn't
think the Peak Skill police knew what they were doing,
and so they went to the state police and asked
the state police to take over the investigation. The State
Police did not, but they let that be known to
the Peak Skill Police, so that ratcheted up the pressure
(16:20):
to solve. And I want to add also talking about
how this impacted the community. Peak Skill, for most intents
and purposes, shut down. I mean, parents were driving their
kids to school, picking them up right after school, you know,
bringing them straight home. There was a general atmosphere of fear, rumor,
(16:44):
and to some extent, paranoia in Peak Skill.
Speaker 2 (16:48):
Were you your mom and your grandmother's carret a little bit?
Speaker 1 (16:51):
Yes, we were.
Speaker 2 (16:53):
We were.
Speaker 1 (16:53):
My mother didn't want me to go out for a while,
and if I was, then eventually when she let up
a little bit and allowed us to go out, you know,
I had to go out with my brother or or
with another one of my friends. She didn't want me
to go outside or go anywhere by myself.
Speaker 2 (17:11):
It's a bad time. It was a very bad time. Yeah.
During the six weeks of the cat and mouse, were
you discussing these conversations with your mom and grandmother? I
was not.
Speaker 1 (17:22):
I knew that, so I knew that my mother didn't
want me to talk and interact with the police, so
I told her about it. She trust them, She did
not know she did not trust them. I told my
mother about my first encounter with the police, and then
she made clear to me that she didn't want me
to talk to them because she knew that, yeah, they
were asking me questions and then they wanted me to
(17:42):
try to help them with the case, but then that
they also were asking me questions that suggested that I
was I was a suspect, so she didn't want me
to be to have anything to do with them. But
I was also sixteen years old, and that's an age
where many people we start to think that you know,
we know everything, we know more and our parents are
(18:04):
stupid and to my way of thinking, well, I don't
understand what your concern is. They telling me that they
want me to help them solve the crime. I didn't
do anything. What could possibly go wrong with my interacting
or helping the police, So I hid that from them,
and the Peaskill police also knew that that my mother
(18:25):
didn't want to have anything me to have anything to
do with them, but they know facilitated that.
Speaker 2 (18:30):
How is that legal for a police department to mess
with a minor without their parent.
Speaker 1 (18:37):
Well, I mean you're at sixteen, you're considered to be
an adult for purposes of waiving your rights and speaking
to the to the police without a parental author is sixteen?
Speaker 2 (18:49):
Yes, yes, right, Yeah, that's right. I didn't even know that.
So eventually understand they said, you know, why don't you
take a pie graph test and just go ahead and
rid yourself of any suspicion?
Speaker 1 (19:04):
Correct, exactly right. And they also added that once not
only that, but that they had some no information that
come into their file and they wanted to share that
with me. And that sounds like it was, of course,
but I didn't realize that. So both of why don't
you just rid yourself with a suspicion and also let
(19:25):
us be able to share this extra info with you,
and that's going to allow you to be more helpful
to us.
Speaker 2 (19:33):
Yeah, you're going to be a better junior cop when
we share this with you. Correct. So you go in
to this polygraph test kind of thinking I'm going to
help out and I'm gonna go ahead and remove myself
from the name, and that way I can really be
good junior cop. Exactly. Yes, all fed to you by
this father figure cop that you're beginning to trust, yes,
(19:57):
having not had a father in your home as a child,
exactly right, all behind your mother and grandmother's back because
they didn't trust them and you didn't want to let
your mom know what you're doing.
Speaker 1 (20:07):
Yeah, you've got it all right?
Speaker 2 (20:10):
What could go wrong? Right? And now a few messages
from our general sponsors. But first, I hope you'll follow
us on all your favorite social media channels where we
share more powerful content from the Army search for at
(20:34):
Army of normal folks on every channel. We'll be right back.
Tell me about the day you took the polygraph.
Speaker 1 (20:51):
So it was a school day and rather than go
to the high school, I went to the police station
for the test. I expected a test to be at
the police station because number one, they kind of implied that,
and number two, the rumor mill in Peace Gill was
that a few other people had been polygraphed at the
police station. So I'm expecting it to be at the
police station. I go there with one of my one
(21:14):
of my best friends. Because it's a school day. My
mother and grandmother think I'm in school. They don't have
a clue that anything's wrong. Therefore, there is no phone
call or coming to my rescue or intervention. That's off
the table because they don't know. I got to the
police station. The police lieutenant had told my friend just
to go home, get out of there.
Speaker 2 (21:35):
And what was your friend going to do with you?
Speaker 1 (21:38):
No, he was. I wanted him to go with me
while I had this idea that he could sit next
to me while I was being tested.
Speaker 2 (21:45):
That was more sixteen year old thinking. But I get it.
Speaker 1 (21:48):
Yeah, right, So when they sent him off, But.
Speaker 2 (21:51):
Do you think just hearing that, do you think somewhere
in the deepest recesses of your mind and you were
worried about getting set up, which is why you had
your friend go with you. Yeah, I was that was
true without being maybe consciously cognizant of it. Yes, why
else would you have a friend go with you except
(22:12):
that you had this tinge of fear?
Speaker 1 (22:13):
Correct? Yeah, you're right. No one's ever brought that out before.
But yes, you're right.
Speaker 2 (22:17):
Well, just listening to you that kind of.
Speaker 1 (22:19):
Yeah, it's true. And so therefore, when the lieutenant told him,
you know, go ahead and get it, get out of here,
I briefly entertained the thought of not going ahead with
things at all, But then I thought, well, the idea
of being an even better junior detective cop.
Speaker 2 (22:35):
Oh, thus, if you say no, you probably think, well,
that makes them suspicious of me.
Speaker 1 (22:40):
Yes, that's true too.
Speaker 2 (22:42):
Yes, so you go with this friend and the cops
tell your friend to beat it? Yeap, what's he going
to say? They're the cops exactly, And now you're there,
you can't exactly beat it. I can. I can already
feel the grip of this happening. I'm putting myself in
a sixteen Well you know, I'm fifty five years old,
but I've got about the mentality of the sixteen year old.
(23:04):
So I'm relating real well to all of this right now.
But I mean, I can almost I feel that.
Speaker 1 (23:10):
So I learned quickly, well, in fact, the test is
not going to be at the Peakskill police station. Why, well,
they're bringing me to the Well I know the answer now,
but I didn't at the time. But they so they
told me, look, We're going to stop at a diner
and eat something, and then I was going to be
(23:32):
brought to the location for the polygraph. I realized now
the reason for that is so the polygraphist was a
Putnam County sheriff's investigator named Daniel Stevens.
Speaker 2 (23:41):
But I didn't know he.
Speaker 1 (23:43):
Was a cop. He was dressed like a civilian. He
never identified himself as law enforcement. He never read been
right rights in terms of the transportation. The psychological intrigue continued.
So they put me in the car by myself with
the good cop the bad cop, but the lieutenant were
in a different vehicle, so there can He reads me
my rights again, but I don't understand them because I'm sixteen,
(24:05):
and plus you're telling me that I'm here to help you,
so that to the extent I could grasp anything at all,
that was all completely out the window. So we get there.
I just described the polygraphists. There's no I'm not giving
anything to eat. The entire time i'm there, there's no
lawyer present. He gives me a four page brochure which
(24:27):
explains how the polygraph works. But it has a lot
of words in it that I don't understand. But I figure, well,
I'm here to help the police, so what does it matter.
Let's just get on with it.
Speaker 2 (24:39):
Why did they drive you somewhere else.
Speaker 1 (24:41):
To bring me into his hands? He carried out this
procedure which he testified to was called GtC. Get the confession,
and you know, he had a knack for getting confessions
all over the place, and that was why they brought
me to him.
Speaker 2 (24:58):
So what was the polygraph like?
Speaker 1 (25:00):
They put me in a small room and he give
first a polygraphist gives me countless cups of coffee.
Speaker 2 (25:06):
I was right, get jamped up?
Speaker 1 (25:08):
Correct, And then he wired me up.
Speaker 2 (25:11):
Are you serious, sixteen year old? A bunch of coffee? Yes?
Speaker 1 (25:14):
No, so on of when I finished one cup that
he was up here pouring away you want another one?
And he'd you know, I think he gave me between
sixty eight cups. It was a lot. Then he wires
me to the machine and then he launches into his well.
First he pretends as he's turning the dials, oh, I'm
gonna I'm gonna fine tune the machine into your body's
(25:36):
bio feedback.
Speaker 2 (25:37):
Right.
Speaker 1 (25:37):
He does that routine for about five minutes, and then
the nature of the beast comes out and he launches
his third degree tactics. So he invades my personal space.
He raises his voice at me. He's asking me the
same questions over and over again, you know, and it's
really frightening. I mean, I'm not He's a mountain of
a man. I'm sixty sixteen, I'm one hundred and fifty pounds.
(26:00):
I'm not used to talking, much less interacting with an
adult male, much less one who's carrying on in a
ferocious manner like he is. And each hour that passes
by with him.
Speaker 2 (26:11):
Doing this, each hour, how long were you there?
Speaker 1 (26:13):
Six and a half to seven hours? Towards the end,
I guess he had had enough of my denials and
he said, you know, he said, what do you mean
you didn't do it? You just told me through the
polygraph test result that you did. We just want you
to verbally confirm it. And when he said that to me,
(26:35):
that ratcheted my fear up. And that's when he left
the room, and the cop pretending to be my friend
came in the room and said, look, they're going to
harm you. I've been holding them off. I can't do.
Speaker 2 (26:47):
That any longer. They're going to harm you. Yes, I
in other words, they're going to beat you.
Speaker 1 (26:53):
Well, I mean yeah, I mean, I mean your harm
is what it is. I mean, yeah, they're going to
beat me. I don't know that it would be limited
to that I don't know how far they're going to go.
I have no idea of where I'm at. No one
else knows where I was at. I felt in fear
of my life, and I felt intimidated. So I felt
like everything was on the table in terms of that,
(27:14):
you know so, and then he says, just tell them
what they want to hear. You can go home afterwards.
You're not going to be arrested. So, being young, naive,
frightened sixteen, I wasn't thinking the long term. I was
just concerned with the safety in the moment. I was
overwhelmed emotionally and psychologically, and so I made up And
(27:36):
then on one hand this possibility of harm and on
the other this false life preserver that he threw me.
And so I took the out which he offered, and
I made up a story based on the information he
gave me that day and that I received in the
six weeks run up to everything. By the time it
was all said and done, I had collapsed on the
(27:57):
floor into a fetal position, crying uncle rollably. Obviously I
was arrested. You know, I was charged with the murder
and rape. This whole thing was not audio taped. It's
not videotaped, there's no signed confession. It's all just the
cops work. And that would be a crucial factor later
(28:18):
on because when a case went to trial, they left
the threat and false promise out of their testimony, and it's.
Speaker 2 (28:25):
Your word against theirs, right, And who's going to believe
a raping, murdering sixteen year old over a good.
Speaker 1 (28:30):
Old cop, right, So that's the arrest.
Speaker 2 (28:34):
I've been in business since two thousand and one, so
twenty three years. When I first started in business, I
didn't have any money. I didn't come from anything, and
so I started my business literally riding up with every
little money I could and bind used equipment. Literally the
(28:56):
first line, the first line of chain lumber comes down
what's called a pool chain, and it's just a big
heavy chain that lumber comes down that you pull boards
off of. I literally drug out from behind out of
some weeds behind an old furniture plant, North Carolina, and
paid like five hundred dollars cash for it and brought
it back to Memphis to put it together. I put
(29:18):
my plant together those first five six years with used
equipment whatever I could buy. And I needed a front
end loader, and they're expensive I mean, a new one
today is one hundred and thirty grand. Back then a
really good, you know, two or three year old when
was seventy five thousand dollars. I can afford that. And
(29:41):
this guy who was a truck driver said he had
some used equipment that he was getting rid of, and
he said he'd bring him down for me to look at.
On his flatbed. It was this old baco. It was
a Ford Baco that didn't look like much. And he
sold it to him for like six thousand dollars and
(30:04):
that was a good deal and I needed it, so
I bought it. Six months later, members of an FBI
task for showed up at my office unannounced with guns
on their hip and badges and said, we need to
speak to you in private. And we went in and
said how long have you been trafficking stolen equipment? And
(30:27):
I said how long I've been doing what? This truck
driver apparently had been stealing equipment from used rental equipment
places all over the United States. He would take loads
to their destination, and then on the way back home
to Tennessee during the night, he would pull over rental
companies and steal stuff and put on his truck, and
(30:48):
he had a ton of stolen stuff out on some
land somewhere, and then he would just sell it as
used equipment to guys like me. And I was like,
what are you talking about? Travel? I don't even know
what you're talking about. And I didn't know that this guy,
I didn't know. And they showed the vend number, and
sure enough, it was stolen from somebody in Alabama. And
(31:11):
this guy had been selling used equipment all over the place,
and everybody that'd been buying it me, you know, by
the letter of lall broke the law because we were
buying stolen equipment, but I wasn't trafficking in it. And
once I finally convinced them showed them the paperwork. I
had a bill of sale and everything else, they switched
gears immediately. It's like, look, man, we see now that
(31:32):
you're not trafficking in this stuff and you're not part
of this ring. But you're out sixty five hundred bucks
because that's not yours, and we've got to take it
right now. And I said, better yet, I'll return it
to the owner. I mean, I'll pay to have it
freight it down, which is exactly what I did. The
whole reason I'm telling this story is the hour that
those men were in my office. Now, I'm a grown
(31:52):
up man at thirty eight years old, homeo own business,
and you know, I've been through a lot in my life.
I remember trembling talking to those guys, because it never
really dawns on you until you're in the position you're
staring at a person that could take away your liberty.
You're staring at a person that has all the power
(32:15):
in the world to slap handcuffs on you, take your
out of your home or your business, put you in
a car, and throw you in jail, whether they prove
you've done anything or not. They have that ability because
if they have suspicion, they can do it, and it
can up end your life. And I remember, just in
that situation how scared I was. I was frightened. I
(32:40):
didn't know whether to call a lawyer. I didn't know
who to talk to. I didn't I searched every word
very carefully because I didn't want to misspeak. I didn't
want to give these men any reason to doubt me.
I knew I'd done nothing wrong. I didn't intend to
buy somebody's stolen equipment I trusted the guy I sold it,
that's told it to me, and it was terrifying. I
(33:06):
cannot imagine what it must be like for a sixteen
year old kid with no parent, no lawyer, no friends,
for six and a half hours, being drilled by grown
adults who you think are there to protect and serve
you and trust. I'd imagine you did on anything to
(33:30):
get out of that room. Yeah, I would have, and
you did, and I did. We'll be right back.
Speaker 1 (33:54):
I didn't ever even actually realize I was under arrest
and back to the police station. So when we once
they obtained this confession, I was crying uncontrollably. They finally
calmed me down, and at that point they gave me
something to eat and it was time to go back,
and you know, in the in the car, and you know,
(34:14):
they put handcuffed they had rearcuffed me, you know, and
I asked, well, why why are you putting me on handcuffs.
I was told that I wasn't going to be arrested,
and Lieutenant just said safety and they put me in
the car and they drove me back to the police station.
The good cop disappeared, Lieutenant disappeared. They said they were
(34:35):
going to call ahead and get order pizza at the
at the police department. And so I'm eating pizza at
the police department and periodically I'm interrupted by a uniformed
police officer that's carrying out different facets of the processing.
And you know, eventually he you know, did the fingerprints
and put the ink on the fingers, my fingers, and
(34:56):
I remember being pretty angry at that point, and I
just I saw the cop that his role had been
like the bad cop, and I just said, you know what,
what is you know, what is he doing? I've got
ink on my fingers. I'm over here trying to eat pizza.
And he said, well, oh, he has the right to
do that. I said, well, what do you mean he
has the right to do that. I was told I
(35:17):
wasn't going to be arrested, and he said, oh, you
are being charged with the crime. And that was how
I realized I was under arrest. So the police called
my mother from there, and she came down to the
police station.
Speaker 2 (35:33):
This how was this girl that was fifteen? And she
was right, and she was raped and murdered. Okay, ned
in the first reader. Didn't they have DNA? They did?
Speaker 1 (35:45):
They did, And so before I went to trial, the
results of the DNA came in from the FBI lab,
which showed that seminal fluid found in and around the victim.
Speaker 2 (35:55):
Didn't match me. It did not match.
Speaker 1 (35:57):
It did not match me. No, So to a explain
away the DNA, the prosecutor got this medical examiner to
commit fraud. They commit perjury. So when as an autopsy's done,
there they take the written and audio notes as they're
making their findings. So it was only six months after
doing the autopsy, hundreds of autopsies, leader only after the
(36:18):
DNA doesn't match me, there's this medical examiner suddenly says,
try to follow this. Now he remembers that he forgot.
Speaker 2 (36:31):
He remembers that he forever the topic. I feel like
an app for laughing. It's okay, No, it's not okay.
But he remembered that he forgot.
Speaker 1 (36:41):
To document medical evidence, which it is almost I think.
Speaker 2 (36:44):
It depends on what the definition of is is the
most ridiculous thing.
Speaker 1 (36:50):
And he claimed that that, yeah, he forgot to document that.
And he and you know, so he's saying he found
medical evidence to show the victim had been promiscuous, which
was a lie.
Speaker 2 (36:59):
They made paid that up. How can you find medical
evidence that the victim had been promiscuous before she died
when she was raped? He that it is stupid.
Speaker 1 (37:08):
He claims that on her He claimed that on a
slide he saw a perforated hymen. So she was raped, right,
And that's what opened the door for the prosecutor to argue, Aha,
that's how the DNA doesn't match Deskovic, and yet he's guilty.
Speaker 2 (37:25):
Oh, sheuating that she had consensual sex before she was raped. Correct,
this fifteen year old? Correct, So he's stolen the victim
under the bus.
Speaker 1 (37:36):
Too, Yes, he is, and then he takes it. Then
he is. And then he took it a step further
and mentioned another youth by name, But he claimed had
slept with the victim, but he never had a DNA
test performed to prove that. He didn't even call him
as a witness to give verbal testimony.
Speaker 2 (37:54):
He just made let's say, if that's who had sex,
we're calling that what and we're going to get a
DNA test from them to disprove.
Speaker 1 (38:03):
That because of a conflict of interest. The conflict of
interest the other youth that the prosecutor was falsely saying
had slept with the victim was represented by another member
of that public defender office, and specifically by a lawyer
that was supposed to be supervising him on my case,
and so that conflict prevented the defense from asking him
(38:24):
for a sample, of preventing the defense from calling him
as a witness.
Speaker 2 (38:30):
I got to say this to you, so far, hearing
this story sounds like a non affluent kid living an
apartment without a father or without the means to defend himself,
(38:52):
simply checking a box as someone to prosecute for this
crime to get everybody offer, So we settled it. I
agree with that his. I mean socioeconomics has something to
do with this too.
Speaker 1 (39:12):
Because the lawyers that we spoke to wanted fifty thousand
dollars as a retainer just to get started.
Speaker 2 (39:18):
And that was no way.
Speaker 1 (39:20):
There is no way. There was no way.
Speaker 2 (39:24):
Your grandmother and mother had to have been well. First
of all. Wow, I'm going ninety different ways right now.
But was a medical examiner proficient enough to establish atom
of death? Yeah? Where were you during the time of death?
You had to have it? Just an alibi?
Speaker 1 (39:42):
I did. I had one. I told, I told my
public defender I was playing with football with one of
my friends at the time of the crime. Okay, and
he never he never interviewed or called called the person
as my alibi. He never introduced the evidence why. I
asked him that after I don't get too far ahead.
(40:04):
But I asked him that after I lost the trial,
and he said, oh, well, I don't prosecute. I don't
do cases like with a shotgun approach.
Speaker 2 (40:13):
You know.
Speaker 1 (40:13):
That was his answer, which didn't really make any sense.
This lawyer essentially didn't defend me so quickly. He rarely
met with me. When he did meet with me, and
I tried to explain to him that I was innocent
in what happened in interrogation room, he was always shutting
me up. One time he told me he didn't care
if I was guilty or innocent. He never explained to
the jury the significance of the DNA not matching me.
(40:35):
He never used that to argue that that proved that
this confession was coerced than false. When it came time
to cross the gamin of the medical examiner, my lawyer
stood up in open court and with a big smile
on his face, like they were friends from back in
the day, said to him, You're going to be pleased
to know that I don't have a single question for you.
(41:00):
He wouldn't allow me to testify either. He said that
his personal one loss record was significantly better when his
clients didn't testify compared to when they did. That's probably true,
but most of his clients probably have a record, and
if they took the stand, they could be asked questions
about that. But I had never been arrested for even
(41:21):
a violation. And the other quick thing that he said
to me was, and this is a very naive way
to practice law. It's not up to me to prove
that you're innocent. It's up to the prosecution to prove
that you're guilty. And I don't think they did that.
Speaker 2 (41:45):
Did the judge not see the lack of defense and
inequity that was happening here?
Speaker 1 (41:55):
I think that he did, because when I was found
guilty and I was at the sentencing hearing, I begged
him to overturn the verdict because I was innocent, and
I referenced the DNA and he said to me, maybe
you are innocent. But instead of him overturning the conviction,
he took the easy way out, which was to give
me a fifteen to life sentence. I have been charged
(42:18):
as an adult and sentence as an adult and sent
to an adult prison. So, first of all, polygraph test
results are not admissible because it's not scientific, and you
know it would be prejudicial for a jurity here.
Speaker 2 (42:30):
I'm a psychology major, and I will tell you that
polygraphs are around seventy eight percent accurate. You can't take
somebody's life away from them. On seventy eight percent, they
should be inadmissible. And if you happen to sweat a lot,
they'll give false readings, and if you're nervous, they'll give
(42:51):
false readings. And if you're cold hearted and don't get nervous,
you can also beat them on the Otherwise, you can
be trained to be polygraph test. There's a reason they're inadmissible,
and one of them should be. A scared less sixteen
year old card up in a fetal position has no
business plugged up to a machine that's going to say
(43:13):
whether or not he's lying, because it's going to register
everything you're saying is lying.
Speaker 1 (43:19):
So have you having said that? The judge let the
polygraphists repeatedly tell the jury that I failed the polygraph
and that I lied when I denied committing the crime,
while at the same time he prohibited my lawyer from
asking him questions about the methods he used to arrive
at his opinion. So you're right, the polygraphs inadmissible unless
(43:43):
both sides agree. We didn't agree, but the judge created
this backdoor role. He said, well, this alleged confession took
place while you are being polygraphed, so it's coming in
that way. So that was an irregularity, and I got
one that's arguably better than that. So the victim's clothes,
including her bra, had been entered into evidence by the prosecutor.
(44:08):
The jury asked to see the bra, and that was
important because that was one of the statements that the
cops coerced out of me was I said that I
ripped her bra off. So when the jury asked to
see that, I mean, we thought they were thinking, like
we wanted them to think, there's some bras that you
can't rip the way that they're made. And it was
at that moment that the judge announced, he said, well,
(44:29):
the bra and the rest of the victim's clothes had
been left in the courtroom over the weekend, and apparently
the janitors thought it was garbage, so it's been thrown out.
Speaker 2 (44:40):
It's not available anymore.
Speaker 1 (44:42):
And he substituted the bra with a photo in which
he said, you can almost see the bra in the photo.
Speaker 2 (44:54):
Unbelievable. This is a kangaroo cord.
Speaker 1 (44:58):
The last thing is on the third day of the
jury deliberation, they sent out a note asking if we
can't come up with a verdica, we're going to be
kept sequestered over the Christmas holiday, and the judge said yes,
and I learned many years later at that point it
was eleven to one for a conviction in the jury.
In the jury room, but there was a holdout Duror
(45:21):
that thought I was in a sympath They were all
pressing him, and when they found out that they would
be sequestered, nobody wanted to be sequestered, and he didn't either,
so that ratcheted the pressure up, and then he switched
his vote based on that, and I was found guilty
of a murder and rape, which I didn't commit.
Speaker 2 (45:37):
Have you spoken that, juror, I haven't, but.
Speaker 1 (45:39):
He spoke to my civil rights lawyers. He had saw
on the news that I had been exonerated and released,
and he said, well, I'm glad because I never thought
he was guilty. And so my lawyer asked him the
obvious question, which well, why did you vote that way?
Speaker 2 (45:55):
And then they told you that story correct. And that
concludes part one of my conversation with Jeff Dskovic, and
you do not want to miss part two that's now
available to listen to the Redemption part. It's coming soon
and it will floor you together. Guys, we can change
(46:15):
this country, but it starts with you. I'll see in
part two
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