August 7, 2017 • 49 mins
Brian Ferguson was a 20-year-old college student in West Virginia when he was accused in 2002 of fatally shooting a fellow classmate. Brian was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life without parole, and he remained in prison until a committed team of pro bono lawyers won his release and exoneration for the crime in 2013. After his release, Brian returned to Washington, D.C. and soon discovered a gap in services for people reentering society after incarceration. In response to these challenges, he developed Start Line, which he describes as a kind of Yelp for returning citizens. Brian Ferguson enrolled at Georgetown University after meeting government professor Marc Howard, who launched the university’s Prisons and Justice Initiative, which addresses pressing policy and moral issues surrounding prison reform and mass incarceration through programs and events. Professor Howard joins Brian in this episode.
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
I think we have the best legal system. It's just
the people that implemented they get lost along the way
and forget what their job really is. He just kept
on trying to remind me that who was in authority,
who was in control, and how easy it was for
my body to be found in any reality of New
(00:24):
York City. It's a tough prison when you have the
guards going against you because they are the biggest gang
in the prison. They do that. They'll give a guy
a life sentence and go home and eat spaghetti like
it was nothing. And anybody that said, well, why would
you confess to something that you didn't do? My question
to them will be why wouldn't you confess when somebody
(00:46):
is threatening to kill your life? Judge, he said, how
you feel? I said, I'm okay. He said, well, the
dad's You're lucky, Dane. You're going home. This is wrong
for conviction. Welcome back to Wrongful Conviction with Jason Flam.
(01:18):
Today we have two extraordinary guests. Brian Ferguson, who served
eleven years in maximum security prison since the life in
West Virginia and is arising senior at Georgetown and is
currently the executive director of the Mayor's Office of Returning
Citizen Affairs in d C. Brian, welcome to the show.
(01:38):
And with Brian is my friend Mark Howard, who is
a mentor to Brian and to me and a major
force in this movement. Mark is a professor of government
and law at Georgetown University, and he's also an acclaimed author.
His most recent book is Unusually Cruel, Prisons, Punishment and
(01:59):
the Real American Exceptionalism. Mark. It's great to have you here.
Great to be here, Jason. So Brian, let's go back
to the beginning of this crazy story of yours. There's
a lot of typical things in your story that we
see in wrongful conviction, but there's a number of unique characteristics,
not the least of which is that you come from
a very distinguished family, which is a typical of people
(02:22):
who get caught up in the system and who get
wrongfully convicted. Can you talk a little bit about your
growing up and what that was like and when your
family was like right now? Absolutely, um, you know, my
family was very supportive. I have a close knit family,
have a small immediate family. I was born and raised
in Washington, d C. In Northeast UM, d C. In
Michigan Park. Relatively middle class family, but professional. Both of
(02:45):
my parents were working, both of them were college graduates,
and so in that respect, it definitely was unique in
terms of the people that I ended up coming across
in the penitentiary and then in the work that I
do with people that have been incash rated since the
work that you're doing now, right, And you have some
legal professionals in your family as well. Right now, I
have several legal professionals in my family. Ironically, as it
(03:08):
turns out, so my mother, my aunt, my uncle, and
my sister are all in the legal profession. My aunt
is still currently a judge in Washington, d C. Right now. Wow,
that's a lot of lawyers in one family. Let's go
back to how this happened and how you became a
suspect in the first place. You were a college student
at the time, right, right, So I was college student
(03:28):
at West Virginia University, actually doing very well because I
actually was on the track to go to law school
and had intentions and plans on going to law school.
So yeah, I was in West Virginia and my second
year of undergrad So, Brian, you're you're a four point
oh student on your way to law school. Why did
you pick West Virginia to go to school? By the way,
because I was playing sports west Virginia. I played soccer
(03:49):
on the team and was recruited to go there. So
your life was pretty good. Things were looking straight up, right,
That's what I thought, absolutely. I mean, your life was
laid out in front of you like a like a
damn red carpet. It just sounds, it sounds ideal. And
then all of a sudden everything went wrong. You became
a suspect in a murder. Did you even know about it? Right?
(04:12):
So I think, if I'm honest, it would have started
before that with the police. I think it's it's important
to understand the community that that is in like small
towns in West Virginia, especially being from a middle relatively
middle class like I said, family, Um in d C.
You know, dressed relatively well, right, but well for d
C is different for what it is in West Virginia.
(04:35):
So you know, the police assumed that myself and there
were a couple of other guys from New York, a
couple of other guys from Los Angeles who were you know,
generally the same in the same socio economic class. Couldn't
have just been that way because our parents might have
been successful, or or that we came from a different environment,
but it had to have been that we were dealing drugs.
(04:55):
So they thought, oh, you know this, these guys you
know might be and this. We weren't together or anything like.
It was separate individuals, but just that I knew of
these guys, you know, must be the drums are doing
something wrong. And so there were a couple of incidents
with the police where it was like what do you
what are you doing? Or why are you why are
you driving this car? Why don't you live in this
part of town? Why do you live in this part
(05:17):
of town? So those kinds of things I think are
good backdrop to kind of what ultimately happened. And so
with respect to the particular incident, which is which which
led up to I guess me being even included in
the conversation was I had a girlfriend who this other
guy at the school had made advances toward and she
(05:39):
told me that, you know, this guy said X, Y
and Z about you, and and and and doesn't very
much appreciate you. And so I said, okay, Well I
ended up talking to the guy listen. I don't know you.
I don't know you know what the issue is or whatever,
but whatever you have to say, please say it to me.
Don't go to her. We had maybe a three minute
(06:00):
argument and then that was. That was literally it. And
that was in my first year of college. And I
say this in my first year in college because that's
important timeline wise, because this gentleman ended up getting shot
and died. He died from being shot. But that was
a year and a half later. And so you know,
after the argument that I had, apparently, and I learned
(06:20):
this after the fact, you know, he would tell his
friends and I don't like this guy. Look at this
guy driving around. He thinks he's this, he thinks he's that.
He wanted your girl, right, Yeah, basically, but after that interaction,
I had no further interactions with him. And so for
the next year and a half, I went about my business,
he went about his business, and I had no occasion
to to kind of come across him until, like I said,
(06:43):
the police asked me about shooting. So here's what we know.
At seven pm on February second, two thousand and two,
Jerry Wilkins was his name, was shot in the back
in front of his apartment, and court records indicate that
witnesses gave varying descriptions of the gunman. However, prosecutors charge
you with murder because basically they didn't know who did it, right,
(07:06):
and they were able to find somebody or a couple
of people who said, oh, yeah, that's the guy that
there was one guy who had an argument, you know,
because he had gone as you just said, he had
gone around telling people that he had had beef with you.
So here comes the police knocking on your door or
what what happened? So you mentioned the witnesses. I think
is the most interesting and really disappointing thing to me
(07:27):
about the witnesses was that they were varying accounts, but
the one thread of of commonality between the witness accounts
was that it was a very skinny, dark skinned black
gentleman that was was the assailant. Um. I've been confused
with a lot of different things in my life, but skinny,
dark skinned guy is not not really one of them. Skinny,
(07:48):
dark skinned black gentleman. I think you resemble that description
about as much as I do. Uh, Brian is um.
You know, it looks like a football player actually, and
it's not dark skinned, so that was an inconvenient truth,
but they managed to find a way around it, as
they do in these cases certainly, and how they do that.
(08:09):
One of the one of the key moments I think
in the trial when it comes to the witness identification
was when the witness refused to ident I mean, I'm
sitting in court obviously in the defendant's table, but when asked,
the witness refused to identify me as the person whom
she had seen. The witness that was the closest to
the crime was asked about, you know, whether the sailing
(08:31):
was in the core room, and first, well did the
person have a mask on? No, he did not saw
his face. Can you identify him? Have you identified him before?
And can you identify him now? And the answer to
that was no. At that point I was thinking that, Okay,
well this is over and we should really just like
have whatever motion that needs to happen to to drop
the case right now should really happen. And that's that
(08:53):
was my misconception of what kind of the next couple
of hours we're gonna be like. But it wasn't. Let's
go back a little though, so you were you were arrested.
That must have been enough of a shock. That was
a tremendous shock. But let me ask you, did you
even know that he had been killed? No? Not at all.
So it wasn't like talk on campus or anything like that. No.
So they came to my friend's house. I was at
(09:13):
my friend's house and they came in, asked could they
come in? You know, we let them in, and they
started asking me about Jerry Wilkins, right, that's that was
a gentleman's name. I didn't know that his name because
he went by a nickname on campus. So for the
first i'm gonna say three minutes of the conversation, it
was like an abbot and costello. Who are you talking about? Oh?
You know who we're talking about? No, I don't. And
(09:35):
then so one of them said, oh, well you know
it's it's JP. Is is this guy's nickname? Okay, well
I know who you're talking about. And so that at
that point they informed me that he had been shot.
And I had no idea up until that very moment
that that had happened. Did they take you away right
then and there? No, not at all. So they questioned,
they asked if they could question me. I agreed to
(09:55):
let them search everything that I had, because I had
nothing to had. I wanted them to disc help me
as a suspect if I were a suspect, which they
told me that I wasn't, of course, as there want
to do sometimes, but spoke with them, finished the conversation
with them, and kind of just went on about my
business and didn't hear about it again for another I'm
gonna say, six months, and then I got a call.
(10:17):
I was actually back in d C at this time,
working as an intern for one of the largest law
firms in the country on an importer, and I got
a call from my lawyer who told me, so, you've
been indicted for this homicide and you need to come
and turn yourself in. And that was the first time
I had heard about it since. And I'm just always
(10:40):
at a loss to try to imagine the shock, the emotions,
the confusion that everything that must go on inside your
head when this all of a sudden is like, wait,
what the are you talking about? Like in a different way, like,
for instance, if you're picked up and putting a handcuffs
(11:01):
and taking in right, you got to actually now go
and get yourself back there. You've got to take this
journey back to West Virginia to go show up and
be processed. Then what I mean, did you go the
next day? Did you go? Did you? And what? And
what do you? I mean? The first person you called
was who when this happened? So I'm pretty sure that
the first person I called was my mother, who is
(11:22):
and remains, you know, the closest person person to me
obviously other than my wife at this point. But we
talked about it, and you know, obviously it had to
be done to go back to West Virginia. So we
made the arrangements too with and I'm not exactly shot
o't recall exactly how long it was, but it was
within a day or two that we went back. And yeah,
(11:44):
so we went up, met with my lawyer and then
went over to to the courthouse for the initial hearing
that that we had and then you were arraigned. So
I was arraigned, and because the judge made several statements
from the bench saying, I don't really know what's going
on here, and and we're going to assume that this
(12:05):
hearsay evidence um is valid and I'm going to let
it in because other than that, he said from the
bench that the prosecution has no case at all. Set
the bail very low for a capital murder case. Set
the bail ten thousand dollars, and I made bail and
went home, then comes to trial, then comes to trial. Right.
It's interesting you had an ineffective assistance of Council plane
(12:28):
later on in your appeal, and typically, well typically X
honorees were represented, whether or not the head in effects
of asistence of council. In general, there are people who
come from very humble roots and have no ability to
pay for an attorney and are represented by a public defender.
That wasn't the case with you, So let's talk about
that too. Because your family hired an attorney who would,
(12:50):
on paper, have seemed like the right guy to represent
you in this situation, right, right, So the determination was
was made to hire a local attorney because the thinking
behind that was, Okay, this person knows the landscape of
this particular small town. If it's necessary to pick a
jury or to do the many different things that a
lawyer would have to do both pre trial and during trial,
(13:12):
that they would be well suited to do that in
this environment. So that determination was made. So we went
with an attorney that was from the Morgantown which is
where Western University is located, the Morgantown area to represent
me in this case, and that was a terrible mistake
in terms of we went to trial. The trial and
you mentioned earlier it's seeming surreal, I can I can
(13:35):
verify that for you that it was. It didn't seems
it was surreal. I was completely baffled by the fact
that I was even in this situation, that I was
even having to answer for a crime like that, that
that had never even crossed my mind. And the fact
that I'm sitting in this chair and being even accused
of something like that was completely foreign to me. And
(13:55):
you know something I really resented, to be honest with you,
but that I knew that I had to go through.
So in trial, the case against me was literally all hearsay.
It had no evidence whatsoever, and that ultimately was brought
up by the courts that released me. But basically the
evidence in the trial was, oh, our friend, the diseased
(14:18):
Mr Wilkins told us you didn't like him. Our friends
told us that y'all had some type of beef. That
was really it. Mark let's turn to you for a second.
You can't convict somebody in America based on that rumors
a capital Americ case. How's that happen? Well, unfortunately, I
think experienced listeners of your podcast will know by now
that that's sadly, that's not the case that when there's
(14:39):
a lot of pressure in the community to solve a
certain crime, when they identify a suspect, they go down
a certain road that they don't want to go back from.
They get their conviction once that train is in motion.
If you're lying there on the tracks, they run over
you and you get convicted. I want to explore that too,
because in this case, what is killing is the idea
(15:01):
that after Brian had been identified as a suspect, and
after the wheels of let's call it justice and quotes
had started turning, another more likely suspect emerged, right, who
may have actually been the killer? But they never that
was not followed up on because it wasn't the narrative
that they had signed on too. Right, they had picked
(15:24):
their guy. Everybody was determined to solve this case or
to clear it off their desk. Not to solve it, right,
but to get rid of it. And if an innocent
guy got caught in the crosshairs, and so be it.
So the hearsay is admitted into court, which seems odd too.
I mean, would you if you were representing him at
that time, would that still have been allowed to be
(15:46):
admitted into court? Yeah, I don't know. I'm not sure
about the rules of evidence in West Virginia, but I'm
sure they found a way to spin it and sort
of use the notion that there were witnesses who somehow
implicated him even though they didn't as a means of conviction.
And from what I understand about Brian's case, there was
evidence that came out about other suspects that the police
(16:08):
essentially buried and and and put away that his attorney, remember,
paid attorney, private, well respected established attorney, found out about
and didn't follow up on. That is just egregious and
it's unusual. But I think there's a real lesson here,
which is that it's not just about the people who
(16:28):
who can't afford to represent themselves, who get bad public
defenders who can't follow through and give adequate representation. It
happens at every level. If that machinery of justice is
determined to get you, they probably will, regardless of your
personal circumstances. And that's just shocking and in my view,
(16:50):
totally unacceptable and outrageous. It should be in everybody's feel
I mean, because this can happen, and I think Brian
is a great example of this, right, I talk about
the fact that this can happen to anyone. It literally
can happen anyone, or he wouldn't be sitting here because
he ain't that guy. Right, So you got convicted of
capital murder that moment. Take us back there. You're in
(17:13):
the courtroom. You're not that far removed from having been
the guy on campus who had it all? And did
you expect that the jury was going to come back
with a guilty or an innocent verdict? The entire time
I expected them to come back within with an innocent verdict.
I had been making plans because remember, like I said,
I was on bond. I had made bond and had
(17:35):
been home and was driving myself every day from the
hotel back and forth to court. And so the day
of the conviction, I had driven myself from the hotel
to the courtroom because they said they had a decision
and I was eager to get it over with because
I wanted to go home, and so my anticipation was
that it would be not guilty, that I would be
acquitted and go home and then deal with everything kind
(17:58):
of after that. But that was far different from the reality.
I actually knew. I found out that there was a
conviction a little bit before they read it in court,
because when they called the jury out from the box,
they have a jury sheet, and the jury sheet has
different lines, and the first line is not guilty, second
line is, you know, first degree murder, third line, and
(18:19):
fourth line or the different the underlying charges. I guess
you would say so second degree manslaughter are different variations
of of the homicide charge. And when the jury walked out,
the foreman had it in his hand in his hand,
but he had it in his hand, and as he
stepped I could see I couldn't tell which line had
been checked, but I knew that it wasn't the first one,
(18:39):
and I knew that the first one was not guilty.
So for about two minutes, I knew that it was
some kind of guilty verdict, but just didn't know what.
And I was in total disbelief in the courtroom. I'm
assuming your family was there, right, So my entire Like
I said, I have a small family, but we're very
close knit. So I had my mother, was their father,
both my siblings, cousins, and some friends were there and
(19:03):
it must have been I mean, it's just like the
worst kind of imaginable sort of nightmare. You're there surrounded
by all these people who know you couldn't possibly have
done it, who love you and care for you, and
are people who have accomplished so much in their own
lives and have have been a part of the justice
system at one level or another, even including your aud
who's a judge, and who are suddenly powerless to stop
(19:26):
this grave injustice from happening to the person that they
love and care about deeply, which is you. And then
it's all just a I just my head explodes when
I try to even imagine this. And I wasn't there,
but you were there, and you were in the middle
of it, and now you get taken off to prison. Right,
So it was it was worse than that, actually, because
(19:49):
prior to us actually going into the courtroom, the marshals,
who had been obviously there for the entire court proceedings,
took me aside and asked me, you know, not even me,
but they took me in a couple of my family
members aside and asked, do you want to talk to
the media or anything afterward? Because we have sat through
several or hundreds even of of court proceedings here, we
(20:11):
can kind of tell one way or the other which
way it's going to go. We really feel like you
shouldn't even be here, that this is going to be
an acquittal. So if you don't want to talk to
the media, let's figure out a way to get you
out of the back door and into your car and
back to the hotel. Asked me where the hotel was,
because their anticipation was that if you don't want to talk,
(20:32):
then let's, you know, get you out of here. And
and we're honestly sorry for this. And that was the
conversation that I had literally before I walked into the
courtroom itself. Even they knew you were somehow or other,
twelve other people call the jury couldn't figure it out.
So I want to talk about the prison experience. Eleven
years in a place that must have been as terrifying
(20:55):
and foreign to you as could be imagined. So you
got taken off to which prison so initially you're taken
to jail, right, So I spent about a year and
a half in the jail awaiting transferred to prison. So
from the courtroom, I was walked down and put into
(21:15):
a holding cell for about four or five hours to
give my clothes up and the change and into kind
of basically jail jumpsuit. And then later that night I
was transferred to the jail where I ended up staying
for about a year and a half. And then after
a year and a half, I was then transferred to
the state's maximum security prison, which is called Mount Olive
in West Virginia. And the jail the jail is that
(21:37):
is that in in a building or is it like
a Is it a sprawling complex? Is it it's a
standalone complex, So it's it's sprawling, but it's they're all
interconnected because in many cases jails like Rikers Island or
Harris County are even more dangerous in maximum security prisons
because of the fact that there's really no order there, right,
(21:58):
because people are transient. It's seems insane that you were
kept there for a year and a half before transferring
you to prison. I mean, how did you get through that?
So I would say that the worst thing was for me.
You know, I felt like, and this was the case throughout.
I felt like, as a as a man, you can
deal with even a terrible thing that happens to you.
I could deal with something that happened to me, as
(22:19):
bad as it was, and as much as I wanted
to change it, it was something that I felt like
I could adjust to and deal with in the moment,
because I always felt that I would eventually come home.
I just didn't know when. The thing that was the
worst for me was the prospect of losing my parents
or seeing what my incarceration did to my family, and
(22:41):
and you know, the things that they had to deal
with and at the same time be helpless about it.
Like you said, it's nothing that they can do. They
do the time with you. I think anyone who's ever
had a family member in prison, anyone who's been around
a family who has had someone in prison, knows that
those close family members especially do every minute of that
time with that person. And so having my parents, my siblings,
(23:05):
my really close friends go through that it was no
fault of mind, but for sure no fault of their
own and not be able to do anything and not
really know how I'm taking it because I know how
I'm taking it, but they don't, and so they might
expect the worst, and so having them or seeing them
rather go through that, I would say that was definitely
and it's not even close um the worst part of
(23:25):
the experience for me, because we were walking around with
that guilt, right right, I mean, ironically, you're innocent, and
you have guilt because of the fact that you're even
though you're not responsible, you're feeling responsible for this misery
that you know your family is going through only because
they love you and they care, right, It's it's it's
just a it's a totally twisted cycle. Was there anything
(23:58):
positive at all? Yeah, they're you know there there are
ironically a lot of different positive moments. Humans are a
resilient kind of species, and especially if you're a strong person.
And I've seen the system break a lot of people,
and so I don't want to say that they're not strong.
But for the people that you know, have hope, for
the people you know that that are able to kind
(24:20):
of adjust to their not accepted but to adjust to
the environment, you can find people doing things that that
make them feel better. Right, So for me, that was
helping people in even worse situations. In mind, I had
a terrible situation. I was giving a life sentence without
the possibility of parole. And so that meant that if
the sense were kept away that it was I was
(24:42):
never going to be given an opportunity to come home.
I was to die in prison. It was a death sentence,
just an extended one. Well, what is worse than that?
Not much, But you said there are people an even
worse situations. So there are people in in worse situations
in mind, and that you know, they came in didn't
have any kind of family support, still had those really
really long sentences or life sentences, but they didn't have
(25:04):
the advantage of being able to call home and talk
to somebody. They didn't have the advantage of already having
an education. And so you know, when I was able
to help people, to tutor people to get their g D,
or to help them through the really limited college classes
that they had, or to even help them with their
legal work, because a lot of times people were stuck
with the really terrible lawyers or no lawyers at all,
(25:25):
and we're responsible for their own legal work, but couldn't
read or couldn't read well enough to be able to
analyze what their case was as compared to what the
law was, and how to how to juxtapose those two things.
So being able to help people with their with their
law work and also with kind of feeling like they
accomplished something, whether it's getting a g D or taking
(25:46):
college classes. That's where I found my solids amazing that
you can dig deep enough in this midst of this
darkest place that you could possibly find yourself into to
help others. I mean, as simple as that, There's really
no better way of putting it. And so let's get
to the appeal. You had sort of a dream team, right,
not like the O J dream team, like your own
(26:07):
version of that like you had. I mean you actually
had sort of legal royalty on your side, right, Yeah,
I did. And again you know you you said that,
like what could be worse than my situation? My situation
was made far better by the fact that I had
distinct hope as opposed to just kind of nebulous, Oh,
I think and I hope that I'll get out one day.
(26:29):
I really was able to to believe and to kind
of know inside that the people that were working on
my case were the very best. So Comington in Berlin,
which is either the top of one of the very
top law firms in the country, took my case pro bono,
which is fortunately because there's no way, even with the
professional family, that we would have ever been able to
(26:49):
afford their services. And not only did they take my
case pro bono, but they put amazing lawyers on my team,
and so for the first few years of the appeal.
And even with that, it's important to point out that
it was eleven years that it took for my case
to be overturned. But one of my lead attorneys was
Eric Holder, who ultimately became the Attorney General of the
(27:11):
United States and two thousand nine when when President Obama
was elected, and so he did an amazing job. Jim Garland,
Sarah Wilson, Sarah Frederick, Paul Schmidt. There are amazing lawyers
that put not only hard work, but they put their
really their soul into into the case. They called me.
(27:31):
I did as much work with them as I did
with anyone else, and ultimately the case was overturned. It's
really amazing to listen to you. I mean, you're very
calm and sort of ethereal type of being for the
short time I know you, but eleven years it took,
even with the support of an amazing and accomplished and
(27:53):
brilliant family and representation at the highest level, that someone
could hope for eleven years. I'm getting the chills just
thinking about that. And it turned to mark for a second,
because the conviction was overturned. So for the average person,
you go, Okay, that's it, right, go home. Conviction overturned,
(28:16):
Mistakes were made. We're sorry, Mr Ferguson. Can we get
you a ride somewhere, you know what I mean? Do
you need a lift? That's not the approach that West
Virginia took. They still wanted their pound of flesh. Yeah.
So from my understanding is they appealed this reversal, right,
which kept Brian for another year and a half right
in prison, um despite the fact that the conviction had
(28:39):
been overturned, but the indictment still stood, and so they
were appealing the fact that he should have been released
at that point, which is actually very common in hopful
conviction cases, and it's really appalling and sickening, and sometimes
it's even after cleared, you know, demonstrable DNA tests and
they still will appeal that and what is it? It's
so it's so strange, and Brian, maybe you have it
(29:00):
and this might not mark you must because it makes
me nuts. What's the very simple human reflex of not
wanting to admit you were wrong morally? They've been so
invested in it. Sometimes they just want to believe. In
many cases they really do believe it, they convinced themselves,
and then they don't want to admit publicly that often
(29:21):
a case that even might have made their reputation, that
that their reputation of their offices is grounded on, was
based on a terrible, horrific mistake. And this happened so
many times where you think there would be they'd be
on their knees begging for forgiveness and apologize, but no,
and on their way to go look for the guy
(29:41):
who actually did it exactly before he killed somebody else.
And if they really cared about justice, that they cared
about law and order, right, these concepts they like to
talk about, then they would be doing those things. No,
but they want to keep that person that they know
and it come to learn is innocent if they didn't
know it already, keep the person in just to preserve
their reputation, preserve their careers, and it's just unconscionable. You
(30:05):
don't seem angry, what's up like that. You're not the
first person to point that out, But what I'd like
to say when anyone mentions that is that you know
there's a threshold beyond which you're not worried about retribution
or you're not worried about being mad about the situation.
If you would have caught me after maybe two or
three years, yeah, I'd have been pissed. I was still
(30:26):
pissed that my name was even brought up in a
situation like this, that these people twisted the law, that
they hid evidence that they knew another person was was
actually the one who committed the murder. But after a while,
after you have to worry about your parents ever seen
you on the outside again, You have to worry about ever,
you know, as you see your friends getting older, graduating
(30:47):
from college and postgraduate degrees and having families and going
off and doing all kinds of things in the world,
passing you buy at some point you just want to
come home. And so when you get that opportunity, for
me least, when I got the opportunity. I was far
more happy to be home and I have the opportunity
to to build my life again than I am mad. Like,
(31:10):
that's not even a close. Those aren't even competing emotions
in my mind. That's amazing. That's some sort of spiritual
enlightenment going on here. That's uh, that's kind of awesome
to behold. He that with a lot of Exonorees that
I hear it over and over again, but it never
gets old and it never ceases to amaze me. And
everybody that I've I mean, I think every exonore I've
(31:33):
ever met, and there's hundreds of them, have had some variation.
Everyone's got their own take on it. Everyone's got their
own unique way of of explaining it, and and and
each one went through their own journey to get to
that place, and of course, so therefore there everyone has
a little bit of a different way of expressing it.
(31:54):
But it's absolutely remarkable when you hear somebody like you,
I hope you understand how much that inspires everybody else
around you, and how much it inspires guys you know,
like marking myself and so many others who are in
this fight and trying to help prevent other people from
following your situation, trying to trying to help, you know,
other people like you find the freedom that they deserve
(32:15):
and and recover the life that was taken from them
on the outside. And let's get to that too, because
we got to still talk about the Alfred plate, because
it's a fascinating and terrifying concept that is hard for
a lot of people, I think, to wrap themselves around.
Because what happened in your case, which we see not
(32:36):
infrequently in wrongful convictions, is that after this year and
a half where you're now in this crazy limbo, right,
you've known all along you're innocent, and they may have
known all along you're innocent, but now you know that
they know that you're innocent, right, and yet you're still
in prison, and at a certain point you're faced with
(32:58):
a decision that I don't think anybody who hasn't been
there can even conceptualize, which is that it's really, do
you want to bet your life? Hey, Ferguson, we just
fucked you up, right, We just took you and just
ground you up, and you're still here and that annoys us, right,
(33:19):
And now you know you're you're in a position to
make us look bad. We like that. And you're in
a position to be able to sue us and get
a lot of money. We don't like that either, And
the tables are turned. We don't like that. We're gonna
give you a choice, right, which is that even though
we know that the right thing to do is to
let you go and move on with your life. And
(33:42):
like I said, we're going to go look for the
guy who really did this, because there is no statue
of limitations on murder. There's a monster that's walking among
us in our community where we live. But instead they
came to you with a much different idea. Do you
want to talk about that? Yeah, So in my case,
actually they knew the person would incarcerated. He had apparently
been been known to be very violent and especially with guns,
(34:06):
two people in that community, and so as is that happens,
he ended up in prison. And so he was in
the prison, in the federal prison actually for I think
fifteen years. So they weren't actually worried about this person
walking among them, um in their communities. What they were
worried about, like you said, was losing money. Was me
suing when they dropped the case and They made it
(34:27):
very clear to my attorneys after they put in their appeal,
that appeal took a year and a half, that I
had to stay in prison after my case was overturned
the Supreme Court of the States, So the West Virginia
Supreme Court once they got the case, and then they
voted to uphold the decision to release me, making kind
of and what I've heard is unprecedented comments from the
bench that this should have never happened, this is a
(34:49):
travesty and miscarriage of justice, and that this case has
bothered us for years. Saying things like that you would
think would influence the prosecutor one way or the other,
but it didn't because they have the discretion to do
as they will with respect to retrying the case. And
so after they made that decision they being this Supreme
Court and I was released, the West Virginian prosecutors still
(35:10):
had the option to retry me and made it clear
to my attorneys that at this point we could drop
the case, but we're playing with house money, and by
that they meant if we retry him and lose, we're
no worse position optically practically than we are right now.
The case there's egg on our face. You know, everybody
sees that we messed up and then we tried the
wrong person. If we retry him and lose, that that
(35:33):
position doesn't get worse in But that's if we lose.
If we win, he gets a brand new life sentence
with no possibility and parole, and this time there's no
coming back from it. So what do you want to do? So, Mark,
(36:01):
doesn't this sound like double jeopardy? How do they get
away with that? Yeah? Well, I mean when the convictions overturned,
it's like a trial never happened, so they do start over.
And so what they're effectively saying is we are going
to try you for murder and go for the maximum sentence,
which is what he'd had before, or we will let
you go with this Alfred plea where it's time served.
(36:24):
It's technically legally a conviction means there's a record, but
you get to claim your innocence, right, and it's it's
very bizarre choice. It's not always offered, but when it is,
a lot of times people do take it because there's
that fear. What I mean, this is West Virginia, right,
this is going into a courtroom after what he'd been
through already. How's he supposed to know it's not gonna
(36:45):
go the same way again even though there's no evidence.
There's no evidence the first time, and okay, there's more now,
but who knows, right. But the key about the alphad
plea it's not a conviction with just time served and
says I plead guilty, I did it. He maintains his
innocence and he gets to claim his innocence and they
get technically the conviction, but then he's out. And I
(37:07):
think many lawyers would say, take the deal because you
need to get out. Out is out, And there are
people who don't take it and who get convicted and
they could have walked out that door. Yeah, and what
a thing to live with that is so literally, Yeah,
even if it's you know, look, even if you had somebody,
they're saying, look, it's a it's a one percent chance. Brian,
like you just everything is in your favorite I mean,
(37:28):
what are you what are you gonna do? Like you
can You're gonna go back to prison for the rest
of your life. It's almost like a Sophie's choice. But
at the same time, I guess you got to take it.
And we know and there are people who roll the
dice and you could say, well, that's a principal thing
to do. It's a brave thing to do. It's also
a crazy thing to do when you know what they're
capable of. And we've seen cases where they'll come right
(37:50):
out and say, look, we got a new jail house Niche,
We've got somebody else that's gonna we're gonna roll out
and they're going to testify against you, and you know
we're gonna get you. But the key thing is Brian
always maintained his innocence, and he could maintain his innocence
while taking that plea and afterwards, so it's it's very
different from a guilty plea for time serve, which sometimes
innocent people will take where they admit guilt for something
(38:12):
they didn't do because it lets them out. The Alford
plea lets him maintain his innocence throughout as he did.
The prosecution made it very clear, and I think as
close to word for word as I can get, the
quote was we're extremely confident in our ability to convince
our jurors of whatever we want to. So that sounds
like a threat, right. So you were finally free to
(38:36):
go home, and no one would blame you, least of
all me if you came out and decided, you know
what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna I'm gonna get drunk.
I'm just gonna drink. I'm just gonna like I'm going
on a bender, right because look at what I just
came out of, and I deserve to go have to
delive my life like I'm in a rap video, you
know what I mean. But but that's not really what
(38:57):
happened though, right, I mean, your story is remarkable in
so many ways, but not least of which because of
what's going on now. And you know you're now a
senior at Georgetown, so you've got what else is going on.
So right now, I am the executive director of the
(39:19):
Mayor's Office on Returning Citizen Affairs in Washington, d C.
So the office is the only legislatively mandated office of
it's kind of the country, and basically the mission is
to provide information, support and services to individuals who come
home from incarceration back to the district. So you're giving
back in a way that you are uniquely qualified to
(39:42):
be able to do. Correct. It's sort of a great
full circle. Look we'd all like to give you back
those eleven years and make that just just to race
that from what we can just you can't you can't
get you can't ever get back the time. But you know,
when I came home, the thing that was really on
my mind was how many people went out of their
(40:02):
way to help me, how many people stepped out of
their comfort zone, and what would have been completely acceptable
for them to do or to not do, to go
above and beyond to help me. Marcus definitely one of
those people. The lawyers that I had, they didn't need
to do any of the stuff that they did, And
if it weren't for what they did, there's no way
that I would be in a position I am today
(40:23):
or anywhere near there. So it's I believe a requirement
for me to give at least some of that back,
as much of it as I can. The people, like
I said, there are worse positions than I was when
I came home. I was fortunate enough to have a
family to come home to. I didn't have to worry
about where my next meal was coming from, or where
I was gonna get money to get food or anything
(40:43):
like that, or clothes, or where I was gonna live
when I was looking for a job or anything like that.
These are problems that face a lot of people when
they come home from prison, whether they did two years
or twenty years. And I didn't necessarily have to deal
with all that. I still had tremendous hurdles, but the
fact is that I had the supports to men. People
helped me through my situation, and so I want to
do that for other people who are in even worse
(41:05):
situation than I was when I came home. If one
person clapping wouldn't sound so weird, I give you a
round of uplads right after that, you know what I mean.
But yeah, that's that's amazing. And you know, and I
think a lot of people that are that do get
involved in this stuff. I mean, I can't speak for everybody,
but many of us recognize that. But there, before the
grace of God, go I right, this could happen to anyone,
(41:27):
because it did. I think it's great that there's so
much interest and momentum behind an awareness that there's a
huge number of people like you who need help, both
people that were wrongfully convicted and people that are out.
The type of people you're helping now and have served
their time and are just in this country, the punishment
(41:48):
is so disproportionate in general to the crime, and the
punishment continues with the stigmas that exist after you get out.
I mean, some of it is deliberate. Some of its
government mandated punishment. I mean, you can't vote and all
this other stuff. And some of it's just society looking
down on people and not wanted to give people a
second chance. When we see both exoneries and people who
(42:09):
were formally incarcerated, who served their time, as you were saying,
accomplishing extraordinary things, I want to ask two more things.
One is when you're finally released, what you do. I
got the hell out of West Virginia. It's the first
thing I did. I wanted to drive. I told so.
My father picked me up, which you know, my father
had been even when I had a life sentence with
(42:31):
no parole and the appeals were stalling or going nowhere
and there wasn't any discernible date to look forward to.
He was always in my ear. Listen, I'm gonna pick
you up. I'm gonna pick you up from right here,
and we're gonna go wherever you want to go, and
to have him be outside the gate when they let
me go. It was a beautiful thing. It was one
of the best moments in my life. But when we
(42:52):
got in that car, I told him to give me
the hell out of the state. Um. And so we
drove until we got to Maryland, and then we stopped
to eat and I don't even remember where it was,
but it was great. It was amazing. Okay, So now
comes the thing we typically do is everyone who listens
to the show knows I like to just turn over
the floor to you for closing thoughts. Let's call it
(43:13):
closing thoughts. Um. I think if I had to come
up with closing thoughts right now, what's on my mind
is just the opportunity that exists for people that are
coming home from prison. As you mentioned, the federal system
is its own thing, but in a lot of these
states and a lot of these cities, d C especially,
there's a tremendous amount of resources and services that are
(43:33):
available to people. And like you said, the tide is
turning with respect to how people look at the criminal
justice system of mass incarceration. What needs to be done
for people not only when they come home, but before
they even get there. In the prison. The treatment that's
going on, a lot of it is criminal in and
of itself. But d C and and I work at,
(43:54):
you know, the Mayor's Officer and Returning Citizen Affairs. If
you got to come home to somewhere after having been
in cars, ready to DC is a great place. And
you know, we serve as an example for a lot
of different things, one of the which is the band
of Box law that's happened, and I know New York
is following suit on which is basically prevents employers from
screening people for their criminal records and so that gives
(44:15):
people opportunities for jobs. The mayor has dedicated millions of
dollars to the re entry community in d C and
has you know, made of the priority of the needs
of the return of citizen community. You have different nonprofit
organizations all throughout the city and the nation that are
really the kind of backbone of the movement to help
(44:35):
people once they come home. And I want to really
take my hat off, not just because I'm a student there,
but to Georgetown and to other universities like that, but
especially Georgetown because of what they do in the reentry space,
Mark and the Prison Justice initiative is an amazing example
of that that they have identified the needs of this
community as a priority as well, and have utilized their
(44:58):
resources in the brain power that exists in in a
university like that, a top tier university, to be able
to make a change. So I think that my last
thought would be to just take my hat off to
everyone who's doing the work, everybody who's listening that has
either done the work or who was inclined towards people
who are incarcerated, whether wrongfully or otherwise, because ninety seven
(45:22):
percent of people that are incarcerated are coming home. So
the question is what kind of neighbor do you want?
What kind of person do you want is going to
be at your school, is going to be in the
store with you? What kind of society do you want
do you want to participate in and contribute to? So
those things I think are what are on my mind,
and you know what I want to have the audience
take away, Mark, Yeah, So I agree with everything that
(45:43):
Brian just said. But let me just close with something
about Brian, because I think it's probably already clear to
your listeners what an amazing person he is and how
strong and resilient and caring he is, but he has
so many different dimensions that might not come across right
away on this podcast. But I got to know Brian,
remember getting an email from him a couple of years ago,
(46:05):
and you know, dear Professor Howard, very polite and so on,
and saying very little but just about his own experience,
and that he'd be interested in having a meeting sometime.
And I thought, yeah, I definitely imaged it. And when
we met in my office, within five minutes, I knew
this guy is a winner. This guy is unbelievable. And
(46:25):
we talked about the possibility of him coming to Georgetown
because he'd stopped. He'd been a West Virginia and he'd
stopped after two years despite having a great record, but
that was over and it's hard to pick that up again.
And we came up with the idea, why not have
him be a transfer student to Georgetown, And so I
supported that and wrote a letter of recommendation very long,
(46:46):
where basically I was threatening to resign if Georgetown did
AD midnight. I said, if Georgetown is worth anything of
its reputation of in terms of academic excellence, where he
had the record and deserved it, just point um, but
also in terms of Georgetown's tradition of giving back and
as a Jesuit institution of caring for others and so on.
(47:10):
And he was admitted as a transfer student and then
came on and then actually was in my classroom and
I was teaching a course called Prisons and Punishment, which
has about fifty students, and Brian was one of those students.
And we talked beforehand and I said, you know, I'll
let you decide when to reveal your story, and if
you want me to, I'm happy to. If you want to,
(47:32):
you decide when the right time is. And I remember
it was several weeks into the class, and he'd already
been active and asking questions and making comments and so on.
But then at one point he said to the whole class,
now might be a good time for me to tell
you my story, what I've been through, why I have
a connection with this issue. And you should have seen
the jaws drop in that room, total silence and admiration
(47:54):
and awe. And over the next few months, the role
that he had in that classroom and in these students lives,
the respect that they had for him, it was life
changing for them and for me too, And I got
course evaluations at the end of the semester that were
through the roof, but so many of them said having
Brian in this course was unbelievable, right, And so I'm
(48:15):
really grateful to him, but not just in terms of
what he did to me and for my students, but
what he's giving back to so many people around him, right.
And so it's one of these things where you never
would wish this type of horrible thing to happen on anyone,
but in a way, Brian is the person to have
it happened to because he is so strong and he's
taking from that something to help change this horrific system.
(48:40):
And I think he's going to be a leader in
the future, whether it's in d C or nationally. He's
got an incredible future and we're all going to hear
a lot more from him and about him. I think,
don't forget to give us a fantastic review. Wherever you
get your podcasts, it really helps. And I'm a proud
(49:03):
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 Wardis.
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(49:24):
Instagram at Wrongful Conviction and on Facebook at Wrongful Conviction Podcast.
Wrongful Conviction with Jason Flam is a production of Lava
for Good Podcasts in association with Signal Company Number one
I think we have the best legal system. It's just
the people that implemented they get lost along the way
and forget what their job really is. He just kept
on trying to remind me that who was in authority,
who was in control, and how easy it was for
my body to be found in any reality of New
(00:24):
York City. It's a tough prison when you have the
guards going against you because they are the biggest gang
in the prison. They do that. They'll give a guy
a life sentence and go home and eat spaghetti like
it was nothing. And anybody that said, well, why would
you confess to something that you didn't do? My question
to them will be why wouldn't you confess when somebody
(00:46):
is threatening to kill your life? Judge, he said, how
you feel? I said, I'm okay. He said, well, the
dad's You're lucky, Dane. You're going home. This is wrong
for conviction. Welcome back to Wrongful Conviction with Jason Flam.
(01:18):
Today we have two extraordinary guests. Brian Ferguson, who served
eleven years in maximum security prison since the life in
West Virginia and is arising senior at Georgetown and is
currently the executive director of the Mayor's Office of Returning
Citizen Affairs in d C. Brian, welcome to the show.
(01:38):
And with Brian is my friend Mark Howard, who is
a mentor to Brian and to me and a major
force in this movement. Mark is a professor of government
and law at Georgetown University, and he's also an acclaimed author.
His most recent book is Unusually Cruel, Prisons, Punishment and
(01:59):
the Real American Exceptionalism. Mark. It's great to have you here.
Great to be here, Jason. So Brian, let's go back
to the beginning of this crazy story of yours. There's
a lot of typical things in your story that we
see in wrongful conviction, but there's a number of unique characteristics,
not the least of which is that you come from
a very distinguished family, which is a typical of people
(02:22):
who get caught up in the system and who get
wrongfully convicted. Can you talk a little bit about your
growing up and what that was like and when your
family was like right now? Absolutely, um, you know, my
family was very supportive. I have a close knit family,
have a small immediate family. I was born and raised
in Washington, d C. In Northeast UM, d C. In
Michigan Park. Relatively middle class family, but professional. Both of
(02:45):
my parents were working, both of them were college graduates,
and so in that respect, it definitely was unique in
terms of the people that I ended up coming across
in the penitentiary and then in the work that I
do with people that have been incash rated since the
work that you're doing now, right, And you have some
legal professionals in your family as well. Right now, I
have several legal professionals in my family. Ironically, as it
(03:08):
turns out, so my mother, my aunt, my uncle, and
my sister are all in the legal profession. My aunt
is still currently a judge in Washington, d C. Right now. Wow,
that's a lot of lawyers in one family. Let's go
back to how this happened and how you became a
suspect in the first place. You were a college student
at the time, right, right, So I was college student
(03:28):
at West Virginia University, actually doing very well because I
actually was on the track to go to law school
and had intentions and plans on going to law school.
So yeah, I was in West Virginia and my second
year of undergrad So, Brian, you're you're a four point
oh student on your way to law school. Why did
you pick West Virginia to go to school? By the way,
because I was playing sports west Virginia. I played soccer
(03:49):
on the team and was recruited to go there. So
your life was pretty good. Things were looking straight up, right,
That's what I thought, absolutely. I mean, your life was
laid out in front of you like a like a
damn red carpet. It just sounds, it sounds ideal. And
then all of a sudden everything went wrong. You became
a suspect in a murder. Did you even know about it? Right?
(04:12):
So I think, if I'm honest, it would have started
before that with the police. I think it's it's important
to understand the community that that is in like small
towns in West Virginia, especially being from a middle relatively
middle class like I said, family, Um in d C.
You know, dressed relatively well, right, but well for d
C is different for what it is in West Virginia.
(04:35):
So you know, the police assumed that myself and there
were a couple of other guys from New York, a
couple of other guys from Los Angeles who were you know,
generally the same in the same socio economic class. Couldn't
have just been that way because our parents might have
been successful, or or that we came from a different environment,
but it had to have been that we were dealing drugs.
(04:55):
So they thought, oh, you know this, these guys you
know might be and this. We weren't together or anything like.
It was separate individuals, but just that I knew of
these guys, you know, must be the drums are doing
something wrong. And so there were a couple of incidents
with the police where it was like what do you
what are you doing? Or why are you why are
you driving this car? Why don't you live in this
part of town? Why do you live in this part
(05:17):
of town? So those kinds of things I think are
good backdrop to kind of what ultimately happened. And so
with respect to the particular incident, which is which which
led up to I guess me being even included in
the conversation was I had a girlfriend who this other
guy at the school had made advances toward and she
(05:39):
told me that, you know, this guy said X, Y
and Z about you, and and and and doesn't very
much appreciate you. And so I said, okay, Well I
ended up talking to the guy listen. I don't know you.
I don't know you know what the issue is or whatever,
but whatever you have to say, please say it to me.
Don't go to her. We had maybe a three minute
(06:00):
argument and then that was. That was literally it. And
that was in my first year of college. And I
say this in my first year in college because that's
important timeline wise, because this gentleman ended up getting shot
and died. He died from being shot. But that was
a year and a half later. And so you know,
after the argument that I had, apparently, and I learned
(06:20):
this after the fact, you know, he would tell his
friends and I don't like this guy. Look at this
guy driving around. He thinks he's this, he thinks he's that.
He wanted your girl, right, Yeah, basically, but after that interaction,
I had no further interactions with him. And so for
the next year and a half, I went about my business,
he went about his business, and I had no occasion
to to kind of come across him until, like I said,
(06:43):
the police asked me about shooting. So here's what we know.
At seven pm on February second, two thousand and two,
Jerry Wilkins was his name, was shot in the back
in front of his apartment, and court records indicate that
witnesses gave varying descriptions of the gunman. However, prosecutors charge
you with murder because basically they didn't know who did it, right,
(07:06):
and they were able to find somebody or a couple
of people who said, oh, yeah, that's the guy that
there was one guy who had an argument, you know,
because he had gone as you just said, he had
gone around telling people that he had had beef with you.
So here comes the police knocking on your door or
what what happened? So you mentioned the witnesses. I think
is the most interesting and really disappointing thing to me
(07:27):
about the witnesses was that they were varying accounts, but
the one thread of of commonality between the witness accounts
was that it was a very skinny, dark skinned black
gentleman that was was the assailant. Um. I've been confused
with a lot of different things in my life, but skinny,
dark skinned guy is not not really one of them. Skinny,
(07:48):
dark skinned black gentleman. I think you resemble that description
about as much as I do. Uh, Brian is um.
You know, it looks like a football player actually, and
it's not dark skinned, so that was an inconvenient truth,
but they managed to find a way around it, as
they do in these cases certainly, and how they do that.
(08:09):
One of the one of the key moments I think
in the trial when it comes to the witness identification
was when the witness refused to ident I mean, I'm
sitting in court obviously in the defendant's table, but when asked,
the witness refused to identify me as the person whom
she had seen. The witness that was the closest to
the crime was asked about, you know, whether the sailing
(08:31):
was in the core room, and first, well did the
person have a mask on? No, he did not saw
his face. Can you identify him? Have you identified him before?
And can you identify him now? And the answer to
that was no. At that point I was thinking that, Okay,
well this is over and we should really just like
have whatever motion that needs to happen to to drop
the case right now should really happen. And that's that
(08:53):
was my misconception of what kind of the next couple
of hours we're gonna be like. But it wasn't. Let's
go back a little though, so you were you were arrested.
That must have been enough of a shock. That was
a tremendous shock. But let me ask you, did you
even know that he had been killed? No? Not at all.
So it wasn't like talk on campus or anything like that. No.
So they came to my friend's house. I was at
(09:13):
my friend's house and they came in, asked could they
come in? You know, we let them in, and they
started asking me about Jerry Wilkins, right, that's that was
a gentleman's name. I didn't know that his name because
he went by a nickname on campus. So for the
first i'm gonna say three minutes of the conversation, it
was like an abbot and costello. Who are you talking about? Oh?
You know who we're talking about? No, I don't. And
(09:35):
then so one of them said, oh, well you know
it's it's JP. Is is this guy's nickname? Okay, well
I know who you're talking about. And so that at
that point they informed me that he had been shot.
And I had no idea up until that very moment
that that had happened. Did they take you away right
then and there? No, not at all. So they questioned,
they asked if they could question me. I agreed to
(09:55):
let them search everything that I had, because I had
nothing to had. I wanted them to disc help me
as a suspect if I were a suspect, which they
told me that I wasn't, of course, as there want
to do sometimes, but spoke with them, finished the conversation
with them, and kind of just went on about my
business and didn't hear about it again for another I'm
gonna say, six months, and then I got a call.
(10:17):
I was actually back in d C at this time,
working as an intern for one of the largest law
firms in the country on an importer, and I got
a call from my lawyer who told me, so, you've
been indicted for this homicide and you need to come
and turn yourself in. And that was the first time
I had heard about it since. And I'm just always
(10:40):
at a loss to try to imagine the shock, the emotions,
the confusion that everything that must go on inside your
head when this all of a sudden is like, wait,
what the are you talking about? Like in a different way, like,
for instance, if you're picked up and putting a handcuffs
(11:01):
and taking in right, you got to actually now go
and get yourself back there. You've got to take this
journey back to West Virginia to go show up and
be processed. Then what I mean, did you go the
next day? Did you go? Did you? And what? And
what do you? I mean? The first person you called
was who when this happened? So I'm pretty sure that
the first person I called was my mother, who is
(11:22):
and remains, you know, the closest person person to me
obviously other than my wife at this point. But we
talked about it, and you know, obviously it had to
be done to go back to West Virginia. So we
made the arrangements too with and I'm not exactly shot
o't recall exactly how long it was, but it was
within a day or two that we went back. And yeah,
(11:44):
so we went up, met with my lawyer and then
went over to to the courthouse for the initial hearing
that that we had and then you were arraigned. So
I was arraigned, and because the judge made several statements
from the bench saying, I don't really know what's going
on here, and and we're going to assume that this
(12:05):
hearsay evidence um is valid and I'm going to let
it in because other than that, he said from the
bench that the prosecution has no case at all. Set
the bail very low for a capital murder case. Set
the bail ten thousand dollars, and I made bail and
went home, then comes to trial, then comes to trial. Right.
It's interesting you had an ineffective assistance of Council plane
(12:28):
later on in your appeal, and typically, well typically X
honorees were represented, whether or not the head in effects
of asistence of council. In general, there are people who
come from very humble roots and have no ability to
pay for an attorney and are represented by a public defender.
That wasn't the case with you, So let's talk about
that too. Because your family hired an attorney who would,
(12:50):
on paper, have seemed like the right guy to represent
you in this situation, right, right, So the determination was
was made to hire a local attorney because the thinking
behind that was, Okay, this person knows the landscape of
this particular small town. If it's necessary to pick a
jury or to do the many different things that a
lawyer would have to do both pre trial and during trial,
(13:12):
that they would be well suited to do that in
this environment. So that determination was made. So we went
with an attorney that was from the Morgantown which is
where Western University is located, the Morgantown area to represent
me in this case, and that was a terrible mistake
in terms of we went to trial. The trial and
you mentioned earlier it's seeming surreal, I can I can
(13:35):
verify that for you that it was. It didn't seems
it was surreal. I was completely baffled by the fact
that I was even in this situation, that I was
even having to answer for a crime like that, that
that had never even crossed my mind. And the fact
that I'm sitting in this chair and being even accused
of something like that was completely foreign to me. And
(13:55):
you know something I really resented, to be honest with you,
but that I knew that I had to go through.
So in trial, the case against me was literally all hearsay.
It had no evidence whatsoever, and that ultimately was brought
up by the courts that released me. But basically the
evidence in the trial was, oh, our friend, the diseased
(14:18):
Mr Wilkins told us you didn't like him. Our friends
told us that y'all had some type of beef. That
was really it. Mark let's turn to you for a second.
You can't convict somebody in America based on that rumors
a capital Americ case. How's that happen? Well, unfortunately, I
think experienced listeners of your podcast will know by now
that that's sadly, that's not the case that when there's
(14:39):
a lot of pressure in the community to solve a
certain crime, when they identify a suspect, they go down
a certain road that they don't want to go back from.
They get their conviction once that train is in motion.
If you're lying there on the tracks, they run over
you and you get convicted. I want to explore that too,
because in this case, what is killing is the idea
(15:01):
that after Brian had been identified as a suspect, and
after the wheels of let's call it justice and quotes
had started turning, another more likely suspect emerged, right, who
may have actually been the killer? But they never that
was not followed up on because it wasn't the narrative
that they had signed on too. Right, they had picked
(15:24):
their guy. Everybody was determined to solve this case or
to clear it off their desk. Not to solve it, right,
but to get rid of it. And if an innocent
guy got caught in the crosshairs, and so be it.
So the hearsay is admitted into court, which seems odd too.
I mean, would you if you were representing him at
that time, would that still have been allowed to be
(15:46):
admitted into court? Yeah, I don't know. I'm not sure
about the rules of evidence in West Virginia, but I'm
sure they found a way to spin it and sort
of use the notion that there were witnesses who somehow
implicated him even though they didn't as a means of conviction.
And from what I understand about Brian's case, there was
evidence that came out about other suspects that the police
(16:08):
essentially buried and and and put away that his attorney, remember,
paid attorney, private, well respected established attorney, found out about
and didn't follow up on. That is just egregious and
it's unusual. But I think there's a real lesson here,
which is that it's not just about the people who
(16:28):
who can't afford to represent themselves, who get bad public
defenders who can't follow through and give adequate representation. It
happens at every level. If that machinery of justice is
determined to get you, they probably will, regardless of your
personal circumstances. And that's just shocking and in my view,
(16:50):
totally unacceptable and outrageous. It should be in everybody's feel
I mean, because this can happen, and I think Brian
is a great example of this, right, I talk about
the fact that this can happen to anyone. It literally
can happen anyone, or he wouldn't be sitting here because
he ain't that guy. Right, So you got convicted of
capital murder that moment. Take us back there. You're in
(17:13):
the courtroom. You're not that far removed from having been
the guy on campus who had it all? And did
you expect that the jury was going to come back
with a guilty or an innocent verdict? The entire time
I expected them to come back within with an innocent verdict.
I had been making plans because remember, like I said,
I was on bond. I had made bond and had
(17:35):
been home and was driving myself every day from the
hotel back and forth to court. And so the day
of the conviction, I had driven myself from the hotel
to the courtroom because they said they had a decision
and I was eager to get it over with because
I wanted to go home, and so my anticipation was
that it would be not guilty, that I would be
acquitted and go home and then deal with everything kind
(17:58):
of after that. But that was far different from the reality.
I actually knew. I found out that there was a
conviction a little bit before they read it in court,
because when they called the jury out from the box,
they have a jury sheet, and the jury sheet has
different lines, and the first line is not guilty, second
line is, you know, first degree murder, third line, and
(18:19):
fourth line or the different the underlying charges. I guess
you would say so second degree manslaughter are different variations
of of the homicide charge. And when the jury walked out,
the foreman had it in his hand in his hand,
but he had it in his hand, and as he
stepped I could see I couldn't tell which line had
been checked, but I knew that it wasn't the first one,
(18:39):
and I knew that the first one was not guilty.
So for about two minutes, I knew that it was
some kind of guilty verdict, but just didn't know what.
And I was in total disbelief in the courtroom. I'm
assuming your family was there, right, So my entire Like
I said, I have a small family, but we're very
close knit. So I had my mother, was their father,
both my siblings, cousins, and some friends were there and
(19:03):
it must have been I mean, it's just like the
worst kind of imaginable sort of nightmare. You're there surrounded
by all these people who know you couldn't possibly have
done it, who love you and care for you, and
are people who have accomplished so much in their own
lives and have have been a part of the justice
system at one level or another, even including your aud
who's a judge, and who are suddenly powerless to stop
(19:26):
this grave injustice from happening to the person that they
love and care about deeply, which is you. And then
it's all just a I just my head explodes when
I try to even imagine this. And I wasn't there,
but you were there, and you were in the middle
of it, and now you get taken off to prison. Right,
So it was it was worse than that, actually, because
(19:49):
prior to us actually going into the courtroom, the marshals,
who had been obviously there for the entire court proceedings,
took me aside and asked me, you know, not even me,
but they took me in a couple of my family
members aside and asked, do you want to talk to
the media or anything afterward? Because we have sat through
several or hundreds even of of court proceedings here, we
(20:11):
can kind of tell one way or the other which
way it's going to go. We really feel like you
shouldn't even be here, that this is going to be
an acquittal. So if you don't want to talk to
the media, let's figure out a way to get you
out of the back door and into your car and
back to the hotel. Asked me where the hotel was,
because their anticipation was that if you don't want to talk,
(20:32):
then let's, you know, get you out of here. And
and we're honestly sorry for this. And that was the
conversation that I had literally before I walked into the
courtroom itself. Even they knew you were somehow or other,
twelve other people call the jury couldn't figure it out.
So I want to talk about the prison experience. Eleven
years in a place that must have been as terrifying
(20:55):
and foreign to you as could be imagined. So you
got taken off to which prison so initially you're taken
to jail, right, So I spent about a year and
a half in the jail awaiting transferred to prison. So
from the courtroom, I was walked down and put into
(21:15):
a holding cell for about four or five hours to
give my clothes up and the change and into kind
of basically jail jumpsuit. And then later that night I
was transferred to the jail where I ended up staying
for about a year and a half. And then after
a year and a half, I was then transferred to
the state's maximum security prison, which is called Mount Olive
in West Virginia. And the jail the jail is that
(21:37):
is that in in a building or is it like
a Is it a sprawling complex? Is it it's a
standalone complex, So it's it's sprawling, but it's they're all
interconnected because in many cases jails like Rikers Island or
Harris County are even more dangerous in maximum security prisons
because of the fact that there's really no order there, right,
(21:58):
because people are transient. It's seems insane that you were
kept there for a year and a half before transferring
you to prison. I mean, how did you get through that?
So I would say that the worst thing was for me.
You know, I felt like, and this was the case throughout.
I felt like, as a as a man, you can
deal with even a terrible thing that happens to you.
I could deal with something that happened to me, as
(22:19):
bad as it was, and as much as I wanted
to change it, it was something that I felt like
I could adjust to and deal with in the moment,
because I always felt that I would eventually come home.
I just didn't know when. The thing that was the
worst for me was the prospect of losing my parents
or seeing what my incarceration did to my family, and
(22:41):
and you know, the things that they had to deal
with and at the same time be helpless about it.
Like you said, it's nothing that they can do. They
do the time with you. I think anyone who's ever
had a family member in prison, anyone who's been around
a family who has had someone in prison, knows that
those close family members especially do every minute of that
time with that person. And so having my parents, my siblings,
(23:05):
my really close friends go through that it was no
fault of mind, but for sure no fault of their
own and not be able to do anything and not
really know how I'm taking it because I know how
I'm taking it, but they don't, and so they might
expect the worst, and so having them or seeing them
rather go through that, I would say that was definitely
and it's not even close um the worst part of
(23:25):
the experience for me, because we were walking around with
that guilt, right right, I mean, ironically, you're innocent, and
you have guilt because of the fact that you're even
though you're not responsible, you're feeling responsible for this misery
that you know your family is going through only because
they love you and they care, right, It's it's it's
just a it's a totally twisted cycle. Was there anything
(23:58):
positive at all? Yeah, they're you know there there are
ironically a lot of different positive moments. Humans are a
resilient kind of species, and especially if you're a strong person.
And I've seen the system break a lot of people,
and so I don't want to say that they're not strong.
But for the people that you know, have hope, for
the people you know that that are able to kind
(24:20):
of adjust to their not accepted but to adjust to
the environment, you can find people doing things that that
make them feel better. Right, So for me, that was
helping people in even worse situations. In mind, I had
a terrible situation. I was giving a life sentence without
the possibility of parole. And so that meant that if
the sense were kept away that it was I was
(24:42):
never going to be given an opportunity to come home.
I was to die in prison. It was a death sentence,
just an extended one. Well, what is worse than that?
Not much, But you said there are people an even
worse situations. So there are people in in worse situations
in mind, and that you know, they came in didn't
have any kind of family support, still had those really
really long sentences or life sentences, but they didn't have
(25:04):
the advantage of being able to call home and talk
to somebody. They didn't have the advantage of already having
an education. And so you know, when I was able
to help people, to tutor people to get their g D,
or to help them through the really limited college classes
that they had, or to even help them with their
legal work, because a lot of times people were stuck
with the really terrible lawyers or no lawyers at all,
(25:25):
and we're responsible for their own legal work, but couldn't
read or couldn't read well enough to be able to
analyze what their case was as compared to what the
law was, and how to how to juxtapose those two things.
So being able to help people with their with their
law work and also with kind of feeling like they
accomplished something, whether it's getting a g D or taking
(25:46):
college classes. That's where I found my solids amazing that
you can dig deep enough in this midst of this
darkest place that you could possibly find yourself into to
help others. I mean, as simple as that, There's really
no better way of putting it. And so let's get
to the appeal. You had sort of a dream team, right,
not like the O J dream team, like your own
(26:07):
version of that like you had. I mean you actually
had sort of legal royalty on your side, right, Yeah,
I did. And again you know you you said that,
like what could be worse than my situation? My situation
was made far better by the fact that I had
distinct hope as opposed to just kind of nebulous, Oh,
I think and I hope that I'll get out one day.
(26:29):
I really was able to to believe and to kind
of know inside that the people that were working on
my case were the very best. So Comington in Berlin,
which is either the top of one of the very
top law firms in the country, took my case pro bono,
which is fortunately because there's no way, even with the
professional family, that we would have ever been able to
(26:49):
afford their services. And not only did they take my
case pro bono, but they put amazing lawyers on my team,
and so for the first few years of the appeal.
And even with that, it's important to point out that
it was eleven years that it took for my case
to be overturned. But one of my lead attorneys was
Eric Holder, who ultimately became the Attorney General of the
(27:11):
United States and two thousand nine when when President Obama
was elected, and so he did an amazing job. Jim Garland,
Sarah Wilson, Sarah Frederick, Paul Schmidt. There are amazing lawyers
that put not only hard work, but they put their
really their soul into into the case. They called me.
(27:31):
I did as much work with them as I did
with anyone else, and ultimately the case was overturned. It's
really amazing to listen to you. I mean, you're very
calm and sort of ethereal type of being for the
short time I know you, but eleven years it took,
even with the support of an amazing and accomplished and
(27:53):
brilliant family and representation at the highest level, that someone
could hope for eleven years. I'm getting the chills just
thinking about that. And it turned to mark for a second,
because the conviction was overturned. So for the average person,
you go, Okay, that's it, right, go home. Conviction overturned,
(28:16):
Mistakes were made. We're sorry, Mr Ferguson. Can we get
you a ride somewhere, you know what I mean? Do
you need a lift? That's not the approach that West
Virginia took. They still wanted their pound of flesh. Yeah.
So from my understanding is they appealed this reversal, right,
which kept Brian for another year and a half right
in prison, um despite the fact that the conviction had
(28:39):
been overturned, but the indictment still stood, and so they
were appealing the fact that he should have been released
at that point, which is actually very common in hopful
conviction cases, and it's really appalling and sickening, and sometimes
it's even after cleared, you know, demonstrable DNA tests and
they still will appeal that and what is it? It's
so it's so strange, and Brian, maybe you have it
(29:00):
and this might not mark you must because it makes
me nuts. What's the very simple human reflex of not
wanting to admit you were wrong morally? They've been so
invested in it. Sometimes they just want to believe. In
many cases they really do believe it, they convinced themselves,
and then they don't want to admit publicly that often
(29:21):
a case that even might have made their reputation, that
that their reputation of their offices is grounded on, was
based on a terrible, horrific mistake. And this happened so
many times where you think there would be they'd be
on their knees begging for forgiveness and apologize, but no,
and on their way to go look for the guy
(29:41):
who actually did it exactly before he killed somebody else.
And if they really cared about justice, that they cared
about law and order, right, these concepts they like to
talk about, then they would be doing those things. No,
but they want to keep that person that they know
and it come to learn is innocent if they didn't
know it already, keep the person in just to preserve
their reputation, preserve their careers, and it's just unconscionable. You
(30:05):
don't seem angry, what's up like that. You're not the
first person to point that out, But what I'd like
to say when anyone mentions that is that you know
there's a threshold beyond which you're not worried about retribution
or you're not worried about being mad about the situation.
If you would have caught me after maybe two or
three years, yeah, I'd have been pissed. I was still
(30:26):
pissed that my name was even brought up in a
situation like this, that these people twisted the law, that
they hid evidence that they knew another person was was
actually the one who committed the murder. But after a while,
after you have to worry about your parents ever seen
you on the outside again, You have to worry about ever,
you know, as you see your friends getting older, graduating
(30:47):
from college and postgraduate degrees and having families and going
off and doing all kinds of things in the world,
passing you buy at some point you just want to
come home. And so when you get that opportunity, for
me least, when I got the opportunity. I was far
more happy to be home and I have the opportunity
to to build my life again than I am mad. Like,
(31:10):
that's not even a close. Those aren't even competing emotions
in my mind. That's amazing. That's some sort of spiritual
enlightenment going on here. That's uh, that's kind of awesome
to behold. He that with a lot of Exonorees that
I hear it over and over again, but it never
gets old and it never ceases to amaze me. And
everybody that I've I mean, I think every exonore I've
(31:33):
ever met, and there's hundreds of them, have had some variation.
Everyone's got their own take on it. Everyone's got their
own unique way of of explaining it, and and and
each one went through their own journey to get to
that place, and of course, so therefore there everyone has
a little bit of a different way of expressing it.
(31:54):
But it's absolutely remarkable when you hear somebody like you,
I hope you understand how much that inspires everybody else
around you, and how much it inspires guys you know,
like marking myself and so many others who are in
this fight and trying to help prevent other people from
following your situation, trying to trying to help, you know,
other people like you find the freedom that they deserve
(32:15):
and and recover the life that was taken from them
on the outside. And let's get to that too, because
we got to still talk about the Alfred plate, because
it's a fascinating and terrifying concept that is hard for
a lot of people, I think, to wrap themselves around.
Because what happened in your case, which we see not
(32:36):
infrequently in wrongful convictions, is that after this year and
a half where you're now in this crazy limbo, right,
you've known all along you're innocent, and they may have
known all along you're innocent, but now you know that
they know that you're innocent, right, and yet you're still
in prison, and at a certain point you're faced with
(32:58):
a decision that I don't think anybody who hasn't been
there can even conceptualize, which is that it's really, do
you want to bet your life? Hey, Ferguson, we just
fucked you up, right, We just took you and just
ground you up, and you're still here and that annoys us, right,
(33:19):
And now you know you're you're in a position to
make us look bad. We like that. And you're in
a position to be able to sue us and get
a lot of money. We don't like that either, And
the tables are turned. We don't like that. We're gonna
give you a choice, right, which is that even though
we know that the right thing to do is to
let you go and move on with your life. And
(33:42):
like I said, we're going to go look for the
guy who really did this, because there is no statue
of limitations on murder. There's a monster that's walking among
us in our community where we live. But instead they
came to you with a much different idea. Do you
want to talk about that? Yeah, So in my case,
actually they knew the person would incarcerated. He had apparently
been been known to be very violent and especially with guns,
(34:06):
two people in that community, and so as is that happens,
he ended up in prison. And so he was in
the prison, in the federal prison actually for I think
fifteen years. So they weren't actually worried about this person
walking among them, um in their communities. What they were
worried about, like you said, was losing money. Was me
suing when they dropped the case and They made it
(34:27):
very clear to my attorneys after they put in their appeal,
that appeal took a year and a half, that I
had to stay in prison after my case was overturned
the Supreme Court of the States, So the West Virginia
Supreme Court once they got the case, and then they
voted to uphold the decision to release me, making kind
of and what I've heard is unprecedented comments from the
bench that this should have never happened, this is a
(34:49):
travesty and miscarriage of justice, and that this case has
bothered us for years. Saying things like that you would
think would influence the prosecutor one way or the other,
but it didn't because they have the discretion to do
as they will with respect to retrying the case. And
so after they made that decision they being this Supreme
Court and I was released, the West Virginian prosecutors still
(35:10):
had the option to retry me and made it clear
to my attorneys that at this point we could drop
the case, but we're playing with house money, and by
that they meant if we retry him and lose, we're
no worse position optically practically than we are right now.
The case there's egg on our face. You know, everybody
sees that we messed up and then we tried the
wrong person. If we retry him and lose, that that
(35:33):
position doesn't get worse in But that's if we lose.
If we win, he gets a brand new life sentence
with no possibility and parole, and this time there's no
coming back from it. So what do you want to do? So, Mark,
(36:01):
doesn't this sound like double jeopardy? How do they get
away with that? Yeah? Well, I mean when the convictions overturned,
it's like a trial never happened, so they do start over.
And so what they're effectively saying is we are going
to try you for murder and go for the maximum sentence,
which is what he'd had before, or we will let
you go with this Alfred plea where it's time served.
(36:24):
It's technically legally a conviction means there's a record, but
you get to claim your innocence, right, and it's it's
very bizarre choice. It's not always offered, but when it is,
a lot of times people do take it because there's
that fear. What I mean, this is West Virginia, right,
this is going into a courtroom after what he'd been
through already. How's he supposed to know it's not gonna
(36:45):
go the same way again even though there's no evidence.
There's no evidence the first time, and okay, there's more now,
but who knows, right. But the key about the alphad
plea it's not a conviction with just time served and
says I plead guilty, I did it. He maintains his
innocence and he gets to claim his innocence and they
get technically the conviction, but then he's out. And I
(37:07):
think many lawyers would say, take the deal because you
need to get out. Out is out, And there are
people who don't take it and who get convicted and
they could have walked out that door. Yeah, and what
a thing to live with that is so literally, Yeah,
even if it's you know, look, even if you had somebody,
they're saying, look, it's a it's a one percent chance. Brian,
like you just everything is in your favorite I mean,
(37:28):
what are you what are you gonna do? Like you
can You're gonna go back to prison for the rest
of your life. It's almost like a Sophie's choice. But
at the same time, I guess you got to take it.
And we know and there are people who roll the
dice and you could say, well, that's a principal thing
to do. It's a brave thing to do. It's also
a crazy thing to do when you know what they're
capable of. And we've seen cases where they'll come right
(37:50):
out and say, look, we got a new jail house Niche,
We've got somebody else that's gonna we're gonna roll out
and they're going to testify against you, and you know
we're gonna get you. But the key thing is Brian
always maintained his innocence, and he could maintain his innocence
while taking that plea and afterwards, so it's it's very
different from a guilty plea for time serve, which sometimes
innocent people will take where they admit guilt for something
(38:12):
they didn't do because it lets them out. The Alford
plea lets him maintain his innocence throughout as he did.
The prosecution made it very clear, and I think as
close to word for word as I can get, the
quote was we're extremely confident in our ability to convince
our jurors of whatever we want to. So that sounds
like a threat, right. So you were finally free to
(38:36):
go home, and no one would blame you, least of
all me if you came out and decided, you know
what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna I'm gonna get drunk.
I'm just gonna drink. I'm just gonna like I'm going
on a bender, right because look at what I just
came out of, and I deserve to go have to
delive my life like I'm in a rap video, you
know what I mean. But but that's not really what
(38:57):
happened though, right, I mean, your story is remarkable in
so many ways, but not least of which because of
what's going on now. And you know you're now a
senior at Georgetown, so you've got what else is going on.
So right now, I am the executive director of the
(39:19):
Mayor's Office on Returning Citizen Affairs in Washington, d C.
So the office is the only legislatively mandated office of
it's kind of the country, and basically the mission is
to provide information, support and services to individuals who come
home from incarceration back to the district. So you're giving
back in a way that you are uniquely qualified to
(39:42):
be able to do. Correct. It's sort of a great
full circle. Look we'd all like to give you back
those eleven years and make that just just to race
that from what we can just you can't you can't
get you can't ever get back the time. But you know,
when I came home, the thing that was really on
my mind was how many people went out of their
(40:02):
way to help me, how many people stepped out of
their comfort zone, and what would have been completely acceptable
for them to do or to not do, to go
above and beyond to help me. Marcus definitely one of
those people. The lawyers that I had, they didn't need
to do any of the stuff that they did, And
if it weren't for what they did, there's no way
that I would be in a position I am today
(40:23):
or anywhere near there. So it's I believe a requirement
for me to give at least some of that back,
as much of it as I can. The people, like
I said, there are worse positions than I was when
I came home. I was fortunate enough to have a
family to come home to. I didn't have to worry
about where my next meal was coming from, or where
I was gonna get money to get food or anything
(40:43):
like that, or clothes, or where I was gonna live
when I was looking for a job or anything like that.
These are problems that face a lot of people when
they come home from prison, whether they did two years
or twenty years. And I didn't necessarily have to deal
with all that. I still had tremendous hurdles, but the
fact is that I had the supports to men. People
helped me through my situation, and so I want to
do that for other people who are in even worse
(41:05):
situation than I was when I came home. If one
person clapping wouldn't sound so weird, I give you a
round of uplads right after that, you know what I mean.
But yeah, that's that's amazing. And you know, and I
think a lot of people that are that do get
involved in this stuff. I mean, I can't speak for everybody,
but many of us recognize that. But there, before the
grace of God, go I right, this could happen to anyone,
(41:27):
because it did. I think it's great that there's so
much interest and momentum behind an awareness that there's a
huge number of people like you who need help, both
people that were wrongfully convicted and people that are out.
The type of people you're helping now and have served
their time and are just in this country, the punishment
(41:48):
is so disproportionate in general to the crime, and the
punishment continues with the stigmas that exist after you get out.
I mean, some of it is deliberate. Some of its
government mandated punishment. I mean, you can't vote and all
this other stuff. And some of it's just society looking
down on people and not wanted to give people a
second chance. When we see both exoneries and people who
(42:09):
were formally incarcerated, who served their time, as you were saying,
accomplishing extraordinary things, I want to ask two more things.
One is when you're finally released, what you do. I
got the hell out of West Virginia. It's the first
thing I did. I wanted to drive. I told so.
My father picked me up, which you know, my father
had been even when I had a life sentence with
(42:31):
no parole and the appeals were stalling or going nowhere
and there wasn't any discernible date to look forward to.
He was always in my ear. Listen, I'm gonna pick
you up. I'm gonna pick you up from right here,
and we're gonna go wherever you want to go, and
to have him be outside the gate when they let
me go. It was a beautiful thing. It was one
of the best moments in my life. But when we
(42:52):
got in that car, I told him to give me
the hell out of the state. Um. And so we
drove until we got to Maryland, and then we stopped
to eat and I don't even remember where it was,
but it was great. It was amazing. Okay, So now
comes the thing we typically do is everyone who listens
to the show knows I like to just turn over
the floor to you for closing thoughts. Let's call it
(43:13):
closing thoughts. Um. I think if I had to come
up with closing thoughts right now, what's on my mind
is just the opportunity that exists for people that are
coming home from prison. As you mentioned, the federal system
is its own thing, but in a lot of these
states and a lot of these cities, d C especially,
there's a tremendous amount of resources and services that are
(43:33):
available to people. And like you said, the tide is
turning with respect to how people look at the criminal
justice system of mass incarceration. What needs to be done
for people not only when they come home, but before
they even get there. In the prison. The treatment that's
going on, a lot of it is criminal in and
of itself. But d C and and I work at,
(43:54):
you know, the Mayor's Officer and Returning Citizen Affairs. If
you got to come home to somewhere after having been
in cars, ready to DC is a great place. And
you know, we serve as an example for a lot
of different things, one of the which is the band
of Box law that's happened, and I know New York
is following suit on which is basically prevents employers from
screening people for their criminal records and so that gives
(44:15):
people opportunities for jobs. The mayor has dedicated millions of
dollars to the re entry community in d C and
has you know, made of the priority of the needs
of the return of citizen community. You have different nonprofit
organizations all throughout the city and the nation that are
really the kind of backbone of the movement to help
(44:35):
people once they come home. And I want to really
take my hat off, not just because I'm a student there,
but to Georgetown and to other universities like that, but
especially Georgetown because of what they do in the reentry space,
Mark and the Prison Justice initiative is an amazing example
of that that they have identified the needs of this
community as a priority as well, and have utilized their
(44:58):
resources in the brain power that exists in in a
university like that, a top tier university, to be able
to make a change. So I think that my last
thought would be to just take my hat off to
everyone who's doing the work, everybody who's listening that has
either done the work or who was inclined towards people
who are incarcerated, whether wrongfully or otherwise, because ninety seven
(45:22):
percent of people that are incarcerated are coming home. So
the question is what kind of neighbor do you want?
What kind of person do you want is going to
be at your school, is going to be in the
store with you? What kind of society do you want
do you want to participate in and contribute to? So
those things I think are what are on my mind,
and you know what I want to have the audience
take away, Mark, Yeah, So I agree with everything that
(45:43):
Brian just said. But let me just close with something
about Brian, because I think it's probably already clear to
your listeners what an amazing person he is and how
strong and resilient and caring he is, but he has
so many different dimensions that might not come across right
away on this podcast. But I got to know Brian,
remember getting an email from him a couple of years ago,
(46:05):
and you know, dear Professor Howard, very polite and so on,
and saying very little but just about his own experience,
and that he'd be interested in having a meeting sometime.
And I thought, yeah, I definitely imaged it. And when
we met in my office, within five minutes, I knew
this guy is a winner. This guy is unbelievable. And
(46:25):
we talked about the possibility of him coming to Georgetown
because he'd stopped. He'd been a West Virginia and he'd
stopped after two years despite having a great record, but
that was over and it's hard to pick that up again.
And we came up with the idea, why not have
him be a transfer student to Georgetown, And so I
supported that and wrote a letter of recommendation very long,
(46:46):
where basically I was threatening to resign if Georgetown did
AD midnight. I said, if Georgetown is worth anything of
its reputation of in terms of academic excellence, where he
had the record and deserved it, just point um, but
also in terms of Georgetown's tradition of giving back and
as a Jesuit institution of caring for others and so on.
(47:10):
And he was admitted as a transfer student and then
came on and then actually was in my classroom and
I was teaching a course called Prisons and Punishment, which
has about fifty students, and Brian was one of those students.
And we talked beforehand and I said, you know, I'll
let you decide when to reveal your story, and if
you want me to, I'm happy to. If you want to,
(47:32):
you decide when the right time is. And I remember
it was several weeks into the class, and he'd already
been active and asking questions and making comments and so on.
But then at one point he said to the whole class,
now might be a good time for me to tell
you my story, what I've been through, why I have
a connection with this issue. And you should have seen
the jaws drop in that room, total silence and admiration
(47:54):
and awe. And over the next few months, the role
that he had in that classroom and in these students lives,
the respect that they had for him, it was life
changing for them and for me too, And I got
course evaluations at the end of the semester that were
through the roof, but so many of them said having
Brian in this course was unbelievable, right, And so I'm
(48:15):
really grateful to him, but not just in terms of
what he did to me and for my students, but
what he's giving back to so many people around him, right.
And so it's one of these things where you never
would wish this type of horrible thing to happen on anyone,
but in a way, Brian is the person to have
it happened to because he is so strong and he's
taking from that something to help change this horrific system.
(48:40):
And I think he's going to be a leader in
the future, whether it's in d C or nationally. He's
got an incredible future and we're all going to hear
a lot more from him and about him. I think,
don't forget to give us a fantastic review. Wherever you
get your podcasts, it really helps. And I'm a proud
(49:03):
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 Wardis.
The music on the show is by three time OSCAR
nominated composer Jay Ralph. Be sure to follow us on
(49:24):
Instagram at Wrongful Conviction and on Facebook at Wrongful Conviction Podcast.
Wrongful Conviction with Jason Flam is a production of Lava
for Good Podcasts in association with Signal Company Number one
Hosts And Creators
Lauren Bright Pacheco
Maggie Freleng
Jason Flom
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