December 26, 2023 • 26 mins
In this bonus episode, host Mosi Secret sits down with Johnny Kauffman to discuss the making of Radical and the investigative journey of the podcast.
Get caught up this week and then listen in next week to new twists and turns in the case.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Radical is released every Tuesday and brought to you absolutely free.
But if you want add free listening and early access
to next week's episode, subscribe to tenderfoot Plus. For more information,
check out tenderfootplus dot com. Hello Radical listeners, I'm Mosty's
(00:27):
Secret host of the podcast. We're doing something a little
different this week. We want to give you a bit
more insight into the reporting that went into the podcast,
and we want to give you a bit of a
preview of what's coming in the next few episodes. I
sat down with Radical senior producer Johnny Kaufman to talk
about all of this, and we'll get to that conversation
right after the break. This is Mostly's Secret. I'm the
(01:13):
host of Radical, and I'm here with the podcast senior
producer Johnny Kaufman. Hey Johnny, how's it going?
Speaker 2 (01:19):
Hey Mosy. I'm good. It's a little weird to be
talking to you and have our conversation recorded, but I
think this will be fun. I think it'll be good
to sort of go back over things. So yeah, I'm
all right.
Speaker 1 (01:33):
So yeah. So many people are asking me how I
thought of this podcast, and the answer is, I didn't
really think of this podcast, so maybe we should talk
about how you first learned about and Ma'am Jamille Alamine
and his conviction.
Speaker 2 (01:48):
Yeah, so my memory is a little bit fuzzy on this.
I'm not quite sure, but I think I was working
on a story about you know, I'm a reporter in Atlanta,
and you know, I'm obviously a producer too, but I
do some reporting as well. And I was working on
a story about this activist who was pushing for changes
(02:13):
to the laws around voting in Georgia for people convicted
of felonies. He was an African American Muslim guy, grew
up in the community.
Speaker 1 (02:22):
In the West End.
Speaker 2 (02:25):
He grew up in the African American Muslim community in
Buffalo actually, and moved here, I think, like when he
was a teen or in his like early twenties. So
I'm based in Atlanta. I'm a reporter here as well
as a producer, and I was working on this story
(02:45):
about this activist who was trying to get some laws
changed in Georgia around voting for people who are convicted
of felonies. He was an African American Muslim guy knew
the community in Atlanta well, and I can't remember if
it was him or his now wife who was his
(03:06):
fiance at the time, who mentioned email Jimi al Alamin
to me, and I was like, oh, I started looking
into this. I emailed a friend who who I really
admire his reporting, and I was like, Hey, has has
anyone done anything on this? You know, because I didn't
want to like waste my time if someone had already
done a story. So and he was like, no, but
(03:28):
someone should. So with that kind of encouragement, then I
started to dig into it a little bit.
Speaker 1 (03:34):
And this was like a couple of years ago or something.
Speaker 2 (03:36):
Yeah, a couple of years ago. Yeah, so it would
have been twenty twenty one, I think.
Speaker 1 (03:42):
And once you learned about the case, what'd you do
after that?
Speaker 2 (03:46):
So usually what you know, I think a lot of
reporters do you make some initial phone calls. And I
filed a bunch of open records requests to get the
case documents, both from the Atlanta Police Department and because
they initially responded to the shooting in the West End,
and then also from the Fulton County District Attorney because
(04:09):
they were the prosecutors in the case, so they kind
of accumulate a lot of the evidence and incident reports
and potentially interviews with witnesses that kind of thing.
Speaker 1 (04:20):
So you file these requests, do they respond to them
or how do they What type of response do.
Speaker 2 (04:28):
You get from the Fulton County DA, Right, because the
Atlanta Police Department response was great, they were very quick,
they got back to meet, but they only had like
some they only had sort of like the detective's initial file,
which actually, you know, the investigation into this case from
(04:49):
the Atlanta Police Department didn't take that long, right, it
was like a month maybe or something, right before he
was indicted, so that most of the documents were with
the Fulton County d And I mean maybe I got
like an automated response initially, but then it was like
months until I really heard anything, and I had to
continue to like email them and email them and call
(05:14):
and eventually they told me. One they told me that
they didn't have any audio or video recordings, which we're
obviously interested in because this is a podcast. But they
also told me that they or I can't exactly remember
the timeline here, but like there weren't audio and video recordings,
and they also said they weren't going to release any
materials to us because the case was under review by
(05:39):
this entity called the conviction integrity unit, which you know,
we get into later in the in the later episodes
of the podcast, and so they were saying, well, you know,
usually the practice is when when a case is open,
when the investigation is open, you know, you don't release
the evidence because that could potentially interfere with the investigation.
Speaker 1 (05:59):
Right.
Speaker 2 (05:59):
It's reasonable to a certain extent, but you know, personally
as a journalist, and as they talk to more people
here is like, well, this could potentially be a problem
because these conviction integrity units are pretty popular within the
criminal justice world at the moment. Different agencies around the
(06:19):
country are instituting them as a way to review prosecutions
or miscarriages of justice potentially. And it seems problematic that
you could kind of push something into a conviction integrity
unit and then seal it off from the public, because
these are cases that have already played out, right.
Speaker 1 (06:38):
They're in a post conviction phase. The case is essentially closed,
you know, Like when we file public records requests, one
of the main responses that we get if it's not
turned over is this is still an open case, but
at once it's closed, it's supposed to be closed. So
what you're saying is they kind of found this little
area where they reopened it it again from public scrutiny.
Speaker 2 (07:01):
Yeah, I mean it seemed that way because we didn't,
you know, I wasn't getting signals that they were doing
a lot of work looking into it, right, So that
was the concern. And then we got the Georgia First
Amendment Foundation involved, which is an organization here who advocates
for government transparency that kind of thing, and they help
(07:24):
journalists with open records requests, and they definitely were concerned
about this sort of setting a precedent for prosecutors to
close cases and keep them from public scrutiny. So they
got involved, and we pushed more, and eventually the Fulton
County DA did find recordings which some of have already
(07:46):
been included in the episodes that have you know, aired,
and there will be more to come, some of those
in later episodes, and those are this is the first
time that those have been heard by the public, I'm
pretty sure. So we got those recordings and we got
eventually got I would say probably only five percent of
(08:08):
the documents were withheld, probably less than that for like
legal reasons, like if there's personal like medical information or
that kind of thing, you know. And it was it
was wild because actually the documents we felt. We got
a document that had a list I think I sent
(08:29):
this to you. At some point. We got a document
that had a list of the different recordings that the
DA's office said they didn't have. So then I was
able to send that to the DA and be like, look,
this says that these recordings exist, so like, please go
back and look for them again. And eventually they found them.
Speaker 1 (08:45):
Yeah, with public records requests, the more detailed you are
and the more specific you are in your requests, the
better you know.
Speaker 2 (08:52):
And you remember, I mean we didn't get those recordings
until like we had already we were already writing episodes.
Speaker 1 (08:56):
Right yeah, yeah, it was very close to the end,
which actually leads me right into my next question. You know,
I know this. You were wrangling with them for a
long time, uh, trying to get this stuff, you know,
with the help of these First Amendment lawyers. What were
you doing in the meantime?
Speaker 2 (09:15):
Right? So, I you know, I had made some calls, uh,
and was sort of doing some preliminary interviews and and
the first one of the first things I did was
right to this guy. His name is Otis Jackson. Folks
who are listening to the podcast, they won't have heard
his his voice yet, but he's coming in the later episodes.
(09:36):
He has for years been confessing to shooting the deputies
outside the mosque in the West End, the crime for
which Eman Jamil was charged, Uh and convicted. I think
we can say that, yeah, yeah, so yeah, we can
say that. So yeah. So I wrote to him he's
in federal prison, uh, and you know, gave him my
(10:00):
phone number, and eventually he called me. The way it
works is you can't call into federal prison. You have
the calls have to come out to you. So I
was always like looking, you know, when I would get calls,
I can't remember where it said they were coming from,
maybe like Maryland or something. So I knew if I
was getting a call from Maryland that it was probably him.
(10:23):
The calls would only last fifteen minutes, but I tried
as much as they could to answer them, and so
we sort of got to know each other, and eventually
he you know, told me this story that he's been
telling for a long time, and so that was, Yeah,
that was really important to have that, particularly in the
early stages. Because also I don't think anyone else in
(10:46):
the press had really interviewed him ever, especially not yeah,
not audio versions of those interviews.
Speaker 1 (10:52):
Throughout this period, you guys were on the record, and
you were recording these conversations.
Speaker 2 (10:57):
Yeah. Yeah, he agreed to talk on the record. He yeah,
I mean you'll hear youill hear some of those recordings
later in the show. The folks who are listening to
the show will hear them. And you know, he's a
complicated guy, as you might imagine, And those conversations weren't
always easy, but they definitely made me like more interested
(11:21):
in the story and kept, you know, got me to
continue to push on other fronts, like with the documents
and that kind of thing.
Speaker 1 (11:28):
Yeah, did you guys ever get a chance to meet?
Speaker 2 (11:31):
No, no, we did not. We did not get a
chance to meet. We tried that. The process for interviewing
someone in federal prison is like complicated. I had to
read like these different like I don't even know what
you call them, like rules that were created by the
(11:52):
the Federal Bureau of Prisons. They're kind of hard to
find online for how you go about that process. And
you have to like submit the request to the warden,
I think, and then you have to get the person
who's incarcerated to sign on as well. And the problem that,
you know, the trick with like reporting on people who
(12:14):
are incarcerated, is that you don't always know like what's
happening on the on the back end, like within the prison.
So I don't know whatever happened. It didn't work out
for us to interview him in person, But I don't
know if the breakdown was that he ultimately didn't want
to do that for whatever reason, or if the warden
didn't clear it. We never really got to the bottom
(12:34):
of that. But he agreed to the interviews on the
record over the phone, and thankfully the quality was good
enough that we were able to use them.
Speaker 1 (12:42):
So you're having these conversations with Otis Jackson and eventually
you start getting documents back. What kinds of things do
you begin to see?
Speaker 2 (12:51):
So we started to get the documents back, and there
were particularly there were some documents especially that caught my
attention that were about a number of other homicides that
had played out in the West End, that had happened
in the West End in the nineties especially, And we
(13:12):
also saw a lot of stuff in those documents about
the FBI and their involvement in the community, informants that
they had in the community in the nineties and even
around the time of the shooting at the mosque, and
so that obviously raised a lot of questions and was
(13:36):
very interesting, And so that was sort of what that
opened up another area of reporting in the story that
sort of as you know, folks will hear that plays
out a lot in episodes seven and eight, especially.
Speaker 1 (13:51):
Okay, so we're gonna take a quick break here and
then we'll be back and Johnny's gonna ask me a
few questions and we'll talk more about what's coming up
the show.
Speaker 2 (14:22):
I am actually curious to know, MOSSI like, when my
boss at Campside Media, his name is Matt Cherr, when
he first talked to you about this project, Like, what
was your initial reaction, Like did you talk about it
with your family, was it something that you were thinking
about a lot, or like did you sort of immediately
(14:45):
know what you were going to do when you heard
about the project.
Speaker 1 (14:47):
Yeah, Matt told me that Campside was looking for a host,
and I think my initial response was kind of like
disbelief at the degree to which Campside's need for a
host aligned with my experience is a little bit creepy.
So there's this show about Jamil Lamine based in Atlanta
(15:12):
that involves the criminal legal system with a potential wrongful conviction.
So I'm like, Okay, I'm from Atlanta. Matt didn't know this.
I don't think Matt knew this. I'm from Atlanta. I've
done a wrongful conviction investigation before. I grew up knowing
about Jamiel Lamine. And my father is a defense lawyer
(15:36):
who knows the people in the in the in the
defense bar there. So I was like, first of all,
if you're looking for somebody, you're not going to find
anybody that checks those boxes. So I was like, it
was kind of weird. And then you know, like I'm
thinking about this. I started to think more, in particular
about this case and also about the reputation of Jamil
(15:59):
Elamina of his community, and I knew that there were
people who were very devoted to him and who believed
very much in his innocence and who you know, would
fight for him in various ways. And so I there
(16:19):
was some trepidation on my part about whether I even
wanted to get involved, and also about what it would mean.
So I was drawn by a potential wrongful conviction case
because there's a you know, a great impact that a
journalist gonna have there. But if he was innocent, I
(16:39):
didn't want to kind of just go doing a crime
story just for the sake of a crime story. So,
you know, after after Matt and I had that conversation,
I talked with my family about, you know, what it
might mean for me to do this type of project
because my family is still in Atlanta and still has
a strong connections and meaningful connections to a lot of
(17:03):
folks in this community that the story deals with. And
so there are a series of conversations there and after,
you know, making sure that they were comfortable with it,
and finding that I was comfortable with it, I told
Matt that I was ready ready to move on. Move
on with you guys.
Speaker 2 (17:23):
Yeah, we're thankful that that worked out. Talk a little
bit about how like, because a lot of people in
the community, right outside of your family, who who that
story touches on, or who have connections to you, man, Jamil,
they weren't necessarily, you know, chomping at the bit to talk.
(17:46):
So how were you able to to get people to
you know, sit down for either for interviews for the
show or even to like talk to you off the
record just for background information.
Speaker 1 (17:58):
Yeah, you know, a lot of it was it was
trust building essentially. There was kind of a baseline level
of trust that was there just because of the family
that I come from, and just because of my family's
(18:20):
proximity to this community, you know, the community of African
American Muslims in Atlanta. There are a number of masjids
or mosques, but still everyone knows everyone. So and also
my name is weird, you know, and everyone knows the secrets.
(18:44):
So that meant that people would at least take my calls.
And also I should say, you know, you had done
some legwork when I came on, and some people had
already heard from you and were impressed with your rigor
and with your yeah determination, and so at that point
(19:05):
they knew that this was a serious project who had
someone on it who they could potentially trust. And then
it began. It began about So that's like that gets
you in the door for an off the record conversation.
You know, you can have these preliminary, preliminary conversations with
people they know you, uh, and they'll tell you things,
(19:27):
but maybe they don't want to go. Maybe they don't
want to go on the record. And so that happened
quite a bit, and then it becomes about, you know,
what we need for the show. Who we returned to
to ask if they might actually speak to us on
the record? Luck, you know, somebody mentioned someone else who
(19:51):
happens to want to talk. All these things kind of
come into play, and you know, eventually you have a
you have what you need. We still got a lot
of people who said no, a lot of people who
said no. Most of the law enforcement people said no,
a lot of people from the community said no. But
we had what we needed. And the conversations that we
got were intimate and heartfelt. You know.
Speaker 2 (20:15):
So then those conversations, how do you think, both off
the record and the interviews that we did, how do
you think that sort of added to what we were
already seeing in the documents that we had.
Speaker 1 (20:27):
I think it added a lot. And here I'm being
careful because I want people to make it to the
end of this show. But you know, in the documents,
particularly in the stuff in the court documents from the trial,
we saw a lot of there are a lot of
(20:49):
things that were questionable about the prosecution and the conviction,
the eyewitness testimony, the ballistics evidence, other types of evidence
that was presented at a trial. There were a lot of
things there that that that raised some doubt about the
conviction and and all these years later. It is difficult.
(21:15):
I mean, it's difficult regardless, but it's just difficult to
kind of land one way or the other with that
type of evidence. If you were not I don't know.
If there's kind of like a pile of evidence on
one side and a pile of evidence on the other,
you could really kind of get in this middle zone
of not knowing what to think.
Speaker 2 (21:34):
But I think especially with with email Jamil, where there's
like there's such strong feelings on both sides exactly.
Speaker 1 (21:42):
Yeah, it's a very polarizing figure. But I think the
reason that we were able to draw a conclusion in
this show, and we do draw a conclusion in this
in this show, is because we got close to people
who had a sense of things, who were around and
(22:05):
that puts those documents in a different light. And it
was it was the people who we talked to were
probably more persuasive to me than anything.
Speaker 2 (22:22):
And I think you also brought a trust, like at
a level that folks, a lot of folks that we
talked to like wouldn't have had for law enforcement. And
so law enforcement because of the relationship that they that
you know, not good relationship that they had with a
lot of people in the West End, meant that either
(22:44):
people didn't talk to them or they didn't approach certain
people who were much more comfortable talking to you.
Speaker 1 (22:50):
It's definitely the case.
Speaker 2 (22:51):
Yeah, that led us to places that I don't think
that law enforcement was able to go potentially.
Speaker 1 (22:57):
Yeah, this community had no love for cops and and yeah,
you know, in the in the initial aftermath of of
the shooting, you know, cops were approaching people for for
(23:18):
for conversations and they got nothing in many cases. And
so it is different when when I come behind and
and try to initiate these conversations. I should also say
that it's different because we're dealing with a twenty year
difference in time. So many people who folks in the
(23:40):
community might be fearful of are either no longer living
or are in prison. Like just that there are just
a lot of things that have changed that allow a
little bit more of the truth to shake loose, so
I can't take like, I don't want to take all
the credit there. There's just the circumstances were such that
(24:04):
it was time for the story to emerge. I really,
I really think it was time for the story to emerge.
Speaker 2 (24:17):
Folks will be at different points in the show maybe
when they encounter this, But why don't you talk a
little bit about where the story is gonna go in
episode six, seven and eight.
Speaker 1 (24:26):
Okay, so we talked about Otis Jackson. We're gonna hear
from Otis Jackson and we're going to consider what he
has to say. You know, it's a it's a complicated
bit of testimony that he's given and he's, uh, he's
(24:50):
a complicated guy, and we're going to make our our
own sense of it. And you know, after that, there's uh,
you know, we've been raising these questions about the FBI
and whether or not they had someone in the community
the night of the shooting, whether or not their informants there,
(25:15):
And we're going to take a very close and very
scary look at that question. And then you know, episode
eight is where we're we're putting it all together, and
we are you know, not only letting you know what
(25:36):
we think happened, but letting you know what we think
it means, and hopefully leaving people with something that will
stick with them and stay with them and you know,
affect the way they think about violence in America.
Speaker 2 (25:58):
So mostly, when do the next episodes of Radical come out?
When will they be available?
Speaker 1 (26:07):
Right? So, the next new episode of Radical will be
available on January second. For Tenderfoot Plus subscribers, you'll be
able to access episode six. For folks who aren't subscribed
to Tenderfoot Plus, you'll be able to access episode five.
Thanks for listening, Hope you're enjoying the show.
Radical is released every Tuesday and brought to you absolutely free.
But if you want add free listening and early access
to next week's episode, subscribe to tenderfoot Plus. For more information,
check out tenderfootplus dot com. Hello Radical listeners, I'm Mosty's
(00:27):
Secret host of the podcast. We're doing something a little
different this week. We want to give you a bit
more insight into the reporting that went into the podcast,
and we want to give you a bit of a
preview of what's coming in the next few episodes. I
sat down with Radical senior producer Johnny Kaufman to talk
about all of this, and we'll get to that conversation
right after the break. This is Mostly's Secret. I'm the
(01:13):
host of Radical, and I'm here with the podcast senior
producer Johnny Kaufman. Hey Johnny, how's it going?
Speaker 2 (01:19):
Hey Mosy. I'm good. It's a little weird to be
talking to you and have our conversation recorded, but I
think this will be fun. I think it'll be good
to sort of go back over things. So yeah, I'm
all right.
Speaker 1 (01:33):
So yeah. So many people are asking me how I
thought of this podcast, and the answer is, I didn't
really think of this podcast, so maybe we should talk
about how you first learned about and Ma'am Jamille Alamine
and his conviction.
Speaker 2 (01:48):
Yeah, so my memory is a little bit fuzzy on this.
I'm not quite sure, but I think I was working
on a story about you know, I'm a reporter in Atlanta,
and you know, I'm obviously a producer too, but I
do some reporting as well. And I was working on
a story about this activist who was pushing for changes
(02:13):
to the laws around voting in Georgia for people convicted
of felonies. He was an African American Muslim guy, grew
up in the community.
Speaker 1 (02:22):
In the West End.
Speaker 2 (02:25):
He grew up in the African American Muslim community in
Buffalo actually, and moved here, I think, like when he
was a teen or in his like early twenties. So
I'm based in Atlanta. I'm a reporter here as well
as a producer, and I was working on this story
(02:45):
about this activist who was trying to get some laws
changed in Georgia around voting for people who are convicted
of felonies. He was an African American Muslim guy knew
the community in Atlanta well, and I can't remember if
it was him or his now wife who was his
(03:06):
fiance at the time, who mentioned email Jimi al Alamin
to me, and I was like, oh, I started looking
into this. I emailed a friend who who I really
admire his reporting, and I was like, Hey, has has
anyone done anything on this? You know, because I didn't
want to like waste my time if someone had already
done a story. So and he was like, no, but
(03:28):
someone should. So with that kind of encouragement, then I
started to dig into it a little bit.
Speaker 1 (03:34):
And this was like a couple of years ago or something.
Speaker 2 (03:36):
Yeah, a couple of years ago. Yeah, so it would
have been twenty twenty one, I think.
Speaker 1 (03:42):
And once you learned about the case, what'd you do
after that?
Speaker 2 (03:46):
So usually what you know, I think a lot of
reporters do you make some initial phone calls. And I
filed a bunch of open records requests to get the
case documents, both from the Atlanta Police Department and because
they initially responded to the shooting in the West End,
and then also from the Fulton County District Attorney because
(04:09):
they were the prosecutors in the case, so they kind
of accumulate a lot of the evidence and incident reports
and potentially interviews with witnesses that kind of thing.
Speaker 1 (04:20):
So you file these requests, do they respond to them
or how do they What type of response do.
Speaker 2 (04:28):
You get from the Fulton County DA, Right, because the
Atlanta Police Department response was great, they were very quick,
they got back to meet, but they only had like
some they only had sort of like the detective's initial file,
which actually, you know, the investigation into this case from
(04:49):
the Atlanta Police Department didn't take that long, right, it
was like a month maybe or something, right before he
was indicted, so that most of the documents were with
the Fulton County d And I mean maybe I got
like an automated response initially, but then it was like
months until I really heard anything, and I had to
continue to like email them and email them and call
(05:14):
and eventually they told me. One they told me that
they didn't have any audio or video recordings, which we're
obviously interested in because this is a podcast. But they
also told me that they or I can't exactly remember
the timeline here, but like there weren't audio and video recordings,
and they also said they weren't going to release any
materials to us because the case was under review by
(05:39):
this entity called the conviction integrity unit, which you know,
we get into later in the in the later episodes
of the podcast, and so they were saying, well, you know,
usually the practice is when when a case is open,
when the investigation is open, you know, you don't release
the evidence because that could potentially interfere with the investigation.
Speaker 1 (05:59):
Right.
Speaker 2 (05:59):
It's reasonable to a certain extent, but you know, personally
as a journalist, and as they talk to more people
here is like, well, this could potentially be a problem
because these conviction integrity units are pretty popular within the
criminal justice world at the moment. Different agencies around the
(06:19):
country are instituting them as a way to review prosecutions
or miscarriages of justice potentially. And it seems problematic that
you could kind of push something into a conviction integrity
unit and then seal it off from the public, because
these are cases that have already played out, right.
Speaker 1 (06:38):
They're in a post conviction phase. The case is essentially closed,
you know, Like when we file public records requests, one
of the main responses that we get if it's not
turned over is this is still an open case, but
at once it's closed, it's supposed to be closed. So
what you're saying is they kind of found this little
area where they reopened it it again from public scrutiny.
Speaker 2 (07:01):
Yeah, I mean it seemed that way because we didn't,
you know, I wasn't getting signals that they were doing
a lot of work looking into it, right, So that
was the concern. And then we got the Georgia First
Amendment Foundation involved, which is an organization here who advocates
for government transparency that kind of thing, and they help
(07:24):
journalists with open records requests, and they definitely were concerned
about this sort of setting a precedent for prosecutors to
close cases and keep them from public scrutiny. So they
got involved, and we pushed more, and eventually the Fulton
County DA did find recordings which some of have already
(07:46):
been included in the episodes that have you know, aired,
and there will be more to come, some of those
in later episodes, and those are this is the first
time that those have been heard by the public, I'm
pretty sure. So we got those recordings and we got
eventually got I would say probably only five percent of
(08:08):
the documents were withheld, probably less than that for like
legal reasons, like if there's personal like medical information or
that kind of thing, you know. And it was it
was wild because actually the documents we felt. We got
a document that had a list I think I sent
(08:29):
this to you. At some point. We got a document
that had a list of the different recordings that the
DA's office said they didn't have. So then I was
able to send that to the DA and be like, look,
this says that these recordings exist, so like, please go
back and look for them again. And eventually they found them.
Speaker 1 (08:45):
Yeah, with public records requests, the more detailed you are
and the more specific you are in your requests, the
better you know.
Speaker 2 (08:52):
And you remember, I mean we didn't get those recordings
until like we had already we were already writing episodes.
Speaker 1 (08:56):
Right yeah, yeah, it was very close to the end,
which actually leads me right into my next question. You know,
I know this. You were wrangling with them for a
long time, uh, trying to get this stuff, you know,
with the help of these First Amendment lawyers. What were
you doing in the meantime?
Speaker 2 (09:15):
Right? So, I you know, I had made some calls, uh,
and was sort of doing some preliminary interviews and and
the first one of the first things I did was
right to this guy. His name is Otis Jackson. Folks
who are listening to the podcast, they won't have heard
his his voice yet, but he's coming in the later episodes.
(09:36):
He has for years been confessing to shooting the deputies
outside the mosque in the West End, the crime for
which Eman Jamil was charged, Uh and convicted. I think
we can say that, yeah, yeah, so yeah, we can
say that. So yeah. So I wrote to him he's
in federal prison, uh, and you know, gave him my
(10:00):
phone number, and eventually he called me. The way it
works is you can't call into federal prison. You have
the calls have to come out to you. So I
was always like looking, you know, when I would get calls,
I can't remember where it said they were coming from,
maybe like Maryland or something. So I knew if I
was getting a call from Maryland that it was probably him.
(10:23):
The calls would only last fifteen minutes, but I tried
as much as they could to answer them, and so
we sort of got to know each other, and eventually
he you know, told me this story that he's been
telling for a long time, and so that was, Yeah,
that was really important to have that, particularly in the
early stages. Because also I don't think anyone else in
(10:46):
the press had really interviewed him ever, especially not yeah,
not audio versions of those interviews.
Speaker 1 (10:52):
Throughout this period, you guys were on the record, and
you were recording these conversations.
Speaker 2 (10:57):
Yeah. Yeah, he agreed to talk on the record. He yeah,
I mean you'll hear youill hear some of those recordings
later in the show. The folks who are listening to
the show will hear them. And you know, he's a
complicated guy, as you might imagine, And those conversations weren't
always easy, but they definitely made me like more interested
(11:21):
in the story and kept, you know, got me to
continue to push on other fronts, like with the documents
and that kind of thing.
Speaker 1 (11:28):
Yeah, did you guys ever get a chance to meet?
Speaker 2 (11:31):
No, no, we did not. We did not get a
chance to meet. We tried that. The process for interviewing
someone in federal prison is like complicated. I had to
read like these different like I don't even know what
you call them, like rules that were created by the
(11:52):
the Federal Bureau of Prisons. They're kind of hard to
find online for how you go about that process. And
you have to like submit the request to the warden,
I think, and then you have to get the person
who's incarcerated to sign on as well. And the problem that,
you know, the trick with like reporting on people who
(12:14):
are incarcerated, is that you don't always know like what's
happening on the on the back end, like within the prison.
So I don't know whatever happened. It didn't work out
for us to interview him in person, But I don't
know if the breakdown was that he ultimately didn't want
to do that for whatever reason, or if the warden
didn't clear it. We never really got to the bottom
(12:34):
of that. But he agreed to the interviews on the
record over the phone, and thankfully the quality was good
enough that we were able to use them.
Speaker 1 (12:42):
So you're having these conversations with Otis Jackson and eventually
you start getting documents back. What kinds of things do
you begin to see?
Speaker 2 (12:51):
So we started to get the documents back, and there
were particularly there were some documents especially that caught my
attention that were about a number of other homicides that
had played out in the West End, that had happened
in the West End in the nineties especially, And we
(13:12):
also saw a lot of stuff in those documents about
the FBI and their involvement in the community, informants that
they had in the community in the nineties and even
around the time of the shooting at the mosque, and
so that obviously raised a lot of questions and was
(13:36):
very interesting, And so that was sort of what that
opened up another area of reporting in the story that
sort of as you know, folks will hear that plays
out a lot in episodes seven and eight, especially.
Speaker 1 (13:51):
Okay, so we're gonna take a quick break here and
then we'll be back and Johnny's gonna ask me a
few questions and we'll talk more about what's coming up
the show.
Speaker 2 (14:22):
I am actually curious to know, MOSSI like, when my
boss at Campside Media, his name is Matt Cherr, when
he first talked to you about this project, Like, what
was your initial reaction, Like did you talk about it
with your family, was it something that you were thinking
about a lot, or like did you sort of immediately
(14:45):
know what you were going to do when you heard
about the project.
Speaker 1 (14:47):
Yeah, Matt told me that Campside was looking for a host,
and I think my initial response was kind of like
disbelief at the degree to which Campside's need for a
host aligned with my experience is a little bit creepy.
So there's this show about Jamil Lamine based in Atlanta
(15:12):
that involves the criminal legal system with a potential wrongful conviction.
So I'm like, Okay, I'm from Atlanta. Matt didn't know this.
I don't think Matt knew this. I'm from Atlanta. I've
done a wrongful conviction investigation before. I grew up knowing
about Jamiel Lamine. And my father is a defense lawyer
(15:36):
who knows the people in the in the in the
defense bar there. So I was like, first of all,
if you're looking for somebody, you're not going to find
anybody that checks those boxes. So I was like, it
was kind of weird. And then you know, like I'm
thinking about this. I started to think more, in particular
about this case and also about the reputation of Jamil
(15:59):
Elamina of his community, and I knew that there were
people who were very devoted to him and who believed
very much in his innocence and who you know, would
fight for him in various ways. And so I there
(16:19):
was some trepidation on my part about whether I even
wanted to get involved, and also about what it would mean.
So I was drawn by a potential wrongful conviction case
because there's a you know, a great impact that a
journalist gonna have there. But if he was innocent, I
(16:39):
didn't want to kind of just go doing a crime
story just for the sake of a crime story. So,
you know, after after Matt and I had that conversation,
I talked with my family about, you know, what it
might mean for me to do this type of project
because my family is still in Atlanta and still has
a strong connections and meaningful connections to a lot of
(17:03):
folks in this community that the story deals with. And
so there are a series of conversations there and after,
you know, making sure that they were comfortable with it,
and finding that I was comfortable with it, I told
Matt that I was ready ready to move on. Move
on with you guys.
Speaker 2 (17:23):
Yeah, we're thankful that that worked out. Talk a little
bit about how like, because a lot of people in
the community, right outside of your family, who who that
story touches on, or who have connections to you, man, Jamil,
they weren't necessarily, you know, chomping at the bit to talk.
(17:46):
So how were you able to to get people to
you know, sit down for either for interviews for the
show or even to like talk to you off the
record just for background information.
Speaker 1 (17:58):
Yeah, you know, a lot of it was it was
trust building essentially. There was kind of a baseline level
of trust that was there just because of the family
that I come from, and just because of my family's
(18:20):
proximity to this community, you know, the community of African
American Muslims in Atlanta. There are a number of masjids
or mosques, but still everyone knows everyone. So and also
my name is weird, you know, and everyone knows the secrets.
(18:44):
So that meant that people would at least take my calls.
And also I should say, you know, you had done
some legwork when I came on, and some people had
already heard from you and were impressed with your rigor
and with your yeah determination, and so at that point
(19:05):
they knew that this was a serious project who had
someone on it who they could potentially trust. And then
it began. It began about So that's like that gets
you in the door for an off the record conversation.
You know, you can have these preliminary, preliminary conversations with
people they know you, uh, and they'll tell you things,
(19:27):
but maybe they don't want to go. Maybe they don't
want to go on the record. And so that happened
quite a bit, and then it becomes about, you know,
what we need for the show. Who we returned to
to ask if they might actually speak to us on
the record? Luck, you know, somebody mentioned someone else who
(19:51):
happens to want to talk. All these things kind of
come into play, and you know, eventually you have a
you have what you need. We still got a lot
of people who said no, a lot of people who
said no. Most of the law enforcement people said no,
a lot of people from the community said no. But
we had what we needed. And the conversations that we
got were intimate and heartfelt. You know.
Speaker 2 (20:15):
So then those conversations, how do you think, both off
the record and the interviews that we did, how do
you think that sort of added to what we were
already seeing in the documents that we had.
Speaker 1 (20:27):
I think it added a lot. And here I'm being
careful because I want people to make it to the
end of this show. But you know, in the documents,
particularly in the stuff in the court documents from the trial,
we saw a lot of there are a lot of
(20:49):
things that were questionable about the prosecution and the conviction,
the eyewitness testimony, the ballistics evidence, other types of evidence
that was presented at a trial. There were a lot of
things there that that that raised some doubt about the
conviction and and all these years later. It is difficult.
(21:15):
I mean, it's difficult regardless, but it's just difficult to
kind of land one way or the other with that
type of evidence. If you were not I don't know.
If there's kind of like a pile of evidence on
one side and a pile of evidence on the other,
you could really kind of get in this middle zone
of not knowing what to think.
Speaker 2 (21:34):
But I think especially with with email Jamil, where there's
like there's such strong feelings on both sides exactly.
Speaker 1 (21:42):
Yeah, it's a very polarizing figure. But I think the
reason that we were able to draw a conclusion in
this show, and we do draw a conclusion in this
in this show, is because we got close to people
who had a sense of things, who were around and
(22:05):
that puts those documents in a different light. And it
was it was the people who we talked to were
probably more persuasive to me than anything.
Speaker 2 (22:22):
And I think you also brought a trust, like at
a level that folks, a lot of folks that we
talked to like wouldn't have had for law enforcement. And
so law enforcement because of the relationship that they that
you know, not good relationship that they had with a
lot of people in the West End, meant that either
(22:44):
people didn't talk to them or they didn't approach certain
people who were much more comfortable talking to you.
Speaker 1 (22:50):
It's definitely the case.
Speaker 2 (22:51):
Yeah, that led us to places that I don't think
that law enforcement was able to go potentially.
Speaker 1 (22:57):
Yeah, this community had no love for cops and and yeah,
you know, in the in the initial aftermath of of
the shooting, you know, cops were approaching people for for
(23:18):
for conversations and they got nothing in many cases. And
so it is different when when I come behind and
and try to initiate these conversations. I should also say
that it's different because we're dealing with a twenty year
difference in time. So many people who folks in the
(23:40):
community might be fearful of are either no longer living
or are in prison. Like just that there are just
a lot of things that have changed that allow a
little bit more of the truth to shake loose, so
I can't take like, I don't want to take all
the credit there. There's just the circumstances were such that
(24:04):
it was time for the story to emerge. I really,
I really think it was time for the story to emerge.
Speaker 2 (24:17):
Folks will be at different points in the show maybe
when they encounter this, But why don't you talk a
little bit about where the story is gonna go in
episode six, seven and eight.
Speaker 1 (24:26):
Okay, so we talked about Otis Jackson. We're gonna hear
from Otis Jackson and we're going to consider what he
has to say. You know, it's a it's a complicated
bit of testimony that he's given and he's, uh, he's
(24:50):
a complicated guy, and we're going to make our our
own sense of it. And you know, after that, there's uh,
you know, we've been raising these questions about the FBI
and whether or not they had someone in the community
the night of the shooting, whether or not their informants there,
(25:15):
And we're going to take a very close and very
scary look at that question. And then you know, episode
eight is where we're we're putting it all together, and
we are you know, not only letting you know what
(25:36):
we think happened, but letting you know what we think
it means, and hopefully leaving people with something that will
stick with them and stay with them and you know,
affect the way they think about violence in America.
Speaker 2 (25:58):
So mostly, when do the next episodes of Radical come out?
When will they be available?
Speaker 1 (26:07):
Right? So, the next new episode of Radical will be
available on January second. For Tenderfoot Plus subscribers, you'll be
able to access episode six. For folks who aren't subscribed
to Tenderfoot Plus, you'll be able to access episode five.
Thanks for listening, Hope you're enjoying the show.
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