This special edition of Wrongful Conviction was recorded at the 2017 Innocence Network Conference in San Diego, CA, where 170 exonerees and 750 members of the innocence movement gathered to honor newly freed people and learn about the latest developments in freeing the wrongfully convicted. Part One features interviews with Innocence Project Executive Director Maddy DeLone and exonerees Floyd Bledsoe and Cornelius Dupree. Floyd Bledsoe was exonerated in 2015 after 15 years in prison for a murder his brother committed. Since his release, Floyd has been a fierce advocate for mandatory recording of interrogations among other reforms in Kansas. Cornelius Dupree was exonerated in 2011, after spending more than 30 years in prison for a rape and robbery he didn’t commit. Cornelius serves as the ambassador to all of the new exonerees at the Innocence Network Conferences.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:05):
With the police banging on the door open up. The
choice to be in that lineup was the last choice
I made as a free man. A year later, I
ended up writing the system. I'm going to be one
of those people who everyone in the world is going
to think as a monster or suspect as a monster
for the rest of my life, and I'm just gonna
have to come to peace with that. Somebody was able
(00:28):
to look at my picture in a database and say
that I was somewhere where I definitely wasn't. I overheard
three of the jailer's discussing what part they might have
to play in my hanging. They had been told that
two prison officers would have to participate in my execution,
and I walked back inside that prison for the last time.
(00:48):
All hell broke loose. But this weekend we're recording from
sunny San Diego at the Innocence Network Conference, and because
we have so many exonorees together, we'll be doing two
(01:08):
shorter interviews with two incredible exonorees who will talk about
what this conference means to them, Floyd Ledso and Cornelius Dupree.
But let's start with Maddie Delone, the executive director of
the Innocence Project, who will explain how this conference came
into existence and what it's all about. Maddie alone, Maddie, welcome,
Thanks Jason. Great to be here. Maddie is a force
(01:29):
of nature. She has spent her entire life in criminal
justice reform, fair to say, and everything from working inside
of prisons to really building and running what is the
organization at the forefront of the innocence movement, epicenter, whatever
you wanna call it. And we're here today at the
Innocence Network conference in San Diego, which is an out
(01:52):
of this world's extraordinary event. And Maddie, you and I
go back to the beginning of this together and your
memories better than mine. So I wanted to talk to
you about how this all started and also what it
means to be here, not only for you and the staff,
but for the exonores. Wow, that's a lot, Jason. So
(02:12):
the Innocence Projects started about twenty five years ago as
a small clinic at Cardozo Law School with Barry and
Peter running the show, working with students, other law professors
and really understanding the power of the science to get
people out of prison. That DNA technology was pretty new
in the criminal justice system. Pretty quickly they realized how
(02:33):
many innocent people there were and how much work it
was going to take to get people out of prison
across the country, and they began to find law professors
really at other universities across the country to do this work.
So the sort of next projects in the network were formed.
We the Innocence Project in ninety two. There was a
(02:54):
project in ninety four. I just heard that the Innocence
Project Northwest settle Of rated their twentieth anniversary this year.
So those are among the first projects, and pretty quickly
people realized they needed to have a way to come
together and to begin to share what they were learning
and figure it out. You have to remember that while
we have fifty post conviction DNA laws right now, so
(03:16):
for people for whom DNA can prove innocence, you now
have a way to get back into court. That wasn't
true when this all started. So they had to figure
out how do you get back into court when there's
no mechanism, and they use the press, and they use persuasion,
and more and more they could use as they began
exonerating people, the power of those stories and the experiences
of the exonorees. I think the first network conference was
(03:40):
in two thousand, so it's seventeen years later, and this
is the sixteenth conference. At that first conference there were
maybe seventy five or eighty people. I wasn't there, but
Barry and Peter were there, and a number of the
people who are still in this work today. And with
each conference the conference grew, new projects started, more people
(04:02):
were exonerated, the exonorees began to come to the conferences,
and bigger and bigger numbers. We began to work. You
began to work to help pay for people to get there,
to put them up in hotels, people who had no resources.
These are people from all over the country and even
other parts of the world as well. That's right. We
had an amazing conference at the Ohio Innocence Project hosted
(04:24):
in two thousand and eleven, I think, where we invited
Mark Godsey, who was the Ohio Innocence Project director, really
invited people from around the world who were doing this
work to come, and they brought exonorees from Japan and
Italy and other places. So it has grown from probably
in two thousand, maybe eight or nine exonerated people, and
(04:47):
today in San Diego they're almost two hundred. Yeah, it's amazing.
I mean last night we we posted a graphic on
the screen with the total number of years served, including
two hundred twenty two years served on death row. And
it's so extraordinary being here and being a part of
it and just sort of experiencing the energy, the positive
(05:07):
energy that's developed or that's generated i should say, from
the axonres being around each other, because not unlike what
I understand to be the case with POW's Prison of War,
no one can understand what they've been through except for
each other, as much as we try and as much
as we we want to help, and so it's really
been an extraordinary journey to watch them heal. And it's
(05:28):
obviously a very long, it's a it's a it's a
number ending journey. But progress is being made in this
building as we speak, and that's the remarkable thing to
be a part of. Can I just tell you a
story I just heard from one of the directors of
one of the projects this morning. They have a client
who got out of prison after thirty two years and
got out maybe four or five months ago, came to
the conference last night, as you were saying, there was
(05:49):
an introduction of all of the exonure ees, including forty
seven axon Ares who had never been here before. And
at the end of that presentation and the whole crowd
is standing and cheering and crying and they're hugging each
other on stage. Her client walked down the stairs from
the stage and said to her, this is the first
time I felt free. I mean, it's it's heavy, and
(06:12):
it's magical. I mean, there's no other word to explain it.
And yeah, it's so great because every time one of
them gets up and the crowd erupts, nobody tells anybody
to erupt, and nobody tells anybody to stand, but standing
ovation every time, and they're really among their peers, and
they're among people who love them and care about them
as we do. So it's a it's just an awesome thing.
What is that for the Innocence Project? I mean, how
(06:34):
have you been able to focus the staff who traditionally
we're just focused on the legal stuff. How are you
able to build this into this sort of the lack
of better where the DNA of the Innocence Project one
thing we had, you know, as we got more and
more people out. About ten years ago, we actually made
the decision with our board that you're on to hire
a social worker, and we now have two social workers
(06:56):
who work in the office and each of them works
on cases as people are about to come home, and
then is a person for them to go to and
talk to over the course of you know, intensively, probably
the first year, but for some people they're still talking
often ten years later. We also have developed a fund
for Innocence Project exonorees who don't have resources or have
(07:18):
family without resources when they come out, so that we
can help pay for rent or medical care that's not
covered under state insurance schemes, or whatever the case may be.
And I think we're trying to get I know, we're
trying to get better and better at that every year,
and we're learning more and more from the exonorees themselves
about what it takes. And one of the things I
(07:38):
think it takes, and you talked about it at the beginning,
is bringing them together with each other more often. They
really are the people who are best able to help
each other heal. And we're realizing the importance of their
families and the importance of helping find support for their
family members, because like the Exonorees, the family members worked
for twelve years, for teen years, twenty years, thirty years
(08:01):
when they stuck with them. They work to help get
somebody out. And if you've been on that course of
getting yourself out or helping someone else get out for
twenty years and then they're out, you have to find
the next course of purpose. And I think there's hope
for many people that it will just be glorious and
perfect and they'll be free. It's the thing they worked
at for so long. But life on the outside is hard,
(08:24):
and the first question people want to know is do
they get compensation when they get out? And their flabber
gas to find out that not only are there i
think twenty states that don't have conversation statues at all,
but also even if you are entitled the conversation, it
can take many years to get it. So you're just
in the twilight zone. Now you're out and trying to
figure out how to live with nothing, and it's an
(08:47):
incredible series of challenges. Let's just talk for a moment,
Mattie about the strategic litigation aspect of our work, all right,
So we have two programs, and the Strategic Litigation program
is a pretty new program for the last five years,
although I like to think that the Instance Project has
been doing it and maybe a less focused and concentrated
way forever. But the Strategic Litigation Unit, which was founded
(09:09):
five years ago by that your generosity and that of
your family, run by Christopher Fabricant, whose brilliant lawyer, really
works on getting the courts to understand their role as
a gatekeeper of bad evidence going into cases. And so
the Strategic Litigation Unit takes cases around the country where
(09:31):
there is bad forensic science is trying to be introduced
or eyewitness identification procedures that were done in a way
that's not reliable and not likely to give you the
best idea. In fact, the DNA cases have had an
eyewitness identification which is erroneous. So we know how important
it is to get the idea procedures right, and our
(09:53):
team finds cases to teach courts about how to vet
evidence and to keep bad evidence out. If we can
keep bad evidence out of these cases in the first place,
then you'll never have people being wrongly convicted and until
and lessen until the police and prosecutors and the courts
understand that at the front end and begin to implement
procedures and keep the evidence out of court. We're going
(10:15):
to continue to replicate the problems we have with wrongful
conviction and to put more people in. And you said
it yourself, it takes forever to get them out. If
somebody goes in and they exhaust their state appeals eight
years later and then they write to us and then
we take their case and then we litigate the case
for ten or twelve or fifteen years. Sometimes heard someone
(10:36):
today who has a case that they picked up in
it's seen the person was just freed. That's an entire life.
So we have to stop it at the front end,
and that's what the Strategic Litigation Unit tries to do.
The Joseph Flam Special Counsel has done amazing work in
the courts to try to protect people from having bad
evidence admitted in the first place in the courts. And
(10:59):
that's what it's going to take to really change the system. Yeah,
and I know that my dad, if he were here,
would be thrilled to see the quality of the work
that's being done in his name. He was a supporter
of the instance, project and Scatton of course has donated
tens of thousands of billions and millions and millions of
dollars worth of legal brilliant legal talent and support to
the project, and they still do to this day. Recently,
(11:21):
Keith Allen Harward was freed after thirty three years in
prison in Virginia with the help of the pro bono
department at Scatton in d C. Run by Don Salzman.
So yeah, it just continues. Unfortunately, our work will never end.
We'd love to put ourselves out of business, but unfortunately
that's not going to happen in our lifetimes. Maddie Delone,
it's a pleasure to have you on the podcast today
(11:42):
and I really appreciate you stopping by and dropping some knowledge.
Thank you, Jason, great to be here. Keep up the
great work. So that was a great introduction to the
conference from my friend and partner in Fighting Injustice, Maddie Delone.
(12:05):
Let's continue with the one and only Floyd bled Cell
after spending sixteen years behind bars for a murder his
brother committed in year old Camille Arfman went missing after
getting off the bus from school. Bledsoe's older brother Tom
confessed several times to the murder and led police to
her body. But several days later, Tom Bledsoe changed his story,
(12:27):
pinning the murder on Floyd. New DNA evidence in October
of two thousand and fifteen implicated Tom bled so Just
over a month ago, Floyd Bledsoe's murder conviction was overturned.
Law enforcement a districtcord agree he was an innocent man.
Floyd bled Cell, Welcome to the show. Thank you. Floyd
as an exonoree from Kansas who served sixteen years sixteen
(12:50):
years and you out there listening had just as much
to do with it as he did, that's fair to say.
And his attorney, Alice Craig is here. Alice, welcome, thank you,
thanks for being here. So we're here at the Innocence
Network conference in San Diego. Have you been to San
Diego for this is a very beautiful city. Yeah, it's
different than Kansas, very different than Kansas, and no ocean.
(13:14):
I just can't even So your case in a nutshell
revolved around this rape and murder, and it's so bizarre
because this one came with instructions right tragically, your brother
was the culprit. And what makes this so insane? Is
that he went, he confessed to a religious figure, was
(13:36):
a pastor or something, and then he confessed to the police,
and he provided the murder weapon, told him where to
find the body, took him to the boy, took him
to the body. Right, So you're probably having the same
reaction I was, which was okay, so thanks for telling us,
and here's your one way ticket to prison, right, I mean,
but that's not what happened. Can you walk us through
(13:59):
how you ended up being charged for a crime that
your brother had not only clearly committed, but had confessed
to in every conceivable way, right, and he had confessed
to multiple times, multiple people had heard him basically what happened.
On November seven, At about ten o'clock that evening, he
went to the police station, made a phone call to
the pastor of the church, said, Hey, this is Tom.
(14:23):
I'm sorry. I lied to you. I know where she is.
I'm gonna turn myself in. He says, I wish I
could have turned back to hands of time, but I can't.
And then he said, please help my parents through this,
and then he hung up called our father and then
called Jim back again and left basically the same message,
(14:43):
saying that he wished he hadn't done it. I wish
he could turn back to hands of time. But he
made his choice. He's going to pay for it for
the rest of his life, and that mom and dad
were mad at him, and he was turning himself in.
He asked the church to forgive him, God to forgive him,
and they took him to get in turn Ernie. Then
the attorney went to the police department. His attorney told
(15:04):
him that Tom knows where the girl is, and then
the police went with him to where the body was.
He showed him. The detectives testified at trial that there
he was so well concealed, only the true perpetrator wouldn't
know him. Yeah, it wasn't. It wasn't a lucky guess. No, no.
And it was the middle of the night, dark and
(15:25):
he had just bought the gun, and he had just
bought the gun. So much stuff. This was literally the
easiest case in the history of criminal justice for the authorities. Alice,
would you disagree with that? No? I wouldn't. I mean,
this was it like, I mean, it's gift wrapped right.
They charged him with murder that Monday. Three or four
days later, he decides he doesn't like jail and says
(15:46):
he didn't do it, that his brother did it, which
was me. So the police say were like, well, how
did you know all this stuff? He said, well, he
confessed to me on the side of the road. Detective
Crinos says, okay, that's plausible and says when Tom says
to thirty in the afternoon, Randy says, are you sure?
And this is all said in my trial. Randy says
(16:09):
are you sure, and Tom says, yep, I'm positive had
to be two thirty. Randy told admitted in trial that
he told Tom that he was lying and Tom said, no,
I'm not. He goes, yeah, you are. You want to
know how I know you're lying? He was like, how
he said Floyd was sitting in my patrol car to
thirty in the afternoon and Tom said, well, it must
have been earlier. Randy admitted to giving Tom facts to
(16:31):
make his story more believable. At my trial. The whole
thing is just like the actually mean and and there's
so much I mean. Basically it comes down to people
getting tunnel vision, people making mistakes, poor detective work, stuff
that should have been investigated they didn't look at. And
(16:54):
then you throw Tom's defense attorney, who you know, his
job is to get his client off and he means
necessary within the law, supposedly, And so I don't think
we know the true reason why everything went the way
he did. But ultimately, with his attorneys and help and
(17:15):
poor investigation, things flipped. They arrested me, they claim on November,
but when they interviewed me on November eleventh, I believe
it was twelve somewhere around and there they had me
in a holding cell, wouldn't let me leave. They told
my wife or my ex wife, but my wife then
(17:36):
that they didn't know where I was. They said he
got in the car and left. When she said, well,
his car's out front, they told her he left. We
don't know where he went. I was in there holding cell.
The whole thing is totally you know, for four days,
nobody knew where I was except them, and then finally,
after the press got ahold of it, then they charged
(17:57):
me with my first scarammer and then I went to trial,
had poor representation and got found guilty. The tip peak
at Capital Journal interviewed an individual who was on the
jury member and he said, we didn't know who did it,
but this was our opportunity to make somebody pay. I
(18:18):
guess we made a mistake. Sixteen years that's a mistake.
I guess we'm interesting. We can just have somebody pay.
Just picked somebody out of phone book and just you know,
I mean in this case, it was just you know, Alice,
what a crazy turn of events. I mean, ultimately Floyd
was exonerated, right, and Alice, how did the exoneration come about? So?
(18:38):
Floyd's case is one of those cases that I think
every lawyer who looked at it was really interested in
and wanted to help. None of us were going to
let go of it. My clinic at k Law School,
the Innocence Project there, we took his case on. We
probably started working on your case in two thousand and
five and went to federal court. And the interesting thing
(19:02):
with the federal habeas that we did is that the
federal district judge when we filed our habeas actually ruled
in Floyd's favor and issued an opinion that essentially said
Floyd was innocent and this conviction couldn't stand. Once he
did that, Floyd said, well, can I be released? And
I guess so we asked the federal court to release
(19:24):
him while the state appealed, and they did so. Floyd
was actually out for a year. That was probably the
nine months that was probably the hardest thing for us.
The state appealed this case to the Tent Circuit. I
remember when we were about to argue in the Tent Circuit.
I was talking to the state's attorney before we walked
(19:45):
up to the podium, and he said to me, we
don't think Floyd did it, but we have to protect
our jury verdict. Okay, wow, let's just think about that
for a second. We don't think he did it, but
with the jury verdict is more important than justice or
one person's for at them and liberty and all that.
The pursuit of happened, All that stuff is all out
the window because we need to protect our jury art
(20:05):
because it's a sort of quaint. Well, actually, what gets
worse is we lost in the Tent Circuit because of
the standard of review, and the Tent Circuit said we're
not going to overturn this Kansas State courts and so
we lost, and they reversed the federal district judge and
I had to call Floyd and tell me had to
(20:26):
go back to prison. But then you got them out.
We're sitting here. So so at that point in time,
we filed for DNA testing, and one of our concerns
was that the investigation that was originally done, and I
think it goes back to what you said at the
very beginning that this seemed to be a slam dunk case.
So a lot of investigation that should have been done
wasn't done. And our biggest concern, I think, was whether
(20:51):
or not there'd be evidence to test. That was the
largest concern we had, and they actually told me over
and over again. They were like, look, we can't go
back and fix bad detective work. You can't because we're
talking at that time. It was twelve years twelve years later.
You know, it's not like you can just walk back
even a few months and see everything because a lot
(21:13):
of changes in twelve years. And by the way, and
there's no way to tell this story in short of
a time as we have here because it's too twisted.
But on top of everything else, we can't leave out
a couple of important details. One is that your dad
got involved. At the trial, he testified in favor of
your brother, saying that he you know, he gave him
an alibi. He created all kinds of phony alibis and
(21:34):
stuff like that, which is so it's like something out
of Shakespeare, right, or a Greek tragedy. We find out
later that he was actually protecting himself because he helped
with covering up and disposing of the body and all
that stuff, and he didn't want, you know, he didn't
want to go to jail. Well, when we pulled the
d n A, that's when we've discovered obviously one of
the motives for him to wanting to cover for Tom
(21:58):
so hard right, and the DNA preu conclusively that not
only weren't you the culprit, but that in fact the perpetrator,
but in fact it was your brother, and that your
dad's DNA was found on her socks, on the victim socks.
Because this theory there is that he helped to drag her.
It sounds grotesque to the grave side or whatever, and
of course that's a crime as well. In protecting himself,
(22:19):
he managed to flip the script and get his innocent
son sentenced for murder while his guilty son stayed out.
And then to wrap up the crazy, right, as if
all this wasn't crazy enough, he killed himself. He did
kill himself, right, and he left three suicide notes in
which he said, in case anybody wasn't listening the first time,
(22:40):
he said it again, that he did it, that you didn't,
that he was the you know, the sole perpetrator, and
that he assumed an innocent person to prison his own brother,
who's sitting here with me right now. So we here
at the Instance Network conference in San Diego, a weekend
of healing and hope and strength, and and you are
a shine example of all of those things. I mean,
(23:01):
if you could see and meet Floyd, you know, he's
just sort of I mean, you never know. You know,
he looks like a guy who won the damn lottery,
you know what I mean. And so that's the way
he carries himself, which always, I mean all respect to you.
I I'm always amazed at the joy and grace that
the Axonorees exhibit. And you're as good of an example
(23:22):
as anyone could be. So let's talk about how you
got from there to here, right, because you come out
of prison. But it ain't so easy after that, is it. No?
You know, when an axonary comes out of prison, they
don't have much, if anything, at all. Kansas does not
have any compensation laws. I'll speak for Kansas because that's
(23:42):
what I know. After sixteen years, you make a dollar
five a day, and that's only if you work the job.
The days you don't work, you don't get paid dollar
five a day, you know, and most and less one
more time and no conversation laws and no compensation right,
one of the twenty states that has. And that's only
five days for eight hours. Put that on a credit report,
(24:05):
you know, almost your last jof hey, dollar five a day,
five days a week. It sounds a lot like five
a week, you know, exactly a week, No, not exactly.
And so when we come out, you know, the clothes
that you see, you know, when I was coming out
of the Jefferson County Courthouse, the final shirt of jeans
(24:26):
and the shoes that was bought by my attorneys. I
had an aunt and an uncle and a few family members,
but my aunt and uncle stuck by me for the
whole sixteen years. And let's not leave out of this
your kids, right, because when you went in and they
became victims. I had two boys and a wife. She
got divorced because obviously, you know it was her sister
in or. It was her sister, and she had the
(24:48):
police and the county attorney was telling her all this stuff,
lying to her, you know, lying to the family. She
took my kids from me, failed to have my rights removed.
The last time I saw my kids prior to my
release was November twelve, at one in the afternoon. I
gave Cody, who was two and a half at that time,
(25:11):
and Christian, who was nine months I kissing a hug
and said I'll be back in a couple of hours.
And I never came back. And then for sixteen years
I didn't see him. You know, I wrote letters, you know,
I had a nice stack of letters wrote to him
when I first started. Every day, every day I'd right
(25:34):
and say I'm coming out. I'll be homesick on their birthday, Christmas,
everything you tried not to lose hope, and ultimately, after
a while, I gave up variety because I had no
(25:57):
place to send the letters, nobody to read to the boys,
to tell him, hey, I love you, I'm thinking of
I haven't forgotten for sixteen years. I never once forgot
my kids. And I got a lot of friends that
that are still in prison. Most of them are rightfully there.
And I remember once right before I got released for
(26:20):
that short time in two thousand eight. You know, he
was like, Floyd, do you ever think you you'll ever
be able to see your kids? And I said, well,
someday I'll be able to see him. Most people were like,
you're crazy, You're crazy, You're never going to get out.
You keep saying the same thing week after week. And
(26:41):
finally in two thousand sixteen, in April, I saw my kids.
What was that like? Well, they're much taller. Cody's six
almost six two and Christians five eleven. Wow, because you're
not at tall man, No, I'm they're towering over you. Yeah,
(27:02):
you know, but you left them as these little babies,
and now you're looking up at him. And you know what,
there's no no two people on this or that I'd
rather look up to than those two boys. And they're
doing good now in spite of this terrible childhood that
they had to endure without their dad and with this
being fed these lies, and believing that their dad was
(27:25):
a child rapist and a murderer. Right, I mean, what
a way to grow up that is. So somehow or other,
you persevered in prison even with this added burden of
not being able to contact your kids. And you can see,
I mean, I'm I'm looking in your eyes right now,
and the pain is it, it's on, it's unreal. And
(27:45):
as a parent, and I'm sure a lot of people
that are out there listening have kids, I'm sure you can,
you know, try to imagine what that would be like,
but we can't imagine. And that's what's so powerful about
this conference. I believe it's being able to get people
together who have had similar experiences and you would know
better that. Last year was my first conference in San Antonio.
I'd been out twelve weeks. Twelve weeks, and you know,
(28:10):
I show up here and you're just starstruck because in
Kansas you feel like you're all alone. But then you
get here. Last year there was a hundred and fifty
three as honorees that had been in the same boat.
I remember sitting sitting down and eating with Amanda Knox
and Ryan Ferguson and finally, you don't have to explain
(28:30):
how you feel because they already know. You don't have
to answer all the questions of well, what do you
mean by that? It don't even have to be spoken
because we've been through the same or the similar ways.
We've all learned how to cope and you learn how
to persevere through it. And there's so much healing, so
(28:54):
much renewal here. I've been looking forward to it since
when I got back at to Kansas City last year,
you know, I was looking forward to the next one
because you learn that there's people just like you. Yeah, Unfortunately,
there's thousands of them, and there's then there's tens. There
are hundreds of thousands that are still in the numbers
(29:15):
are truly mind boggling. Yeah. For me, it's just an
honor and a privilege to be here and be amongst
you and the you know, and the other men and
women who have so overcome such impossible challenges and odds
and tragedies and trauma. To be here and be speaking
for the people who are still in really when you
think about it, right, and and for each other and
(29:37):
standing up for each other like you do. And that's
some of the stuff that I do now, is I
go to the Kansas Legislature and try to get the
LAWSS change to ensure that it doesn't happen. You know,
I've spoke on the on the Mandatory Recording Act for Kansas,
the recording of interrogation. That's one of the biggest causes
was you would think that if you have somebody can
(30:00):
tessing that you would record it right smart to me,
Jefferson County did not. They did not do any recordings
of Tom until November. It just doesn't make any sense.
Everybody else they recorded right off the bat. It's it's
just it's like Alison's lends, just like through the looking glass.
It's just backwards and upside down and inside. Nothing. Nothing
(30:21):
that they did make any sense. And I will say
for myself, and I think I'm speaking for nineties some
percent of people that are listening that if we weren't
hearing this from your mouth, the story just you know,
if I tell this story to someone, they're gonna go,
no, no no, no, You've got something wrong there, because it
doesn't work like that. It can't work like that. I mean, Alice,
you must have the same feeling like it's just totally
(30:44):
fucking bizarre. This case is very bizarre, but it's not
the only one. And I think that's the sad truth
of it is. Floyd and I have been working together
for so long, but there's other people that we're going
to continue to as a team try and get out
We all have of the shared responsibility, and I think
everyone who's listening hopefully will feel the same sense and
(31:06):
want to get involved and help, because you can't be
around somebody like you, Floyd and not feel like Jesus,
that could have been me, because it really could have
been any of us. Right, You're just a regular guy.
You weren't some career criminal or some sinister like dark
force of just a regular guy going about your life
with a couple of young kids in the middle of America.
You know, just a regular guy. I was working for dairy,
(31:29):
just trying to raise my kids on the farm. Right,
and then and then this, right, And it's just so
weird how when the forces of justice they start to
churn and they just grind people up, and it's only
a miracle that somebody like you can actually survive this
ordeal and come out at one piece with a smile
on your face. I see how you light up when
you're talking about your kids. So now they're they're twenty
(31:51):
and eighteen and they're telling up to be a basketball
players and they're doing good. You want to talk about
that a little bit. Go ahead. He's just enlisted in
the army. He's going in intelligence. He just finished basic training.
He's on his way to go for extended training for intelligence.
Christian is a senior in high school. He'll be graduating
(32:13):
in May, going to firefighter school. Amazing. So you gott
a you got a soldier and a fireman and are
you close to the kids now? Yes. I try to
get up there at least once a month to see him.
Cody will be a little harder because now he's out here,
but we stay in contact. Now. I do animal portraits,
painting and stuff like that. Floyd learned painting. Where do
(32:33):
people see that actually exhibiting right now at the Johnson
County Public Library? Yes? Um, and it'll be on exhibit
till May. But is there a website people can go
if they want to just see it because a lot
of people can't get to that tonight. Yeah, you know,
I hope they have it up here pretty quick. You
let us know when you do it, we'll we'll put
it on our site and people can be able to
find the Floyd Bloeds are. Maybe you'll turn out to
(32:55):
be the next who knows Home or Winslow or something
like that, you know. And then I got married November
nine of last year. Congratulation. She has a seventeen month
old So I have a step son that's seventeen months Blake,
and he's he's a ball. So it's actually kind of
a full circle, now, isn't it. Right Now you got
your kids back. You actually have a young son who's
(33:18):
really almost about the same age as one of your
kids was when you went in. So it's really a redo, right.
I mean, what a difference to see somebody like you
who would have been literally rotting and suffering in prison
for the rest of your life if not for the
fact that good people like Alice and others that donate
(33:39):
almost all of their time to the cause had come
to the rescue and had ultimately proven that what should
have been obvious to the authorities all along and really
was obvious, you know. And I remember just before we
filed for the d n A, I would call Alice
and Jean and Beth. They give me the answer. We
(34:00):
don't know what we're going to do, but we'll figure
out something. It was like we hit this big old
stone wall. And I wrote in the in the thank
you card to the d NA KU, and I said,
when you're instructors and your students hitting the stone wall,
they didn't give up and turn around. They picked up
the chisel, they picked up the hammer, and they made away.
(34:21):
And that's exactly what they did. They gave me my
life back. Yeah, they don't make it easy for anyone
to get out of print. I mean, even with extremely
talented attorneys and and advocates, which you were in that
sense lucky to have, because a lot of people don't
even have that, it's still almost impossible task because they
just keep putting up roadblox because, like you said, Alsaide,
they want to protect the jury verdict or the wrongful
(34:43):
prosecution or the wrong whatever the hell it. And it's
so weird. It's like why why why why? No? This
is simple, right, everybody needs to know who really did it.
It's hard to convince people. Ben. When we filed the
DNA reports in Floyd's case, the investigators for Jefferson County
(35:06):
that were reinvestigating it said, well, this doesn't mean Floyd
didn't do it or wasn't involved, And it wasn't really
until Tom committed suicide that they were convinced that was
the only thing that did it. We hadn't had that
would probably still be litigating it. Sounds like if you
would have had pictures and photographs of the crime taking
place and a time stamped video of you being somewhere
(35:29):
else doing something else, they still would have went, well, yeah,
they would have come up with it because we've seen that.
I mean, they come up with theories that are just
a first grader would go that don't make any sense,
but they do, and they did, and you're the living
proof of it. But now you're here, so San Diego,
what are you gonna do? Well, now you're saying going surfing?
What you kans? I've always wanted to write a jet ski,
(35:52):
so I'm trying to convince people to write a jet
ski with me. But they're not really hip because they're like,
it's kind of cold in the morning, but hey, it's
a little hyperthermia. You know it's gonna wear off eventually,
you know, But well we're gonna I'm gonna make sure
you get on a jet ski if I have to
go with you. So I got I got the chance
to go to Lahoya to see the sea lions. Huh,
(36:16):
And those are so awesome because you're just a few
feet away. You can almost walk right up to them.
I wouldn't recommend petinum because they kind of grew out
at you, but it's amazing. Yeah, they don't have those
in Kansas right now. So I really appreciate you being here.
I know it's not easy. I appreciate you being here,
and also you being here, so I appreciate you being
(36:37):
in San Diego at the conference. I appreciate you being
a really remarkable beacon of light and hope. And I
really appreciate both of you being guests on this very
special edition of Wrongful Conviction with Jason Flom from the
Innocence Network conference, where we are generating so much positive
energy that we could probably light up at least a
(36:57):
mid size city. Once again, Loyd Alice, thank you for
being here. It's been an extraordinary experience for me. And
now let's have some fun. Sounds great. Thank you. It's
(37:18):
my pleasure, my honor, actually to introduce a friend of
mine for many years, an incredible man, Cornelius Dupree. He
maintains and projects an incredible positive attitude and great energy,
and that's why he's now an ambassador to the New exonorees,
helping them adapt to life on the outside. In nineteen eighty,
(37:39):
Cornelius Dupree was sentenced to seventy five years for aggravated robbery.
Cornelius Dupre Jr. Was just nineteen years old when he
first went to jail. The crime included abduction and rape.
He has served the longest prison term of any Texas
inmate ever cleared through DNA evidence. Pre was released last
July on parole after thirty years behind bars. One week later,
(38:03):
DNA test results proved his innocence. Cornelius, Welcome to the show.
Thanks for having me here. So Cornelius, your story is
remarkable in the fact that you served thirty one years
in prison for a crime you had nothing to do with,
had no knowledge of, and no involvement with. That's correct,
(38:24):
and this was a crime. I mean the the length
of your sentence is extraordinary and unusual even among the exonorees.
But the causes of your wrongful conviction are common. You
were a victim of wrongful identification and to some extent, racism.
Let's right, and I want to talk about this with
(38:47):
wrongful convictions that are based on mis identifications, which is
the most common cause of wrongful conviction. It's been proven
scientifically that the least accurate form of I wouldn't identification
is cross race. Yes, and in this case, and I
want to go back to it all those years ago,
nineteen seventy nine, right, that's correct, That seems like another century.
(39:09):
It was another century actually, and two white people in Dallas,
Texas were robbed. It was a couple and the woman
was sexually assaulted by two black men. And you and
a buddy were out. What were you doing that night?
We want to wait till a party, and they had
house parties back then. He and I decided earlier to the
(39:29):
the day that we was going to attend this party. Uh,
you know, fruit blocks away from where our parents live.
We lived with our parents at that time. So a boy,
maybe a ten thirty eleven o'clock at night. We proceeded
on to attend the party. And before us we we
acknowledged there was a couple of squad cars, you know,
just sitting there. So we proceeded on to go to
(39:51):
the party, and the cops they stopped us and asked
us where we were going, and we told him we
were on our way to the party, and they at
that point as us to get up against the car,
and they fished us and found a bag of we
marijuana and a little during your pistol which my co
defendant had. So they proceeded to fish just to try
(40:12):
to find more stuff out assumed than we really though.
You know, we were in trouble for the marajuana and
a little gun, you know, a little pistol and whatnot.
So we were thinking that we were going to go
to jail and possibly get out, you know, we were probationers.
I was kind of borderline, you know, with juvenile young
a duct, you know, I guess they could have made
it a felony, you know, a duct felon need case
(40:34):
because you were twenty at the time, right, Well, no,
I was nineth yes, nineteen turning twenties, So I was
kind of borderlinged, I think. Yeah, I was in a
duct straight across the border. I was in a d
he was a young juvenile, right and to be fair,
it's the seventies. Everybody was carrying back then. Yeah, that
was the thing. But the pistol, you know, a couple
of young black eyes and Texas with a pistol. The cops,
(40:54):
don't they don't like that. Yes, yes, and we're the
white cops. Yes they were. They were white cops and
not come me from an all black neighborhood. And but
you had no idea that this robbery, this uh, the
sexual assault had taken place, not in the in the
in the general vicinity. Again, I come from an all
black neighborhood. You know, it's all black. And this is
(41:15):
from what I gathered. This incident happened man through miles away,
which was another neighborhood. I guess at a convenience store
something like that. I'm not really for sure. I mean,
I don't know anything about it. All I know is
they stopped us, ask is where we were going, and
put the cuffs on us, and then uh proceeded to
taking us through the count of jail and then things
(41:37):
went really wrong. Yes, sir, you were not a rich guy,
so you couldn't afford the hire, not by a long shot. Right,
So you you are a public defender, Yes, I did.
And the evidence against you really they had no physical evidence,
because if they had, they would have had to lie
about that because you weren't there. So the only evidence
that had against you was the mirror one and the pistol,
(41:57):
but that had nothing to do with the crime that
you were convicted of. Well, they used it as I mean,
because I guess the guy was robbed. I mean, I
guess that would have took a pistol or something that
so well. But at the same time, I how many
people have pistols. We know there's more guns in America
than our people, and back then in Texas, I imagine
a lot of people are carrying guns. That doesn't prove
(42:18):
you you assaulted and raped and robbed anybody. But there
was no physical evidence. There was no biological evidence. There
was no sperm or hairs or anything else that could
have connected you to this crime, which was since it
was a crime that was physical in nature, that evidence
would have existed and would have been able to be tested.
There wasn't DNA technology back then, but there was enough
blood type or this or that that they could have tested,
(42:40):
and if they had, they would have learned that you
were not the guys that did it. Again, it comes
back to they had circumstantial evidence, which is, here's these
two black guys. There's a lot of black guys though, right,
And here's a little gun, right, And I don't want
to minimize that was a gun. The weed has nothing
to do with anything, right. And then they have these
two white people, this couple who made a mistake. I
(43:01):
don't think they wanted to identify the wrong people. I'm
sure they wanted to do it right. But we know
now and they knew to an extent then that I
wouldn't identification. It's such an imperfect thing. And then, of
course there's all the stuff that happened in the police
station and the ways that these procedures are conducted, whether
it's mug shots or lineups or any other thing. We
(43:22):
know that there's a lot of They've been a lot
of improvements since then, and the Innocence Project has been
behind a lot of those. But there's a lot still
that has to be done to help to diminish the
number of wrongful identifications. But in your case, I'm guessing
that most of those procedures weren't followed. They had a
couple of guys. They probably felt a lot of pressure.
This is a crime that, particularly in the South, a
(43:45):
couple of white people getting sexually assaulted by a couple
of black men. They want to get this off their desk, right,
They're probably a lot of pressure, probably coming from the
top get this out, and they got a couple of
guys and you were one of them. You go to trial,
did you still believe that the system was going to
function correct it? Well, I have to say no in
that regards. As the trial went on, were you becoming
(44:06):
more I mean, obviously you had to be scared, but
were you You said you were a believer in the system,
and a lot of the guys that I've interviewed on
the show and women have said, yeah, I thought that
justice would be done because this doesn't happen. But in
your case, when the jury went out, were you expecting
that they would convict you and send you to seventy
five years in prison like they did? Well, that was
(44:27):
like my whole court. It was like I knew I
was innocent. I know any nothing about this case in
which they were allegend that I committed, and so all
I had was the system. So I sit in the
counter jail awaiting trial so that I can come in
(44:48):
and sit before the accuser. I really didn't know how
to trial system work. I felt that once I go
to trial, I would sit before the you and they
would actually see me and say that's the wrong guy.
But that's not how I win. That didn't happen. And
(45:08):
then the jury went out and they came back in,
and then the worst possible result happened. Yes, get to Burdick.
Was your family in the courtroom? What was that moment? Like?
How did you even deal with it? They did not
let my family in the courtroom. They stopped him at
the back of the court and for whatever reason, they're
not allow him. Man, I was not allowed to testify
(45:30):
due to the public offender that I had told me
that it would be to my best entest not to
take the stand because they were going to make me
look like a you know, a hoot them or something
like this. Sort. Yeah, they were saying that it was
the burden of proof was on them to prove that
I was guilty. That I didn't have to take the
stand and to prove my innocence and it being naive,
(45:53):
you know, to the law. I said, well, I'm innocent,
and I felt like, okay, I really didn't know. So
I sit there and once I made that decision, they
ate more lunch. So you've got to convict. You got
sentenced to seventy five years in prison and your co
defendant was sentenced to life. And then so many years
(46:16):
went by and eventually you found out about the Innocence Project.
Had you given up hope by this point or like,
you know, you were in for decades already by the
time that over two decades. No, no, Uh, I've never
given up hope. I always felt that someday I was
going to be released. I just didn't know when that
(46:36):
day was gonna come, because with the seventy five year sentence,
they were going to carry you out of there in
a box. That was the the only way you were getting out.
But so you wrote a letter to the Innocence Project
in two thousand seven, and obviously we took your case
and that was in this project New York, and then
things started to really turn your way. Yes, it was
actually after the O. J. Simpsons, Try A Big Try
(47:00):
and whatnot. And I think that's somewhere along therew they
became kind of well known, you know, DNA and whatnot.
And uh, I was one who was very active in
the law librarian the rooms in the prison system, and
one of the guys who know that I was working
on my case and trying to get out, told me
about DNA be introduced. You know, told me about the
(47:22):
Instan project and that there was some information that I
could use concern the Instant Project in DNA. And so
I sit in my sale and I had to figure
out a way because I know I was in in
jail for robbery that didn't consist of DNA. I was
never charged of the rape case. It was dismissed, and
(47:45):
so when he told me about the DNA and the
Innocent Project, I had to figure out a way in
which I could write this letter to the Innercent Project
explaining to them that I was in prison for a
robber that I didn't commit. But in the course of
this robber, there was also a rape case that occurred
that I was never tried for they dismissed, and that
(48:08):
if you go back and open up that rape case
and do a DNA on it, it's gonna show that
I didn't. I'm not the perpetrator who raped the lady.
And if I didn't rape the lady who was with
the guy in which they said I robbed, then I'm
not the actual prepetrator. And that's exactly what happened. Fortunately,
the evidence was preserved, it was tested, and you walked
(48:30):
out of prison a freeman in two thousand and ten
after thirty one years. That's correct. In Texas prisons, which
is even saying that name Texas Prisons, it just conjures
up all kinds of nightmare scenarios. I mean, from the
heat to the it's just an unimaginable thing to be
(48:51):
able to persevere and overcome. And now now you're an
ambassador to New Axonorees at the conference. Thank you. You know,
I want to ask you specifically about the conference because
here you are in sunny San Diego an ambassador. That
really means that you're here to help some of the
new newly exonerated people. I was gonna say, man, but
(49:12):
we know it's men and women, and what's that like?
What does that mean to them? What does that mean
to you? Because you're viewed as somebody that is extremely
respected among the entire community for the way you carry yourself.
How does that feel for you and what's the impact
of that role? Well, I'm very honest and pleased to
(49:32):
have that that title, but that it's just a title
to me. I'm very emotional and I take it very
personal when I engage with the guys and welcome these
guys in as family. What I try to do is
give back what was given to me when I was
first released, when I came to my first conference. That
(49:55):
was the three guys that came up to me after,
you know, being confined for such an long time and
being all uptight and not knowing what they expect and
not knowing anymore, it's very challenging. It could be very
scary because you don't know anyone and being in prison
for such a long time. You you're you're in a hard,
(50:17):
a hard environment. It's a very different environment. You just
it's not an environment which you embrace people. It's an
environment in which you keep people at bay. You know,
you keep them away. And so by the guys embracing
me after such a long time and welcome me home
and making me feel a part of family, I took
(50:39):
that very personal. That's stuck with me. And so throughout
the whole time in which I have been free, I
was trying to figure out a way in which I
can become a part of this platform and give back
to these guys and welcome these guys in and allowing
these guys to know that we are a family and
(51:00):
and and we stand by you, and we're gonna support you.
We're gonna do everything we can, me personally in my
power to make it better for these guys, you know,
because we come from different poets of the world in
terms of prison, but we all suffer the same thing
(51:21):
and we all can identify with that, and so it's
gonna take people who understands that they try to make
this more of a family atmosphere, more ofble welcome home.
It's amazing because I heard you use the word family,
um several times in that beautiful speech, and it really
(51:42):
is a family. I mean, that's the sense that I get.
And the experience of being in that room last night
when almost two hundred exnrees got on stage, it was
a beautiful thing to see it and be a part of.
And the speeches that were made and the hugging and
the dancing and the connecting of people who have shared this.
(52:03):
You know, everybody in that room is a member of
a club that nobody wants to belong to. But now
it's amazing because every single asonree I've been privileged to
spend time with is so devoted to helping their fellow
exenrees and making a difference and not only improving their lives,
(52:25):
but in helping other people who are still stuck in
the system. And that's what we're here to do on
the show, is to educate people and inform people and
try to prevent the next Cornelius dupre from ever happening,
you know, ever getting into the system. You know, once
you get started on this work, I was lucky. I
sort of stumbled into it twentysomething years ago. You can't stop,
(52:46):
you know, you can't stop because there's no better feeling.
And I see it in your eyes when you're talking
about it. How you're able to do it now. It's
a high, that is it's impossible to even put it
into words. So we talked about the worst moment of
your life when you were wrongfully convicted and sentenced to
spend the rest of your life in prison. What's the
best thing that's happened since you've been out being married?
(53:09):
Getting married to my wife after courting my wife for
such a long time. My wife is my best friend,
she's my support system. As you know, I met my
wife while I was in prison. I've actually known my
wife for twenty some years. Proud of me getting out
of prison and married my wife. So, my wife's been
there practically thirty years. How did you meet her? Let's
(53:32):
go back to that. Well, I met my wife while
I was in prison. My wife was actually a prison guard. Incredible, Yes,
my wife was. She was going to sam Houston her
she major in criminology. She was on her way to
possibly becoming a award and at some point in time,
and she was actually a prison guard. I be friend
(53:53):
my wife first. She was someone who I highly respected.
She had no clue who I was. I had no
idea here that she would become my wife. Again, she
was a lady who I highly respected. My job in
prison kind of allowed me to kind of get a
little up close and personally with the guards, you know,
being that I had been in prison such a long time,
(54:14):
I was one who was pretty much trusted, you know.
I had a job that allowed me to intermingle with
some of the guards. And so she was one who
I used to talk to a great deal. My wife
as a minister, so she was always talking about Christ.
She's very religious, haunted, and and that's what won me over.
(54:35):
That was one of the president which I prayed to
God to send me a Christian woman in my life.
To kind of hit me state. Of course, I never
knew it would be her. It's an incredible love story.
I mean, but you can't see through the radio, but
Cornelius is a very stylish and handsome, distinguished looking gentleman.
But still you have to have an incredible amount of
(54:56):
game right to be able to meet the woman of
your reams while you're on the inside, right, You've got
tens of millions of people out here on different dating
websites can't even find love, and you found it in
the most hellish place on earth. It's just really beautiful
that you found each other, however, even though it was
a horrible circumstance, and that we're able to connect on
the outside and create a family. And I see when
(55:19):
you're talking about I see the love in your eyes.
It's amazing. So I would like to ask you if
there's anything at all that you want to say. Well,
I would just like to say to kind of enlighten
people about what the Innocent Project is all about. I
really wanted to know that we are family. I feel
that we are now a community. There are so many
(55:41):
innocent men and women nowadays that we are actually a
community within ourselves and that's good, that's great because we
can all identify with each other's hurt. There's a big
world around us that doesn't quite understand what actual you
we innocn see is what the Innocent Project is all about.
(56:03):
And the people who have roam been in prison. These
people all suffer, We all suffer from some form of PTSD,
and we need to be close and identify with one another,
talk to one another so that we can start the
healing process. This is what it's all about. So to
(56:25):
add to that, I always like to give people a
way to get involved, right and so of course you've
heard me say the number of times. Please go to
www dot instance project dot org. You can learn more
about Cornelius and his case and his life. We can
learn how to get involved. Is there another any other
website that you would recommend her? That's that's the place
(56:46):
to go. Yes, that's that's the place to go. That's
the place to go. Please join us, join us in
this movement. There's so many more people in this tragic situation,
and we gotta we gotta give them the hope and
and give them the ability to get there get back
out on the outside. And it achieved the freedom that
they deserved. Don't forget to give us a fantastic review
(57:12):
wherever you get your podcasts. It really helps. And I'm
a proud donor to the Innocence Project and I really
hope you'll join me in supporting this very important cause
and helping to prevent future wrongful convictions. Go to Innocence
Project dot org to learn how to donate and get involved.
I'd like to thank our production team, Connor Hall and
Kevin Awardis. The music in the show is by three
(57:35):
time OSCAR nominated composer Jay Ralph. Be sure to follow
us on Instagram at Wrongful Conviction and on Facebook at
Wrongful Conviction Podcast. Wrongful Conviction with Jason Flam is a
production of Lava for Good Podcasts and association with Signal
Company Number one
With the police banging on the door open up. The
choice to be in that lineup was the last choice
I made as a free man. A year later, I
ended up writing the system. I'm going to be one
of those people who everyone in the world is going
to think as a monster or suspect as a monster
for the rest of my life, and I'm just gonna
have to come to peace with that. Somebody was able
(00:28):
to look at my picture in a database and say
that I was somewhere where I definitely wasn't. I overheard
three of the jailer's discussing what part they might have
to play in my hanging. They had been told that
two prison officers would have to participate in my execution,
and I walked back inside that prison for the last time.
(00:48):
All hell broke loose. But this weekend we're recording from
sunny San Diego at the Innocence Network Conference, and because
we have so many exonorees together, we'll be doing two
(01:08):
shorter interviews with two incredible exonorees who will talk about
what this conference means to them, Floyd Ledso and Cornelius Dupree.
But let's start with Maddie Delone, the executive director of
the Innocence Project, who will explain how this conference came
into existence and what it's all about. Maddie alone, Maddie, welcome,
Thanks Jason. Great to be here. Maddie is a force
(01:29):
of nature. She has spent her entire life in criminal
justice reform, fair to say, and everything from working inside
of prisons to really building and running what is the
organization at the forefront of the innocence movement, epicenter, whatever
you wanna call it. And we're here today at the
Innocence Network conference in San Diego, which is an out
(01:52):
of this world's extraordinary event. And Maddie, you and I
go back to the beginning of this together and your
memories better than mine. So I wanted to talk to
you about how this all started and also what it
means to be here, not only for you and the staff,
but for the exonores. Wow, that's a lot, Jason. So
(02:12):
the Innocence Projects started about twenty five years ago as
a small clinic at Cardozo Law School with Barry and
Peter running the show, working with students, other law professors
and really understanding the power of the science to get
people out of prison. That DNA technology was pretty new
in the criminal justice system. Pretty quickly they realized how
(02:33):
many innocent people there were and how much work it
was going to take to get people out of prison
across the country, and they began to find law professors
really at other universities across the country to do this work.
So the sort of next projects in the network were formed.
We the Innocence Project in ninety two. There was a
(02:54):
project in ninety four. I just heard that the Innocence
Project Northwest settle Of rated their twentieth anniversary this year.
So those are among the first projects, and pretty quickly
people realized they needed to have a way to come
together and to begin to share what they were learning
and figure it out. You have to remember that while
we have fifty post conviction DNA laws right now, so
(03:16):
for people for whom DNA can prove innocence, you now
have a way to get back into court. That wasn't
true when this all started. So they had to figure
out how do you get back into court when there's
no mechanism, and they use the press, and they use persuasion,
and more and more they could use as they began
exonerating people, the power of those stories and the experiences
of the exonorees. I think the first network conference was
(03:40):
in two thousand, so it's seventeen years later, and this
is the sixteenth conference. At that first conference there were
maybe seventy five or eighty people. I wasn't there, but
Barry and Peter were there, and a number of the
people who are still in this work today. And with
each conference the conference grew, new projects started, more people
(04:02):
were exonerated, the exonorees began to come to the conferences,
and bigger and bigger numbers. We began to work. You
began to work to help pay for people to get there,
to put them up in hotels, people who had no resources.
These are people from all over the country and even
other parts of the world as well. That's right. We
had an amazing conference at the Ohio Innocence Project hosted
(04:24):
in two thousand and eleven, I think, where we invited
Mark Godsey, who was the Ohio Innocence Project director, really
invited people from around the world who were doing this
work to come, and they brought exonorees from Japan and
Italy and other places. So it has grown from probably
in two thousand, maybe eight or nine exonerated people, and
(04:47):
today in San Diego they're almost two hundred. Yeah, it's amazing.
I mean last night we we posted a graphic on
the screen with the total number of years served, including
two hundred twenty two years served on death row. And
it's so extraordinary being here and being a part of
it and just sort of experiencing the energy, the positive
(05:07):
energy that's developed or that's generated i should say, from
the axonres being around each other, because not unlike what
I understand to be the case with POW's Prison of War,
no one can understand what they've been through except for
each other, as much as we try and as much
as we we want to help, and so it's really
been an extraordinary journey to watch them heal. And it's
(05:28):
obviously a very long, it's a it's a it's a
number ending journey. But progress is being made in this
building as we speak, and that's the remarkable thing to
be a part of. Can I just tell you a
story I just heard from one of the directors of
one of the projects this morning. They have a client
who got out of prison after thirty two years and
got out maybe four or five months ago, came to
the conference last night, as you were saying, there was
(05:49):
an introduction of all of the exonure ees, including forty
seven axon Ares who had never been here before. And
at the end of that presentation and the whole crowd
is standing and cheering and crying and they're hugging each
other on stage. Her client walked down the stairs from
the stage and said to her, this is the first
time I felt free. I mean, it's it's heavy, and
(06:12):
it's magical. I mean, there's no other word to explain it.
And yeah, it's so great because every time one of
them gets up and the crowd erupts, nobody tells anybody
to erupt, and nobody tells anybody to stand, but standing
ovation every time, and they're really among their peers, and
they're among people who love them and care about them
as we do. So it's a it's just an awesome thing.
What is that for the Innocence Project? I mean, how
(06:34):
have you been able to focus the staff who traditionally
we're just focused on the legal stuff. How are you
able to build this into this sort of the lack
of better where the DNA of the Innocence Project one
thing we had, you know, as we got more and
more people out. About ten years ago, we actually made
the decision with our board that you're on to hire
a social worker, and we now have two social workers
(06:56):
who work in the office and each of them works
on cases as people are about to come home, and
then is a person for them to go to and
talk to over the course of you know, intensively, probably
the first year, but for some people they're still talking
often ten years later. We also have developed a fund
for Innocence Project exonorees who don't have resources or have
(07:18):
family without resources when they come out, so that we
can help pay for rent or medical care that's not
covered under state insurance schemes, or whatever the case may be.
And I think we're trying to get I know, we're
trying to get better and better at that every year,
and we're learning more and more from the exonorees themselves
about what it takes. And one of the things I
(07:38):
think it takes, and you talked about it at the beginning,
is bringing them together with each other more often. They
really are the people who are best able to help
each other heal. And we're realizing the importance of their
families and the importance of helping find support for their
family members, because like the Exonorees, the family members worked
for twelve years, for teen years, twenty years, thirty years
(08:01):
when they stuck with them. They work to help get
somebody out. And if you've been on that course of
getting yourself out or helping someone else get out for
twenty years and then they're out, you have to find
the next course of purpose. And I think there's hope
for many people that it will just be glorious and
perfect and they'll be free. It's the thing they worked
at for so long. But life on the outside is hard,
(08:24):
and the first question people want to know is do
they get compensation when they get out? And their flabber
gas to find out that not only are there i
think twenty states that don't have conversation statues at all,
but also even if you are entitled the conversation, it
can take many years to get it. So you're just
in the twilight zone. Now you're out and trying to
figure out how to live with nothing, and it's an
(08:47):
incredible series of challenges. Let's just talk for a moment,
Mattie about the strategic litigation aspect of our work, all right,
So we have two programs, and the Strategic Litigation program
is a pretty new program for the last five years,
although I like to think that the Instance Project has
been doing it and maybe a less focused and concentrated
way forever. But the Strategic Litigation Unit, which was founded
(09:09):
five years ago by that your generosity and that of
your family, run by Christopher Fabricant, whose brilliant lawyer, really
works on getting the courts to understand their role as
a gatekeeper of bad evidence going into cases. And so
the Strategic Litigation Unit takes cases around the country where
(09:31):
there is bad forensic science is trying to be introduced
or eyewitness identification procedures that were done in a way
that's not reliable and not likely to give you the
best idea. In fact, the DNA cases have had an
eyewitness identification which is erroneous. So we know how important
it is to get the idea procedures right, and our
(09:53):
team finds cases to teach courts about how to vet
evidence and to keep bad evidence out. If we can
keep bad evidence out of these cases in the first place,
then you'll never have people being wrongly convicted and until
and lessen until the police and prosecutors and the courts
understand that at the front end and begin to implement
procedures and keep the evidence out of court. We're going
(10:15):
to continue to replicate the problems we have with wrongful
conviction and to put more people in. And you said
it yourself, it takes forever to get them out. If
somebody goes in and they exhaust their state appeals eight
years later and then they write to us and then
we take their case and then we litigate the case
for ten or twelve or fifteen years. Sometimes heard someone
(10:36):
today who has a case that they picked up in
it's seen the person was just freed. That's an entire life.
So we have to stop it at the front end,
and that's what the Strategic Litigation Unit tries to do.
The Joseph Flam Special Counsel has done amazing work in
the courts to try to protect people from having bad
evidence admitted in the first place in the courts. And
(10:59):
that's what it's going to take to really change the system. Yeah,
and I know that my dad, if he were here,
would be thrilled to see the quality of the work
that's being done in his name. He was a supporter
of the instance, project and Scatton of course has donated
tens of thousands of billions and millions and millions of
dollars worth of legal brilliant legal talent and support to
the project, and they still do to this day. Recently,
(11:21):
Keith Allen Harward was freed after thirty three years in
prison in Virginia with the help of the pro bono
department at Scatton in d C. Run by Don Salzman.
So yeah, it just continues. Unfortunately, our work will never end.
We'd love to put ourselves out of business, but unfortunately
that's not going to happen in our lifetimes. Maddie Delone,
it's a pleasure to have you on the podcast today
(11:42):
and I really appreciate you stopping by and dropping some knowledge.
Thank you, Jason, great to be here. Keep up the
great work. So that was a great introduction to the
conference from my friend and partner in Fighting Injustice, Maddie Delone.
(12:05):
Let's continue with the one and only Floyd bled Cell
after spending sixteen years behind bars for a murder his
brother committed in year old Camille Arfman went missing after
getting off the bus from school. Bledsoe's older brother Tom
confessed several times to the murder and led police to
her body. But several days later, Tom Bledsoe changed his story,
(12:27):
pinning the murder on Floyd. New DNA evidence in October
of two thousand and fifteen implicated Tom bled so Just
over a month ago, Floyd Bledsoe's murder conviction was overturned.
Law enforcement a districtcord agree he was an innocent man.
Floyd bled Cell, Welcome to the show. Thank you. Floyd
as an exonoree from Kansas who served sixteen years sixteen
(12:50):
years and you out there listening had just as much
to do with it as he did, that's fair to say.
And his attorney, Alice Craig is here. Alice, welcome, thank you,
thanks for being here. So we're here at the Innocence
Network conference in San Diego. Have you been to San
Diego for this is a very beautiful city. Yeah, it's
different than Kansas, very different than Kansas, and no ocean.
(13:14):
I just can't even So your case in a nutshell
revolved around this rape and murder, and it's so bizarre
because this one came with instructions right tragically, your brother
was the culprit. And what makes this so insane? Is
that he went, he confessed to a religious figure, was
(13:36):
a pastor or something, and then he confessed to the police,
and he provided the murder weapon, told him where to
find the body, took him to the boy, took him
to the body. Right, So you're probably having the same
reaction I was, which was okay, so thanks for telling us,
and here's your one way ticket to prison, right, I mean,
but that's not what happened. Can you walk us through
(13:59):
how you ended up being charged for a crime that
your brother had not only clearly committed, but had confessed
to in every conceivable way, right, and he had confessed
to multiple times, multiple people had heard him basically what happened.
On November seven, At about ten o'clock that evening, he
went to the police station, made a phone call to
the pastor of the church, said, Hey, this is Tom.
(14:23):
I'm sorry. I lied to you. I know where she is.
I'm gonna turn myself in. He says, I wish I
could have turned back to hands of time, but I can't.
And then he said, please help my parents through this,
and then he hung up called our father and then
called Jim back again and left basically the same message,
(14:43):
saying that he wished he hadn't done it. I wish
he could turn back to hands of time. But he
made his choice. He's going to pay for it for
the rest of his life, and that mom and dad
were mad at him, and he was turning himself in.
He asked the church to forgive him, God to forgive him,
and they took him to get in turn Ernie. Then
the attorney went to the police department. His attorney told
(15:04):
him that Tom knows where the girl is, and then
the police went with him to where the body was.
He showed him. The detectives testified at trial that there
he was so well concealed, only the true perpetrator wouldn't
know him. Yeah, it wasn't. It wasn't a lucky guess. No, no.
And it was the middle of the night, dark and
(15:25):
he had just bought the gun, and he had just
bought the gun. So much stuff. This was literally the
easiest case in the history of criminal justice for the authorities. Alice,
would you disagree with that? No? I wouldn't. I mean,
this was it like, I mean, it's gift wrapped right.
They charged him with murder that Monday. Three or four
days later, he decides he doesn't like jail and says
(15:46):
he didn't do it, that his brother did it, which
was me. So the police say were like, well, how
did you know all this stuff? He said, well, he
confessed to me on the side of the road. Detective
Crinos says, okay, that's plausible and says when Tom says
to thirty in the afternoon, Randy says, are you sure?
And this is all said in my trial. Randy says
(16:09):
are you sure, and Tom says, yep, I'm positive had
to be two thirty. Randy told admitted in trial that
he told Tom that he was lying and Tom said, no,
I'm not. He goes, yeah, you are. You want to
know how I know you're lying? He was like, how
he said Floyd was sitting in my patrol car to
thirty in the afternoon and Tom said, well, it must
have been earlier. Randy admitted to giving Tom facts to
(16:31):
make his story more believable. At my trial. The whole
thing is just like the actually mean and and there's
so much I mean. Basically it comes down to people
getting tunnel vision, people making mistakes, poor detective work, stuff
that should have been investigated they didn't look at. And
(16:54):
then you throw Tom's defense attorney, who you know, his
job is to get his client off and he means
necessary within the law, supposedly, And so I don't think
we know the true reason why everything went the way
he did. But ultimately, with his attorneys and help and
(17:15):
poor investigation, things flipped. They arrested me, they claim on November,
but when they interviewed me on November eleventh, I believe
it was twelve somewhere around and there they had me
in a holding cell, wouldn't let me leave. They told
my wife or my ex wife, but my wife then
(17:36):
that they didn't know where I was. They said he
got in the car and left. When she said, well,
his car's out front, they told her he left. We
don't know where he went. I was in there holding cell.
The whole thing is totally you know, for four days,
nobody knew where I was except them, and then finally,
after the press got ahold of it, then they charged
(17:57):
me with my first scarammer and then I went to trial,
had poor representation and got found guilty. The tip peak
at Capital Journal interviewed an individual who was on the
jury member and he said, we didn't know who did it,
but this was our opportunity to make somebody pay. I
(18:18):
guess we made a mistake. Sixteen years that's a mistake.
I guess we'm interesting. We can just have somebody pay.
Just picked somebody out of phone book and just you know,
I mean in this case, it was just you know, Alice,
what a crazy turn of events. I mean, ultimately Floyd
was exonerated, right, and Alice, how did the exoneration come about? So?
(18:38):
Floyd's case is one of those cases that I think
every lawyer who looked at it was really interested in
and wanted to help. None of us were going to
let go of it. My clinic at k Law School,
the Innocence Project there, we took his case on. We
probably started working on your case in two thousand and
five and went to federal court. And the interesting thing
(19:02):
with the federal habeas that we did is that the
federal district judge when we filed our habeas actually ruled
in Floyd's favor and issued an opinion that essentially said
Floyd was innocent and this conviction couldn't stand. Once he
did that, Floyd said, well, can I be released? And
I guess so we asked the federal court to release
(19:24):
him while the state appealed, and they did so. Floyd
was actually out for a year. That was probably the
nine months that was probably the hardest thing for us.
The state appealed this case to the Tent Circuit. I
remember when we were about to argue in the Tent Circuit.
I was talking to the state's attorney before we walked
(19:45):
up to the podium, and he said to me, we
don't think Floyd did it, but we have to protect
our jury verdict. Okay, wow, let's just think about that
for a second. We don't think he did it, but
with the jury verdict is more important than justice or
one person's for at them and liberty and all that.
The pursuit of happened, All that stuff is all out
the window because we need to protect our jury art
(20:05):
because it's a sort of quaint. Well, actually, what gets
worse is we lost in the Tent Circuit because of
the standard of review, and the Tent Circuit said we're
not going to overturn this Kansas State courts and so
we lost, and they reversed the federal district judge and
I had to call Floyd and tell me had to
(20:26):
go back to prison. But then you got them out.
We're sitting here. So so at that point in time,
we filed for DNA testing, and one of our concerns
was that the investigation that was originally done, and I
think it goes back to what you said at the
very beginning that this seemed to be a slam dunk case.
So a lot of investigation that should have been done
wasn't done. And our biggest concern, I think, was whether
(20:51):
or not there'd be evidence to test. That was the
largest concern we had, and they actually told me over
and over again. They were like, look, we can't go
back and fix bad detective work. You can't because we're
talking at that time. It was twelve years twelve years later.
You know, it's not like you can just walk back
even a few months and see everything because a lot
(21:13):
of changes in twelve years. And by the way, and
there's no way to tell this story in short of
a time as we have here because it's too twisted.
But on top of everything else, we can't leave out
a couple of important details. One is that your dad
got involved. At the trial, he testified in favor of
your brother, saying that he you know, he gave him
an alibi. He created all kinds of phony alibis and
(21:34):
stuff like that, which is so it's like something out
of Shakespeare, right, or a Greek tragedy. We find out
later that he was actually protecting himself because he helped
with covering up and disposing of the body and all
that stuff, and he didn't want, you know, he didn't
want to go to jail. Well, when we pulled the
d n A, that's when we've discovered obviously one of
the motives for him to wanting to cover for Tom
(21:58):
so hard right, and the DNA preu conclusively that not
only weren't you the culprit, but that in fact the perpetrator,
but in fact it was your brother, and that your
dad's DNA was found on her socks, on the victim socks.
Because this theory there is that he helped to drag her.
It sounds grotesque to the grave side or whatever, and
of course that's a crime as well. In protecting himself,
(22:19):
he managed to flip the script and get his innocent
son sentenced for murder while his guilty son stayed out.
And then to wrap up the crazy, right, as if
all this wasn't crazy enough, he killed himself. He did
kill himself, right, and he left three suicide notes in
which he said, in case anybody wasn't listening the first time,
(22:40):
he said it again, that he did it, that you didn't,
that he was the you know, the sole perpetrator, and
that he assumed an innocent person to prison his own brother,
who's sitting here with me right now. So we here
at the Instance Network conference in San Diego, a weekend
of healing and hope and strength, and and you are
a shine example of all of those things. I mean,
(23:01):
if you could see and meet Floyd, you know, he's
just sort of I mean, you never know. You know,
he looks like a guy who won the damn lottery,
you know what I mean. And so that's the way
he carries himself, which always, I mean all respect to you.
I I'm always amazed at the joy and grace that
the Axonorees exhibit. And you're as good of an example
(23:22):
as anyone could be. So let's talk about how you
got from there to here, right, because you come out
of prison. But it ain't so easy after that, is it. No?
You know, when an axonary comes out of prison, they
don't have much, if anything, at all. Kansas does not
have any compensation laws. I'll speak for Kansas because that's
(23:42):
what I know. After sixteen years, you make a dollar
five a day, and that's only if you work the job.
The days you don't work, you don't get paid dollar
five a day, you know, and most and less one
more time and no conversation laws and no compensation right,
one of the twenty states that has. And that's only
five days for eight hours. Put that on a credit report,
(24:05):
you know, almost your last jof hey, dollar five a day,
five days a week. It sounds a lot like five
a week, you know, exactly a week, No, not exactly.
And so when we come out, you know, the clothes
that you see, you know, when I was coming out
of the Jefferson County Courthouse, the final shirt of jeans
(24:26):
and the shoes that was bought by my attorneys. I
had an aunt and an uncle and a few family members,
but my aunt and uncle stuck by me for the
whole sixteen years. And let's not leave out of this
your kids, right, because when you went in and they
became victims. I had two boys and a wife. She
got divorced because obviously, you know it was her sister
in or. It was her sister, and she had the
(24:48):
police and the county attorney was telling her all this stuff,
lying to her, you know, lying to the family. She
took my kids from me, failed to have my rights removed.
The last time I saw my kids prior to my
release was November twelve, at one in the afternoon. I
gave Cody, who was two and a half at that time,
(25:11):
and Christian, who was nine months I kissing a hug
and said I'll be back in a couple of hours.
And I never came back. And then for sixteen years
I didn't see him. You know, I wrote letters, you know,
I had a nice stack of letters wrote to him
when I first started. Every day, every day I'd right
(25:34):
and say I'm coming out. I'll be homesick on their birthday, Christmas,
everything you tried not to lose hope, and ultimately, after
a while, I gave up variety because I had no
(25:57):
place to send the letters, nobody to read to the boys,
to tell him, hey, I love you, I'm thinking of
I haven't forgotten for sixteen years. I never once forgot
my kids. And I got a lot of friends that
that are still in prison. Most of them are rightfully there.
And I remember once right before I got released for
(26:20):
that short time in two thousand eight. You know, he
was like, Floyd, do you ever think you you'll ever
be able to see your kids? And I said, well,
someday I'll be able to see him. Most people were like,
you're crazy, You're crazy, You're never going to get out.
You keep saying the same thing week after week. And
(26:41):
finally in two thousand sixteen, in April, I saw my kids.
What was that like? Well, they're much taller. Cody's six
almost six two and Christians five eleven. Wow, because you're
not at tall man, No, I'm they're towering over you. Yeah,
(27:02):
you know, but you left them as these little babies,
and now you're looking up at him. And you know what,
there's no no two people on this or that I'd
rather look up to than those two boys. And they're
doing good now in spite of this terrible childhood that
they had to endure without their dad and with this
being fed these lies, and believing that their dad was
(27:25):
a child rapist and a murderer. Right, I mean, what
a way to grow up that is. So somehow or other,
you persevered in prison even with this added burden of
not being able to contact your kids. And you can see,
I mean, I'm I'm looking in your eyes right now,
and the pain is it, it's on, it's unreal. And
(27:45):
as a parent, and I'm sure a lot of people
that are out there listening have kids, I'm sure you can,
you know, try to imagine what that would be like,
but we can't imagine. And that's what's so powerful about
this conference. I believe it's being able to get people
together who have had similar experiences and you would know
better that. Last year was my first conference in San Antonio.
I'd been out twelve weeks. Twelve weeks, and you know,
(28:10):
I show up here and you're just starstruck because in
Kansas you feel like you're all alone. But then you
get here. Last year there was a hundred and fifty
three as honorees that had been in the same boat.
I remember sitting sitting down and eating with Amanda Knox
and Ryan Ferguson and finally, you don't have to explain
(28:30):
how you feel because they already know. You don't have
to answer all the questions of well, what do you
mean by that? It don't even have to be spoken
because we've been through the same or the similar ways.
We've all learned how to cope and you learn how
to persevere through it. And there's so much healing, so
(28:54):
much renewal here. I've been looking forward to it since
when I got back at to Kansas City last year,
you know, I was looking forward to the next one
because you learn that there's people just like you. Yeah, Unfortunately,
there's thousands of them, and there's then there's tens. There
are hundreds of thousands that are still in the numbers
(29:15):
are truly mind boggling. Yeah. For me, it's just an
honor and a privilege to be here and be amongst
you and the you know, and the other men and
women who have so overcome such impossible challenges and odds
and tragedies and trauma. To be here and be speaking
for the people who are still in really when you
think about it, right, and and for each other and
(29:37):
standing up for each other like you do. And that's
some of the stuff that I do now, is I
go to the Kansas Legislature and try to get the
LAWSS change to ensure that it doesn't happen. You know,
I've spoke on the on the Mandatory Recording Act for Kansas,
the recording of interrogation. That's one of the biggest causes
was you would think that if you have somebody can
(30:00):
tessing that you would record it right smart to me,
Jefferson County did not. They did not do any recordings
of Tom until November. It just doesn't make any sense.
Everybody else they recorded right off the bat. It's it's
just it's like Alison's lends, just like through the looking glass.
It's just backwards and upside down and inside. Nothing. Nothing
(30:21):
that they did make any sense. And I will say
for myself, and I think I'm speaking for nineties some
percent of people that are listening that if we weren't
hearing this from your mouth, the story just you know,
if I tell this story to someone, they're gonna go,
no, no no, no, You've got something wrong there, because it
doesn't work like that. It can't work like that. I mean, Alice,
you must have the same feeling like it's just totally
(30:44):
fucking bizarre. This case is very bizarre, but it's not
the only one. And I think that's the sad truth
of it is. Floyd and I have been working together
for so long, but there's other people that we're going
to continue to as a team try and get out
We all have of the shared responsibility, and I think
everyone who's listening hopefully will feel the same sense and
(31:06):
want to get involved and help, because you can't be
around somebody like you, Floyd and not feel like Jesus,
that could have been me, because it really could have
been any of us. Right, You're just a regular guy.
You weren't some career criminal or some sinister like dark
force of just a regular guy going about your life
with a couple of young kids in the middle of America.
You know, just a regular guy. I was working for dairy,
(31:29):
just trying to raise my kids on the farm. Right,
and then and then this, right, And it's just so
weird how when the forces of justice they start to
churn and they just grind people up, and it's only
a miracle that somebody like you can actually survive this
ordeal and come out at one piece with a smile
on your face. I see how you light up when
you're talking about your kids. So now they're they're twenty
(31:51):
and eighteen and they're telling up to be a basketball
players and they're doing good. You want to talk about
that a little bit. Go ahead. He's just enlisted in
the army. He's going in intelligence. He just finished basic training.
He's on his way to go for extended training for intelligence.
Christian is a senior in high school. He'll be graduating
(32:13):
in May, going to firefighter school. Amazing. So you gott
a you got a soldier and a fireman and are
you close to the kids now? Yes. I try to
get up there at least once a month to see him.
Cody will be a little harder because now he's out here,
but we stay in contact. Now. I do animal portraits,
painting and stuff like that. Floyd learned painting. Where do
(32:33):
people see that actually exhibiting right now at the Johnson
County Public Library? Yes? Um, and it'll be on exhibit
till May. But is there a website people can go
if they want to just see it because a lot
of people can't get to that tonight. Yeah, you know,
I hope they have it up here pretty quick. You
let us know when you do it, we'll we'll put
it on our site and people can be able to
find the Floyd Bloeds are. Maybe you'll turn out to
(32:55):
be the next who knows Home or Winslow or something
like that, you know. And then I got married November
nine of last year. Congratulation. She has a seventeen month
old So I have a step son that's seventeen months Blake,
and he's he's a ball. So it's actually kind of
a full circle, now, isn't it. Right Now you got
your kids back. You actually have a young son who's
(33:18):
really almost about the same age as one of your
kids was when you went in. So it's really a redo, right.
I mean, what a difference to see somebody like you
who would have been literally rotting and suffering in prison
for the rest of your life if not for the
fact that good people like Alice and others that donate
(33:39):
almost all of their time to the cause had come
to the rescue and had ultimately proven that what should
have been obvious to the authorities all along and really
was obvious, you know. And I remember just before we
filed for the d n A, I would call Alice
and Jean and Beth. They give me the answer. We
(34:00):
don't know what we're going to do, but we'll figure
out something. It was like we hit this big old
stone wall. And I wrote in the in the thank
you card to the d NA KU, and I said,
when you're instructors and your students hitting the stone wall,
they didn't give up and turn around. They picked up
the chisel, they picked up the hammer, and they made away.
(34:21):
And that's exactly what they did. They gave me my
life back. Yeah, they don't make it easy for anyone
to get out of print. I mean, even with extremely
talented attorneys and and advocates, which you were in that
sense lucky to have, because a lot of people don't
even have that, it's still almost impossible task because they
just keep putting up roadblox because, like you said, Alsaide,
they want to protect the jury verdict or the wrongful
(34:43):
prosecution or the wrong whatever the hell it. And it's
so weird. It's like why why why why? No? This
is simple, right, everybody needs to know who really did it.
It's hard to convince people. Ben. When we filed the
DNA reports in Floyd's case, the investigators for Jefferson County
(35:06):
that were reinvestigating it said, well, this doesn't mean Floyd
didn't do it or wasn't involved, And it wasn't really
until Tom committed suicide that they were convinced that was
the only thing that did it. We hadn't had that
would probably still be litigating it. Sounds like if you
would have had pictures and photographs of the crime taking
place and a time stamped video of you being somewhere
(35:29):
else doing something else, they still would have went, well, yeah,
they would have come up with it because we've seen that.
I mean, they come up with theories that are just
a first grader would go that don't make any sense,
but they do, and they did, and you're the living
proof of it. But now you're here, so San Diego,
what are you gonna do? Well, now you're saying going surfing?
What you kans? I've always wanted to write a jet ski,
(35:52):
so I'm trying to convince people to write a jet
ski with me. But they're not really hip because they're like,
it's kind of cold in the morning, but hey, it's
a little hyperthermia. You know it's gonna wear off eventually,
you know, But well we're gonna I'm gonna make sure
you get on a jet ski if I have to
go with you. So I got I got the chance
to go to Lahoya to see the sea lions. Huh,
(36:16):
And those are so awesome because you're just a few
feet away. You can almost walk right up to them.
I wouldn't recommend petinum because they kind of grew out
at you, but it's amazing. Yeah, they don't have those
in Kansas right now. So I really appreciate you being here.
I know it's not easy. I appreciate you being here,
and also you being here, so I appreciate you being
(36:37):
in San Diego at the conference. I appreciate you being
a really remarkable beacon of light and hope. And I
really appreciate both of you being guests on this very
special edition of Wrongful Conviction with Jason Flom from the
Innocence Network conference, where we are generating so much positive
energy that we could probably light up at least a
(36:57):
mid size city. Once again, Loyd Alice, thank you for
being here. It's been an extraordinary experience for me. And
now let's have some fun. Sounds great. Thank you. It's
(37:18):
my pleasure, my honor, actually to introduce a friend of
mine for many years, an incredible man, Cornelius Dupree. He
maintains and projects an incredible positive attitude and great energy,
and that's why he's now an ambassador to the New exonorees,
helping them adapt to life on the outside. In nineteen eighty,
(37:39):
Cornelius Dupree was sentenced to seventy five years for aggravated robbery.
Cornelius Dupre Jr. Was just nineteen years old when he
first went to jail. The crime included abduction and rape.
He has served the longest prison term of any Texas
inmate ever cleared through DNA evidence. Pre was released last
July on parole after thirty years behind bars. One week later,
(38:03):
DNA test results proved his innocence. Cornelius, Welcome to the show.
Thanks for having me here. So Cornelius, your story is
remarkable in the fact that you served thirty one years
in prison for a crime you had nothing to do with,
had no knowledge of, and no involvement with. That's correct,
(38:24):
and this was a crime. I mean the the length
of your sentence is extraordinary and unusual even among the exonorees.
But the causes of your wrongful conviction are common. You
were a victim of wrongful identification and to some extent, racism.
Let's right, and I want to talk about this with
(38:47):
wrongful convictions that are based on mis identifications, which is
the most common cause of wrongful conviction. It's been proven
scientifically that the least accurate form of I wouldn't identification
is cross race. Yes, and in this case, and I
want to go back to it all those years ago,
nineteen seventy nine, right, that's correct, That seems like another century.
(39:09):
It was another century actually, and two white people in Dallas,
Texas were robbed. It was a couple and the woman
was sexually assaulted by two black men. And you and
a buddy were out. What were you doing that night?
We want to wait till a party, and they had
house parties back then. He and I decided earlier to the
(39:29):
the day that we was going to attend this party. Uh,
you know, fruit blocks away from where our parents live.
We lived with our parents at that time. So a boy,
maybe a ten thirty eleven o'clock at night. We proceeded
on to attend the party. And before us we we
acknowledged there was a couple of squad cars, you know,
just sitting there. So we proceeded on to go to
(39:51):
the party, and the cops they stopped us and asked
us where we were going, and we told him we
were on our way to the party, and they at
that point as us to get up against the car,
and they fished us and found a bag of we
marijuana and a little during your pistol which my co
defendant had. So they proceeded to fish just to try
(40:12):
to find more stuff out assumed than we really though.
You know, we were in trouble for the marajuana and
a little gun, you know, a little pistol and whatnot.
So we were thinking that we were going to go
to jail and possibly get out, you know, we were probationers.
I was kind of borderline, you know, with juvenile young
a duct, you know, I guess they could have made
it a felony, you know, a duct felon need case
(40:34):
because you were twenty at the time, right, Well, no,
I was nineth yes, nineteen turning twenties, So I was
kind of borderlinged, I think. Yeah, I was in a
duct straight across the border. I was in a d
he was a young juvenile, right and to be fair,
it's the seventies. Everybody was carrying back then. Yeah, that
was the thing. But the pistol, you know, a couple
of young black eyes and Texas with a pistol. The cops,
(40:54):
don't they don't like that. Yes, yes, and we're the
white cops. Yes they were. They were white cops and
not come me from an all black neighborhood. And but
you had no idea that this robbery, this uh, the
sexual assault had taken place, not in the in the
in the general vicinity. Again, I come from an all
black neighborhood. You know, it's all black. And this is
(41:15):
from what I gathered. This incident happened man through miles away,
which was another neighborhood. I guess at a convenience store
something like that. I'm not really for sure. I mean,
I don't know anything about it. All I know is
they stopped us, ask is where we were going, and
put the cuffs on us, and then uh proceeded to
taking us through the count of jail and then things
(41:37):
went really wrong. Yes, sir, you were not a rich guy,
so you couldn't afford the hire, not by a long shot. Right,
So you you are a public defender, Yes, I did.
And the evidence against you really they had no physical evidence,
because if they had, they would have had to lie
about that because you weren't there. So the only evidence
that had against you was the mirror one and the pistol,
(41:57):
but that had nothing to do with the crime that
you were convicted of. Well, they used it as I mean,
because I guess the guy was robbed. I mean, I
guess that would have took a pistol or something that
so well. But at the same time, I how many
people have pistols. We know there's more guns in America
than our people, and back then in Texas, I imagine
a lot of people are carrying guns. That doesn't prove
(42:18):
you you assaulted and raped and robbed anybody. But there
was no physical evidence. There was no biological evidence. There
was no sperm or hairs or anything else that could
have connected you to this crime, which was since it
was a crime that was physical in nature, that evidence
would have existed and would have been able to be tested.
There wasn't DNA technology back then, but there was enough
blood type or this or that that they could have tested,
(42:40):
and if they had, they would have learned that you
were not the guys that did it. Again, it comes
back to they had circumstantial evidence, which is, here's these
two black guys. There's a lot of black guys though, right,
And here's a little gun, right, And I don't want
to minimize that was a gun. The weed has nothing
to do with anything, right. And then they have these
two white people, this couple who made a mistake. I
(43:01):
don't think they wanted to identify the wrong people. I'm
sure they wanted to do it right. But we know
now and they knew to an extent then that I
wouldn't identification. It's such an imperfect thing. And then, of
course there's all the stuff that happened in the police
station and the ways that these procedures are conducted, whether
it's mug shots or lineups or any other thing. We
(43:22):
know that there's a lot of They've been a lot
of improvements since then, and the Innocence Project has been
behind a lot of those. But there's a lot still
that has to be done to help to diminish the
number of wrongful identifications. But in your case, I'm guessing
that most of those procedures weren't followed. They had a
couple of guys. They probably felt a lot of pressure.
This is a crime that, particularly in the South, a
(43:45):
couple of white people getting sexually assaulted by a couple
of black men. They want to get this off their desk, right,
They're probably a lot of pressure, probably coming from the
top get this out, and they got a couple of
guys and you were one of them. You go to trial,
did you still believe that the system was going to
function correct it? Well, I have to say no in
that regards. As the trial went on, were you becoming
(44:06):
more I mean, obviously you had to be scared, but
were you You said you were a believer in the system,
and a lot of the guys that I've interviewed on
the show and women have said, yeah, I thought that
justice would be done because this doesn't happen. But in
your case, when the jury went out, were you expecting
that they would convict you and send you to seventy
five years in prison like they did? Well, that was
(44:27):
like my whole court. It was like I knew I
was innocent. I know any nothing about this case in
which they were allegend that I committed, and so all
I had was the system. So I sit in the
counter jail awaiting trial so that I can come in
(44:48):
and sit before the accuser. I really didn't know how
to trial system work. I felt that once I go
to trial, I would sit before the you and they
would actually see me and say that's the wrong guy.
But that's not how I win. That didn't happen. And
(45:08):
then the jury went out and they came back in,
and then the worst possible result happened. Yes, get to Burdick.
Was your family in the courtroom? What was that moment? Like?
How did you even deal with it? They did not
let my family in the courtroom. They stopped him at
the back of the court and for whatever reason, they're
not allow him. Man, I was not allowed to testify
(45:30):
due to the public offender that I had told me
that it would be to my best entest not to
take the stand because they were going to make me
look like a you know, a hoot them or something
like this. Sort. Yeah, they were saying that it was
the burden of proof was on them to prove that
I was guilty. That I didn't have to take the
stand and to prove my innocence and it being naive,
(45:53):
you know, to the law. I said, well, I'm innocent,
and I felt like, okay, I really didn't know. So
I sit there and once I made that decision, they
ate more lunch. So you've got to convict. You got
sentenced to seventy five years in prison and your co
defendant was sentenced to life. And then so many years
(46:16):
went by and eventually you found out about the Innocence Project.
Had you given up hope by this point or like,
you know, you were in for decades already by the
time that over two decades. No, no, Uh, I've never
given up hope. I always felt that someday I was
going to be released. I just didn't know when that
(46:36):
day was gonna come, because with the seventy five year sentence,
they were going to carry you out of there in
a box. That was the the only way you were getting out.
But so you wrote a letter to the Innocence Project
in two thousand seven, and obviously we took your case
and that was in this project New York, and then
things started to really turn your way. Yes, it was
actually after the O. J. Simpsons, Try A Big Try
(47:00):
and whatnot. And I think that's somewhere along therew they
became kind of well known, you know, DNA and whatnot.
And uh, I was one who was very active in
the law librarian the rooms in the prison system, and
one of the guys who know that I was working
on my case and trying to get out, told me
about DNA be introduced. You know, told me about the
(47:22):
Instan project and that there was some information that I
could use concern the Instant Project in DNA. And so
I sit in my sale and I had to figure
out a way because I know I was in in
jail for robbery that didn't consist of DNA. I was
never charged of the rape case. It was dismissed, and
(47:45):
so when he told me about the DNA and the
Innocent Project, I had to figure out a way in
which I could write this letter to the Innercent Project
explaining to them that I was in prison for a
robber that I didn't commit. But in the course of
this robber, there was also a rape case that occurred
that I was never tried for they dismissed, and that
(48:08):
if you go back and open up that rape case
and do a DNA on it, it's gonna show that
I didn't. I'm not the perpetrator who raped the lady.
And if I didn't rape the lady who was with
the guy in which they said I robbed, then I'm
not the actual prepetrator. And that's exactly what happened. Fortunately,
the evidence was preserved, it was tested, and you walked
(48:30):
out of prison a freeman in two thousand and ten
after thirty one years. That's correct. In Texas prisons, which
is even saying that name Texas Prisons, it just conjures
up all kinds of nightmare scenarios. I mean, from the
heat to the it's just an unimaginable thing to be
(48:51):
able to persevere and overcome. And now now you're an
ambassador to New Axonorees at the conference. Thank you. You know,
I want to ask you specifically about the conference because
here you are in sunny San Diego an ambassador. That
really means that you're here to help some of the
new newly exonerated people. I was gonna say, man, but
(49:12):
we know it's men and women, and what's that like?
What does that mean to them? What does that mean
to you? Because you're viewed as somebody that is extremely
respected among the entire community for the way you carry yourself.
How does that feel for you and what's the impact
of that role? Well, I'm very honest and pleased to
(49:32):
have that that title, but that it's just a title
to me. I'm very emotional and I take it very
personal when I engage with the guys and welcome these
guys in as family. What I try to do is
give back what was given to me when I was
first released, when I came to my first conference. That
(49:55):
was the three guys that came up to me after,
you know, being confined for such an long time and
being all uptight and not knowing what they expect and
not knowing anymore, it's very challenging. It could be very
scary because you don't know anyone and being in prison
for such a long time. You you're you're in a hard,
(50:17):
a hard environment. It's a very different environment. You just
it's not an environment which you embrace people. It's an
environment in which you keep people at bay. You know,
you keep them away. And so by the guys embracing
me after such a long time and welcome me home
and making me feel a part of family, I took
(50:39):
that very personal. That's stuck with me. And so throughout
the whole time in which I have been free, I
was trying to figure out a way in which I
can become a part of this platform and give back
to these guys and welcome these guys in and allowing
these guys to know that we are a family and
(51:00):
and and we stand by you, and we're gonna support you.
We're gonna do everything we can, me personally in my
power to make it better for these guys, you know,
because we come from different poets of the world in
terms of prison, but we all suffer the same thing
(51:21):
and we all can identify with that, and so it's
gonna take people who understands that they try to make
this more of a family atmosphere, more ofble welcome home.
It's amazing because I heard you use the word family,
um several times in that beautiful speech, and it really
(51:42):
is a family. I mean, that's the sense that I get.
And the experience of being in that room last night
when almost two hundred exnrees got on stage, it was
a beautiful thing to see it and be a part of.
And the speeches that were made and the hugging and
the dancing and the connecting of people who have shared this.
(52:03):
You know, everybody in that room is a member of
a club that nobody wants to belong to. But now
it's amazing because every single asonree I've been privileged to
spend time with is so devoted to helping their fellow
exenrees and making a difference and not only improving their lives,
(52:25):
but in helping other people who are still stuck in
the system. And that's what we're here to do on
the show, is to educate people and inform people and
try to prevent the next Cornelius dupre from ever happening,
you know, ever getting into the system. You know, once
you get started on this work, I was lucky. I
sort of stumbled into it twentysomething years ago. You can't stop,
(52:46):
you know, you can't stop because there's no better feeling.
And I see it in your eyes when you're talking
about it. How you're able to do it now. It's
a high, that is it's impossible to even put it
into words. So we talked about the worst moment of
your life when you were wrongfully convicted and sentenced to
spend the rest of your life in prison. What's the
best thing that's happened since you've been out being married?
(53:09):
Getting married to my wife after courting my wife for
such a long time. My wife is my best friend,
she's my support system. As you know, I met my
wife while I was in prison. I've actually known my
wife for twenty some years. Proud of me getting out
of prison and married my wife. So, my wife's been
there practically thirty years. How did you meet her? Let's
(53:32):
go back to that. Well, I met my wife while
I was in prison. My wife was actually a prison guard. Incredible, Yes,
my wife was. She was going to sam Houston her
she major in criminology. She was on her way to
possibly becoming a award and at some point in time,
and she was actually a prison guard. I be friend
(53:53):
my wife first. She was someone who I highly respected.
She had no clue who I was. I had no
idea here that she would become my wife. Again, she
was a lady who I highly respected. My job in
prison kind of allowed me to kind of get a
little up close and personally with the guards, you know,
being that I had been in prison such a long time,
(54:14):
I was one who was pretty much trusted, you know.
I had a job that allowed me to intermingle with
some of the guards. And so she was one who
I used to talk to a great deal. My wife
as a minister, so she was always talking about Christ.
She's very religious, haunted, and and that's what won me over.
(54:35):
That was one of the president which I prayed to
God to send me a Christian woman in my life.
To kind of hit me state. Of course, I never
knew it would be her. It's an incredible love story.
I mean, but you can't see through the radio, but
Cornelius is a very stylish and handsome, distinguished looking gentleman.
But still you have to have an incredible amount of
(54:56):
game right to be able to meet the woman of
your reams while you're on the inside, right, You've got
tens of millions of people out here on different dating
websites can't even find love, and you found it in
the most hellish place on earth. It's just really beautiful
that you found each other, however, even though it was
a horrible circumstance, and that we're able to connect on
the outside and create a family. And I see when
(55:19):
you're talking about I see the love in your eyes.
It's amazing. So I would like to ask you if
there's anything at all that you want to say. Well,
I would just like to say to kind of enlighten
people about what the Innocent Project is all about. I
really wanted to know that we are family. I feel
that we are now a community. There are so many
(55:41):
innocent men and women nowadays that we are actually a
community within ourselves and that's good, that's great because we
can all identify with each other's hurt. There's a big
world around us that doesn't quite understand what actual you
we innocn see is what the Innocent Project is all about.
(56:03):
And the people who have roam been in prison. These
people all suffer, We all suffer from some form of PTSD,
and we need to be close and identify with one another,
talk to one another so that we can start the
healing process. This is what it's all about. So to
(56:25):
add to that, I always like to give people a
way to get involved, right and so of course you've
heard me say the number of times. Please go to
www dot instance project dot org. You can learn more
about Cornelius and his case and his life. We can
learn how to get involved. Is there another any other
website that you would recommend her? That's that's the place
(56:46):
to go. Yes, that's that's the place to go. That's
the place to go. Please join us, join us in
this movement. There's so many more people in this tragic situation,
and we gotta we gotta give them the hope and
and give them the ability to get there get back
out on the outside. And it achieved the freedom that
they deserved. Don't forget to give us a fantastic review
(57:12):
wherever you get your podcasts. It really helps. And I'm
a proud donor to the Innocence Project and I really
hope you'll join me in supporting this very important cause
and helping to prevent future wrongful convictions. Go to Innocence
Project dot org to learn how to donate and get involved.
I'd like to thank our production team, Connor Hall and
Kevin Awardis. The music in the show is by three
(57:35):
time OSCAR nominated composer Jay Ralph. Be sure to follow
us on Instagram at Wrongful Conviction and on Facebook at
Wrongful Conviction Podcast. Wrongful Conviction with Jason Flam is a
production of Lava for Good Podcasts and association with Signal
Company Number one
Hosts And Creators
Lauren Bright Pacheco
Maggie Freleng
Jason Flom
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