#073 Jason Flom with Damien Echols (Live from the Church of Rock and Roll)

As a teenager, Damien Echols along with Jason Baldwin and Jessie Misskelley—known as the West Memphis Three—was convicted in 1994 of killing three 8-year-old boys in West Memphis, AK. There was no DNA linking the WM3 to the crime, and some of the DNA found at the crime scene even seemed to implicate the stepfather of one of the victims. The case gained national attention soon after the teenagers’ arrests when word was leaked that the murders were committed as part of a satanic ritual. A key prosecution witness in the second trial was a self-proclaimed cult expert who stated that the murders bore “trappings” of the occult. This testimony, combined with testimony about books Damien Echols read and some of his writings, plus evidence that he and Jason Baldwin liked heavy-metal music and several black t-shirts were found in Jason Baldwin’s closet, helped to convict the two teenagers. Damien Echols was sentenced to death; Jason Baldwin was sentenced to life without parole, and Misskelley was sentenced to 40 years. Following a 2010 decision by the Arkansas Supreme Court regarding newly produced DNA evidence and potential juror misconduct, the West Memphis Three negotiated a plea bargain with prosecutors. After serving more than 18 years in prison, all three of the WM3 took the Alford Plea, which meant that the state of Arkansas admitted no wrongdoing. While in prison, Damien was ordained into the Rinzai Zen Buddhist tradition. Today he teaches classes on Magick around the country and works as a visual artist. He and wife Lorri live in New York City with their three cats. He is the author of High Magick: A Guide to the Spiritual Practices That Saved My Life on Death Rowand the *New York Times *bestseller Life After Death and Yours For Eternity(with his wife Lorri Davis). This episode was recorded live in front of a studio audience at the opening of The Church of Rock & Roll.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
I've never been in trouble in my life. I didn't
even have a parking ticket, you know what I mean.
I was brought up with cops are the good guys.

Speaker 2 (00:09):
I didn't know what was going to happen, but I
do know that everything was stacked against me.

Speaker 3 (00:14):
Everything like everything.

Speaker 2 (00:17):
This isn't supposed to happen this way. I'm innocent. I
know I'm innocent. I know I had nothing to do
with this. How is this possible?

Speaker 3 (00:28):
I grew up trusting the systems. I grew up believing
that every human being should do the right thing. And
that's why, even though I knew I was dealing with
corp people, I wasn't going to break anyone to get
me out of prison because I wouldn't live with the
fact that I break my way out of my wife's death.

Speaker 1 (00:44):
I'm not innocent, too proven guilty. I'm guilty until I
prove my innocence. And that's absolutely what happened to me.
Our system.

Speaker 4 (00:52):
Since I've been out ten years, it has come a
little ways, but it's still broken.

Speaker 3 (00:56):
I totally lost trusting humanity after what's happened to me.

Speaker 4 (01:02):
This is wrongful conviction.

Speaker 5 (01:19):
Welcome back to wrongful conviction with Jason Flamm That's me,
And today we have an episode that I'm actually kind
of intimidated to even do because I'm interviewing a personal
hero of Damien Eccles.

Speaker 4 (01:35):
Damien, welcome to the show.

Speaker 1 (01:36):
Thank you so much for having me.

Speaker 5 (01:38):
And it's extra special because we're here recording in front
of an audience at the Church of Rock and Roll
in Las Vegas, of which you have been an incredible
part and I'm so grateful to you for your participation.
But I want to start this episode by apologizing to
you on behalf of.

Speaker 4 (01:56):
The entire human race for.

Speaker 5 (01:58):
What is just and unbelievable there's not a right word
for it, but nightmare, saga, ordeal that never should have
happened in the first place. And I just wanted to
tell you upfront that I'm I'm, I'm inspired and uh
just in incredibly moves by by your presence. And so

(02:21):
so with that being said, before I get all gushy here,
let's get right into it. So I'm gonna ask you questions,
some of them already know the answer to because I'm
familiar with your story, but not not all the details.
But let's go back to growing up your childhood. Okay,
did you have brothers and sisters?

Speaker 1 (02:42):
I did. My family history is kind of odd and convoluted,
just because my mother and father were both married about
five times each.

Speaker 4 (02:50):
Wow.

Speaker 1 (02:50):
So I have a lot of you know, half siblings,
step siblings, full siblings. So my family did to vary
at any given time. It could be anything from just
me and my sister to I think like the most
was like seven of us at one time, seven children
at one time. So it was kind of all over

(03:12):
the map.

Speaker 5 (03:12):
And I've heard you talk about the fact that you
grew up so poor that when you finally moved to
a trailer, it was like you felt like you were
like the Jeffersons moving on up right, absolutely, I mean,
can you describe how what did that look like? I mean,
you were Did you grow up in West Memphis?

Speaker 1 (03:28):
Well, when I was really young. One of the things
whenever Laurie was working with the investigators looking back over
the case and they were getting like my school records
and things like that, one of the investigators was saying,
this can't be right. The school records show that sometimes
you moved as often as every two weeks, and I
did you know I lived in Arkansas, Texas, Tennessee, Mississippi, Louisiana, Maryland, Oregon,

(03:55):
just everywhere. We were constantly moving, you know, my parents
or my dad at you sort of thought, you know,
maybe if we go to this place, then you know,
somehow or another will escape poverty. You know, there'll be
a better job, a better place to live, a better
something down the road. So we were constantly moving from
place to place looking for something better than what we had,

(04:16):
trying to escape poverty basically. But we would always at
the same time, end up coming back to either Tennessee
or Arkansas, because that was where we had, you know,
the most family members at least some sense of support
or community. So we went all over the place, but
would always end up coming back there.

Speaker 5 (04:34):
And for you growing up in this really, I mean
I didn't even know. I mean every two weeks you
were literally a nomad, right, an American nomad.

Speaker 4 (04:42):
Yeah. And I've heard you talk about I watch your moth.

Speaker 5 (04:46):
Presentation, which is wonderful if anyone wants to go online
and see it, just I mean, it comes right up
when you google Damien Echols. It's a ten minute video
that is very, very powerful. So you talked about how
for you, and this is why it's so exciting and
interesting to be here right now, the Church of Rock
and Roll. You talked about how music and books were

(05:09):
really your way of sort of taking yourself out of
this really miserable situation in many ways that you were.

Speaker 1 (05:16):
In absolutely, you know, my family, I have a ninth
grade education. I dropped out of school when I was
in ninth grade, and that's more than anyone else in
my family has. You know, if you looked at my
whole family tree, you won't find anyone with so much
as a high school diploma. So we didn't have, you know,
like a lot of books or a library or anything
in our house. For me, I used to skip school

(05:38):
and go hang out at the library all day. As
odd as that sounds. I would hide in the library,
read books, bring them home because when you're reading, you know,
you're even if it's only in your head, you're going
different places, seeing different things, having different experiences, and you
don't have to focus on the fact that you're eating
rice again for the you know, seventh time this week.

Speaker 4 (06:02):
And then you had a sort of an outsider.

Speaker 5 (06:08):
You were an outcast right and as as partially as
a result of that, or maybe it was a cause
and effect whatever, you ended up being inadvertently putting yourself
in a situation where when one of the most terrible
crimes not only the history of Arkansas, but in the history.

Speaker 4 (06:24):
Of America.

Speaker 5 (06:26):
Or the world happened, there were these very small minded
people around who.

Speaker 4 (06:36):
Sort of came to this.

Speaker 5 (06:39):
Instinctual call it conclusion that it must be the weird kid, right,
it must be the kid that wears black and listens
to heavy metal. Because this was in the we're going
back to nineteen ninety three now, right day of nineteen
ninety three, and many people.

Speaker 4 (06:54):
Will already know part of the story.

Speaker 5 (06:56):
But on that tragic day, three little eight year old
boys went out for a bike ride and disappeared, and they.

Speaker 4 (07:05):
Turned up sexually mutilated.

Speaker 5 (07:09):
One boy was castrated, they were tortured, hogtied, it hurts
me just to say it.

Speaker 4 (07:15):
And their bodies were dumped in a swampy river bed.

Speaker 5 (07:20):
So we know, I know from decades of working on
wrongful convictions that when you get a crime like this,
especially at a small community but anywhere, there's a lot
of pressure. Nobody wants to have fat pressure. Everybody wants
to calm the community, and so the authorities are more

(07:44):
prone to developing theories that in a more calm environment
might not make sense and they might not pursue. But
in this case, somehow or other, they And this was
the in the Satanic Panic as well. Right, yes, back then,
for those of you who are old enough to remember,
in the early nineties, there was this very strange thing

(08:07):
that was going on in America where there was rumors
of Satanic cllts and stuff like that. None of them
turned out to be true, but that's besides the point.
So what happened, Well.

Speaker 1 (08:15):
You know, for me my entire life, the thing that
has been most important to me, that that I love
the most, that my life always sort of revolved around,
was Western hermeticism, ceremonial magic all the way back from
when I was a child. But I lived in an
incredibly right wing fundamentalist town where I mean, there were

(08:36):
places in this town where you come to a four
corner stop and on all four corners of the street
will be churches. If you weren't like I was.

Speaker 4 (08:46):
Like Starbucks, Now, yeah, that's exactly what it was like.

Speaker 1 (08:48):
It was like, yeah, churches were like Starbucks is there,
And if you didn't belong to, you know, one of
these mainstream for that area, mainstream fundamentalist religions. You were
automatically viewed as suspicious. You know, you you were Satanic.
That's what they thought. And it didn't matter if you
were a Buddhist or a Hindu or something like that.

(09:09):
You're still satanic. You just don't know you're a Satanist.
You're just being you know, tricked by the devil into
thinking there's some other religion. But then whenever you start,
you know, bringing factors in, like the fact that I
actually did love ceremonial magic, and that's been one of
their things that you know, they harp on forever that
that is Satanism, that those two things there's no difference

(09:30):
in those. So that was a huge part of what
made them focus on me as well. You know, that
was what they thought made me a freak. They think, automatically,
you're a Satanist. It would take a Satanist to commit
a crime like this. Stick all those things together, and
they didn't even look for anybody or anything else.

Speaker 5 (09:46):
No, and they ignored in this case what's really stomach churning.
Aside from so many other factors, but one of the
things that's really so upsetting is the idea that they
ignored obvious signs you have that pointed to at least one,
arguably up to three other individuals. Yes, including and this

(10:08):
is just it's too strange to even believe. But the
fact is that there was a local restaurant, was it
Bojangles or something. It was a Bojangles where the manager
called the cops that night and said there was a
guy covered in mud and blood that stumbled into the
fast food place and went into the bathroom. And to
their credit, the manager called up and a police officer

(10:31):
came but didn't investigate, and they ultimately collected evidence from
that bathroom that he went into, which there was blood
all over the place and mud, and they lost it.

Speaker 1 (10:41):
Yes, right, they lost it. So I mean not only that,
but also even after they did DNA testing, you know,
years later, they do DNA testing, find out that the
DNA does not match me or the other two guys
they convicted. To this day, they still have not run
that DNA through codis to see who it matches. They
refuse to do that.

Speaker 4 (11:00):
Yeah, which is you know, which is so strange.

Speaker 5 (11:02):
And I talk about on the show a lot because
in a case like this, especially in the small community,
the people who are doing investigating live in that community.
By definition, they may bring in outside experts, but a
lot of them live in the community. And you know,
as a dad, myself, or as as any as a citizen,
as anybody, everyone's got relatives, everyone should be concerned for
their own safety. When you have somebody out there who's

(11:23):
capable of this sort of pure evil, you would think
it for no other reason than purely selfish reasons. You
would want to get that person off the street, because
that's a you know, that's a really scary situation. So
but that that's not what happened, and it happens too
frequently that these various factors combine to result in a

(11:44):
tragic outcome. To tragic outcomes, well, in this case many
because there were three of you, all your family members
are affected. And then the fact that the actual perpetrators
were allowed to remain free and there and there again
were obvious signs, I mean the one I just talked about,
the various signs pointing to the stepfather of one of
the boys, including a bloody knife that had the kids
blood on them, that was found that belonged to him.

(12:06):
I mean, this one kind of came with instructions, and
I know that it's difficult, and I have known one
of these people that I'm not an anarchist. I believe
we do need a system of law and order, and
I think a lot of there are a lot of
very good police and judges and prosecutors out there.

Speaker 4 (12:23):
But in this case, you ran into the perfect storm.

Speaker 5 (12:27):
It's a small town, high profile crime, complicated crime because
the crime scene itself was a muddy riverbed, not the
easiest place to collect evidence.

Speaker 4 (12:35):
It seemed to have been scrubbed to some degree. And
then all the pressure.

Speaker 1 (12:39):
And what people don't realize also, you know, just most
people's knowledge of the legal system comes from watching TV,
which is complete and absolute fiction. They don't, you know
they And it fosters this idea that these people, these judges,
these prosecutors, these attorney generals, that they have these positions
because there're somehow moral people. They're good people who are

(12:59):
looking out for since that's excuse me, society. In actual fact,
these are politicians, just like senators, just like congressmen. Their
number one priority is winning that next election, So they're
going to do for that next case exactly, whatever the
community is pressuring them to do, that's the way they're
going to lean because they want to win the next election.

Speaker 5 (13:33):
So in this case, they focused on you, and then
they had to find a way to get to you,
right because there was no evidence connecting you to it.

Speaker 1 (13:44):
Did you know the boys, No, never even heard of them.

Speaker 5 (13:47):
Even in a small I mean, it's got to be
a very small community. I think that everybody would almost
know everybody. Course, I'm from New York, so I sound ridiculous,
but you know what I mean, it sounds really small
to me.

Speaker 4 (13:56):
West Memphis, Arkansas.

Speaker 1 (13:57):
I mean, but keep in mind, these are eight year
old kids. You know, it's an entire day generation than
me or the other two guys even convicted. Were there
were you know, no reason that we would know him.
They were in elementary school. We were already you know,
in junior high getting ready to go into high school.
They also lived in you know, the suburbs and the
next town over. Technically we didn't even live in the
same town. They lived in West Memphis. Me and the

(14:17):
other two guys lived in the next town over, which
was called Marion. So you know, it wasn't like there
was any reason for us to ever even come in
contact with each other.

Speaker 4 (14:26):
And Jason Baldwin.

Speaker 5 (14:28):
Let's just talk about Jason for a second, because he's
one of my favorite people. I called him before, the
best Jason I know, and he's been on the show.
It was an awesome experience interviewing him and just an
amazing guy. He just recently got somebody off of death row.
I saw on Instagram today actually that he helped to

(14:49):
free a guy from death row, which is such an
incredible accomplishment with his organization. So Jason was your sort
of a one and best and a pretty much onlyfriend
at the time, right, And he was I mean from
just appearance, his physical appearances, he was sort of he

(15:10):
didn't have the same stigma that you did, right.

Speaker 4 (15:13):
He was sort of just an average.

Speaker 5 (15:14):
Looking kid, very very young looking, must have weighed a
hundred pounds or less, long blonde hair, didn't look like
a killer.

Speaker 4 (15:24):
But to them, you did, exactly. And he got caught
up in all.

Speaker 1 (15:27):
Of this too, yep, just because he knew me.

Speaker 4 (15:29):
Right, unbelievable.

Speaker 5 (15:30):
So they found a way and that way was Jesse
miscally exactly. So from your view, and I want to
know the moment, like I know, when the cops came
to your door and your life turned into the living
nightmare that I think is everyone's primal fear. So they

(15:53):
originally went after Jesse, and they sort of tricked him
into confessing, and he immediately recanted after he confessed.

Speaker 4 (16:01):
But he was a I mean, he was slow, right.
He had an.

Speaker 1 (16:05):
Arsue of somewhere between seventy and seventy two, and they
interrogated him. I think the I can't remember exactly how
many hours it was, it was something like between twelve
and fourteen hours. And they're telling this guy, who you know,
has an IQ that's way way below normal. They're telling
him things like, you know, just tell us what we
want to know and we'll let you go home. So
they finally get this guy to confess, and he can't

(16:27):
get anything about the crime scene, right because he wasn't
actually there, so he didn't know anything. They didn't care.
The only thing they cared about was the fact that
they got him to say yes. And most people, you know,
on a jury, even today, they'll say, well, nobody would
confess to something they haven't actually done. We know now
that that's not true. You know, all the studies show
that something like over half of the people who are

(16:48):
falsely convicted end up being forced into confessions in one
way or another. And this guy was just another person
that got forced into a confession.

Speaker 5 (16:56):
And we also know, Damien, that the most people who
are most susceptible to this our adolescence. We now know
that the human brain isn't fully formed until you're twenty five,
but when you're he was sixteen, right, and he was
sixteen or seventeen, yes, seventeen seventeen, and with his low IQ,
he was totally outmatched, overwhelmed, and probably after twelve to
fourteen hours, he would have confessed to you know, anything,

(17:19):
killing Abraham Lincoln exactly, I mean, just to go home,
because that tiny room and the you know, and everybody
being on top of you. You know, it's not a
situation anyone ever wants to find themselves in it. And
we know now from study after study that people will
say and do almost anything to get themselves out of there.

Speaker 4 (17:34):
So and he kept changing his story.

Speaker 5 (17:36):
It didn't make any sense, but it was good enough
for them, and then he got them to do exactly
what they brought.

Speaker 4 (17:43):
Him in there for. And he was just collateral damage.

Speaker 5 (17:45):
They didn't really care about convicting him, but they had
to because he had now confessed, and in order to
get you and to make his confession make even a
modicum of sense, they had to bring him along for
this terrible ride as well. And so he implicated you
and Jason, and then they said, okay, now now we
can we can proceed. And then one day, one night

(18:08):
it was I guess right, you were home with Jason, Yeah,
watching movies.

Speaker 1 (18:11):
You had me, Jason, my younger sister, and my girlfriend
at the time were just at home watching TVs. You know,
by this time, we had been harassed by the cops
for probably a month straight. They were at our house,
either my house or Jason's house, or stopping us on
the street, you know, just messing with us non stop,
every single day. So when they showed up this night,

(18:32):
we figured it was just more of the same, you know,
we thought they're just here to harass us again. We
didn't realize they were coming to arrest us this time.

Speaker 4 (18:40):
So take us through that, because it's it's so terrifying.

Speaker 1 (18:44):
But you know, like I said, we were sitting there
watching TV and they start banging on the door. You know,
they're they're just beating the hell out of it, like
they're gonna knock it in. And at first, you know,
I'd said, don't even answer the door, so let them
stand out there and beat on it. But they wouldn't.
They didn't go away this time, so we go open
the door immediately. You know, whenever I open the door,

(19:05):
it looked like pretty much every cop in West Memphis
is standing there with their guns pointed at me. They
rush into the house, start destroying everything. They put me
in Jason, both in handcuffs, throw us in the backs
of cock cars, drive us to jail. They put me,
they immediately separated us. I wouldn't see Jason again for years. Well,

(19:26):
I saw him for a short period of time at
the trial, but we weren't allowed to communicate in any
way whatsoever. You know, even though we're sitting at the
same table, they've got me at one side and him
at the other, and they will not even let us
talk to each other. So we wouldn't, you know, talk
to each other again for almost twenty years, I think.
But okay, here's another thing. My brain goes dead a lot.

(19:47):
I will forget what I'm talking about, because, like you
were just saying, people's minds are still forming all the
way up until they're twenty five years old. I was
arrested when I was nineteen, and I I spent almost
a decade in solitary confinement, so I lost a lot
of things that people take for granted, like face recognition,

(20:08):
voice recognition. I have almost no short term memory whatsoever.
I will a lot of times forget what the hell
I'm saying right in the middle of a sentence. Whenever
I'm doing talks, I'll tell the audience that beforehand, I'll say,
if I forget what I'm saying, I'll have to ask
and you'll have to remind me what the hell I
was even just talking about. The reason I'm telling you
this now is because I just forgot what we're talking about.

Speaker 5 (20:29):
No problem, I can bring you back. And I know
you mentioned to me weeks ago when we were talking
about doing this event, that that was the case, and
that actually there's a study being conducted at Columbia University
about the effects of solitary long term solitary confinement on
the brain.

Speaker 4 (20:46):
Because for you, yeah, you didn't really need.

Speaker 5 (20:49):
Those functions exactly when you were in solitary staring at
four walls all day long with no contact.

Speaker 1 (20:54):
Well, it takes huge tolls on you in many ways.
You know, it almost cost me mind eyesight because you're
in this small space and now here. Your eyes are
constantly changing focus. You know, you're looking at stuff far away,
stuff close up, You're looking at all different colors. I
didn't do that for twenty years, so I started losing
my eyesight over time. I was in the hospital for

(21:15):
a day two weeks ago because my lungs are so
screwed up from breathing in years of tear gas that
I have lots of attacks of bronchitis. It has screwed
me up so bad that, like two weeks ago, I
walked into a diner, ordered some food, passed out on
the floor. I come to the waiters are around me.
They're saying, are you okay? Do we need to call

(21:36):
nine one wine. I'm like, no, just give me a minute,
let me sit here. Next thing, I know, you know,
they've called the ambulance because I passed out again. I
didn't even realize it. So it takes a toll on
you in huge ways that lasts for the rest of
your life. You know, there's no way for me to
physically rectify the things that they did to me.

Speaker 5 (21:57):
No, and we want to get into that too, because
the you know, the way you were treated, even had
you been guilty of this horrendous crime that you were
in fact innocent of, there's no excuse or justification for
the torture that was inflicted upon you. It's you know,

(22:21):
it just shocks my conscience and I think it should
shock everyone's.

Speaker 4 (22:25):
So you were thrown in the back of the cop car,
brought to the police station.

Speaker 1 (22:29):
Okay, we're at the police station.

Speaker 4 (22:32):
Uh.

Speaker 1 (22:32):
I don't know what they did with Jason. They carried
him off somewhere and like I said, I wouldn't see
him again for almost a year. They put me in
a cell that was about the size of a phone booth.
It's not what you see on TV when you think
of a prison cell. You know, there's no bed, there's
no toilet, there's no sink, there was no anything. It
was literally a cell that there had. There was just
enough room to stand in and.

Speaker 4 (22:53):
They even could you even sit down.

Speaker 1 (22:54):
No, I mean maybe you could, you know, sit like
Indian style on the floor if you wanted to.

Speaker 4 (23:00):
But it was literally I've seen those.

Speaker 1 (23:02):
Yes, yeah, yeah. They left me standing there all night long.
The only thing. Every so often one of the cops
would come in and say, are you ready to make
your confession yet? I would just stand there and look
at him. They would leave. I stood there all night
long until the next day they got me and took
me into a courtroom and told me I was being
charged with Well, first they whenever they take me into

(23:23):
the courtroom, they tell me, you know, somebody's already confessed
to this crime. They've implicated you. They're saying you were
the ring leader of this. So now what you need
to do is confess to this and say no, you
weren't the ring leader they were. Try to put the
blame back on them, or you're going to die because
of this. I can't even figure out who the hell
they're talking about, because, like I said, I've only got

(23:44):
one friend in the entire world, and that was Jason Baldwin.
I knew it wasn't him because he was with me,
and I knew he didn't do it. I knew he
wasn't going to confess to something he hadn't done. So
I didn't realize who it even was that had confessed
until the next day. Whenever they take me into the courtroom,
they say who it is, and they ask, you know,
how do you plead all this sort of thing. They

(24:05):
refuse to even read the confession in the courtroom. They
asked me did I want it read? I said yes,
and they wouldn't read it even after they asked me
and I said yes. Instead, they take me out of
the courtroom into a janitor's closet with mops and brooms.
They give me a transcript, a type transcript of this confession.
When I started reading it, it's immediately obvious why they

(24:27):
didn't want this thing read in court. It made no
sense whatsoever. You know, you're talking about this story that's
like a Frankenstein patchwork thing that they've sewed together out
of many statements made by somebody with an IQ of
between seventy and seventy two. And they would What they
would do is when he would confess to something and
wouldn't get anything right, they would come back into the
room and say, well, do you think maybe this could

(24:50):
have happened? Or I mean, even more blatantly obvious. The
first time they asked him, when did the murders happen?
And he says something like eight o'clock in the morning. Well,
they knew that wasn't true because all three of the
kids were in school. So they come back later and
they're like, well, do you think it could have been
a little later in the day, like when was it?
Was it around like lunch or was it around dinner?
And he'll say, yeah, it was around dinner. Well, they

(25:11):
still knew that wasn't true because the kids hadn't even
disappeared yet. So then they would come back and say, well,
you know when it happened when you did this, was
it getting dark outside? And he'll say, yeah, it was
getting dark outside. Well, at that time of year, you know,
it's not getting dark till like eight or nine o'clock
at night in that part of the country. So gradually,
what they did was shape this thing to make it

(25:31):
what they wanted it to be. That's why they didn't
want it read in court. I read this thing. They
put me in another sale where I would stay for
almost the next year while I waited to go to trial.
When we do go to trial, the evidence that they
present us against us is things like Stephen King books,
the fact that we owned Metallica T shirts, and albums,

(25:55):
posters that were hanging on our walls. You know, things
that were from like skateboarding magazines, ceremonial magic books. This
is the evidence they had that the prosecutors tell the
jury that these things are not only evidence that we're guilty,
but they're evidence that I don't even have a soul,
that this is how evil I am. They came back in.

(26:17):
I think our trial lasted slightly under a month something
like that. They came back in. They sentenced me to
death three times. They sentenced me to die by lethal
injection three times. They sentenced Jason to life in prison
without parole. The other guy they sentenced to life plus

(26:37):
forty years. They immediately take me to the court from
the courtroom to death row, where I would not see
Jason again. I saw him maybe twelve fifteen years later,
for maybe twenty to thirty seconds. They used to bring
other prisoners in to clean the barracks, and he was

(26:58):
one of the prisoners they brought in day to clean
death row. So he comes by my cell mopping and sweeping.
That was the first contact I'd had with him in
like fifteen years by that point.

Speaker 5 (27:09):
David Jason talked about when he was on the podcast
how the first day in prison he was released into
the general population, and basically the entire weekend, he said,
pretty much everybody in the prison took turns beating him up.
He was certainly in no position to defend himself, but
he did the best he could, but obviously he had

(27:31):
no chance. He's also just a very small, slight guy.
He's not playing linebacker anywhere, you know what I mean.
As I said, he was almost one hundred pounds when
it started and probably barely over by the time we
were convicted a year later. But for you, you were
taken to the worst, literally the worst part of one
of the worst prisons.

Speaker 4 (27:52):
You were taken to the whole of holes.

Speaker 5 (27:55):
Really right, as I heard you describe it, it was the darkest, deepest,
as filthiest place in the prison.

Speaker 1 (28:03):
My situation was different from Jason's, and that, like he
describes how they put him in general population, he spends
you know, I don't even know how long fighting, sustaining
all sorts of physical damage, skull fractures, broken collar bones.
At one point he was hitting the face with a
padlock and it messed his nose up so bad that
it bled for like a year afterwards, on and off. Finally,

(28:25):
when he did see a doctor, they realized what it
was is that his nose had been shattered and one
of the bone shards was sticking out, and they had
to go in and pull the bone shard out of
his nose and cauterize it shut. For me, it was
the guards. Death Row is different from the rest of
the prison just because everybody on death Row has a
common enemy. You know, everyone knows that these people are

(28:47):
trying to murder you on a daily basis. You don't
have time to squabble with each other because you're too
busy fighting to survive against the system. So for me,
the guards exactly every time my life was in danger,
it was all always prison guards. So whenever I first
get there, they decided they're just going to welcome me
to the neighborhood. You know, it's nothing personal. They take
me to the whole and spent the next eighteen days

(29:11):
beating the hell out of me, starving me, pretty much
doing everything they could possibly think of to torture a
human being. To me, the only reason they didn't kill me,
and I do believe they planned on murdering me back there.
The only reason they didn't kill me was because there
was a deacon from the Catholic church that used to
come into the prison and bring communion to inmates on

(29:35):
death row. So sometimes the sewage would overflow and you
would end up, you know, spending a couple of days
standing like ankle deep raw sewage. Well, the guards aren't
going to clean that up. When that happens, they bring
other prisoners in to clean it up. So they bring
these other guys in from population. They see what the
guards are doing to me and go to this deacon
from the Catholic church that's coming in, and they told
him they're killing this guy back there. They're beating him

(29:57):
to death every day. This guy goes to the war
and says, I know what you're doing, and if it
doesn't stop, I'm going to start telling people. I'm going
to go public with it. That's the only thing they
care about, you know. The only concern they have whatsoever,
is that people in the outside world will find out
what they're doing inside those walls. So they took me
out of the hole after about eighteen days and put

(30:18):
me back in a regular cell on death row. If
not for that guy and those inmates coming in to
clean up the sewage. I probably would not have even
lived the first year that I was in prison.

Speaker 4 (30:28):
It doesn't sound like you would have lived the first
month under those circumstances, but you did. There's so many
twists and turns, and it's really remarkable the fact that
you know, so many incredible people got involved, the filmmakers,

(30:53):
various celebrities including Eddie Vedder, Natalie Mays, Johnny Depp a
little like Johnny by the way.

Speaker 6 (31:01):
Anyway, So so yeah, so many people got involved because
it was so obvious that this was such a.

Speaker 5 (31:11):
Terrible miscarriage of justice, and because it was such a
such a a the crime itself was so unimaginable, right,
and I think that drew attention to it, and then
the result was so obviously wrong that it made for
let's face it, I mean, media is important in these things,
and in this case, the movies.

Speaker 4 (31:35):
Was it the movies that started it? How did the
I mean?

Speaker 5 (31:38):
And I want to talk about how you survived, And
I know you're going to lead us in a meditation afterwards,
which I'm really looking forward to because if I can
find one percent of what you've got through that meditation,
it'll make my life better.

Speaker 4 (31:51):
So so.

Speaker 5 (31:55):
What was the tipping point that started to get people interested?
Because here you are, like just a guy from the
middle of nowhere, convicted of the most notorious crime in
the history of Arkansas. The odds of you ever seeing
daylight again were extremely slim. The odds of you dying
in a prison cellary an electric chair were extremely high.

Speaker 4 (32:19):
What happened.

Speaker 1 (32:19):
The only thing that saved me was, you know, really,
quite frankly, the vanity of the politicians that were involved.
They allowed cameras in the courtroom. They thought, you know,
this was going to be a slam dunk thing. Nobody's
going to question this. They're going to send Jason off
to prison, murder me, sweep this under the rug. They're

(32:40):
all going to go out like heroes and everything's going
to be fine. So they let these cameras in the
courtroom HBO. Two guys named Joe Berlinger and Bruce Snovski,
they come in, set cameras up and film the entire
trial from beginning to end. Those that footage would eventually
become a documentary, a series of documentaries. But the first

(33:00):
one came out, and I think it was nineteen ninety six,
it was called Paradise Lost and it aired on HBO.
If not for that, we would still be in prison
right now, or I'd probably be dead right now. Yeah,
people started to see the documentaries, you know, all over
the country and then eventually all over the world. You know,

(33:21):
these things went all over the world. People would see them,
and people started getting involved in the case. You know,
everything from really people would do bake cakes and have
like cake sales to raise moneys, to raise money to
pay for like, you know, lawyers, private investigators, whatever it was.
Because most people also don't comprehend the amount of money

(33:44):
it takes to fight a legal case. Over the I
was in for eighteen years and seventy six days. Over
that time, it cost us about five million dollars to
fight this case. Because you know, even things like DNA testing,
when you think of DNA testing and you watch it
on TV, it's always the state doing it. You know,
they didn't do anything in our case. We had to

(34:06):
raise the money to pay for DNA testing ourselves, which
in and of itself ended up being close to half
a million dollars.

Speaker 5 (34:13):
Right and now, the good news is it's become much
more affordable DNA test can now be done for thousands
of dollars, not one hundreds of thousands, not tens of thousands,
just thousands of dollars. And I do want to I'm
glad you pointed that out because it's important to recognize
the role that the general public played in this.

Speaker 4 (34:28):
Right, It wasn't just celebrities exactly, It wasn't just filmmakers.

Speaker 5 (34:31):
There were people, I think it's fair to say, all
over the world who saw this movie and it's so
painful to watch. And now we have the modern day
equivalent with making a murder and Brendan Dassi, I guess
you could say, right, except he wasn't sentenced to death.
But when you watch Brendon Daci, you know his interrogation,
you can get a sense of what the Jessemskally interrogation
must have been like. And a couple of things that

(34:52):
I want to mention about his his false confession. One
is that he recanted it immediately after he gave it,
but nobody cared. The other the thing is that they
interrogated him for, as you said, twelve to fourteen hours,
but they only recorded a half an hour of exactly right,
So what does that tell you? I mean, it's really
they Apparently they didn't want a recording of them telling
him all the information that he didn't know since he

(35:12):
wasn't there. That would have been inconvenient, so to say
the least. So there you are, and I guess you're
kind of getting these little rays of hope while you're
in the most hopeless situation that anyone can be in. Right,
are you aware at this time of everything that's going
on this? And how important was it to you when

(35:34):
people would write letters, Because it's one of the things
I tell people when they asked me, what can I do.
I'm just a regular person. I don't have any access
on have any influence whatever. I'll tell people, go to
the website, go to Innocence project dot org, go to
your local innocence project. There's innocence projects all over the country.
Write letters, talk to people, write letters to journalists. But also,
I mean, you must have been getting a lot of

(35:54):
mail at this time, and how important was that Because
I talked about writing letters to people who are on
the inside as being you know, one thing that almost
anybody can.

Speaker 1 (36:01):
Do exactly, you know, and it really does help because
it gives people inside something to focus on. Other than prison,
other than you know, the walls you're trapped in twenty
four hours a day, other than the brutality, other than
the deprivation and degradation and everything else. It gives you
something to think about other than all of that stuff
going on, which really does preserve your sanity. So even

(36:23):
just doing something as simple as writing a letter to
someone in prison really does change their life in a
very marked, profound way. For me, you know, this was
I still haven't seen the documentaries. I don't watch stuff
like that. So the only way that I would really
know that it was that things were changing, that things

(36:45):
were happening. One is the mail gradually started to change.
It went from in the very beginning getting you know,
there was a trickle of letters started right after the
documentaries come out, like you would get three five letters
a week. It built up to by the time I
got out. The people in the mailroom at the prison
hated me because they would come to my cell with

(37:06):
like big plastic you know, mail crates full of mail
and they would have to stand there and get people
to come help them open it all up and make
sure there's no contraband or anything in it. And they
hated me for that, so I knew about it from
that angle, just because the mail was increasing, and I
would call Lauri every day and she would tell me,

(37:28):
you know, Eddie Vedder's doing this, or these people in
you know, Seattle are putting together this benefit concert, or
you know, whatever it was. She would tell me about it,
and you know, in one way, yet kind of helps.
You're thinking about it when you're on the phone, But
in all honesty, the second you hang up that phone,
that stuff is happening in a different world. You know,

(37:50):
it's so far away that it has almost no impact
on the fact that you are fighting every fucking day
of your life just to survive. You know, the fact
that you know people are having like a bake sale
in Nebraska or something. Theoretically, you know, somewhere in the
back of your mind, somehow it gives you a little hope,

(38:12):
but you don't think about that in the course of
your daily life. And the course of your daily life,
all your doing is trying to survive another day in prison.

Speaker 5 (38:19):
And you know, I want to talk about the death
penalty too, because everyone knows I'm a very vocal opponent
of the death penalty. I don't think it has any
place in a civilized society, and most of the world agrees, certainly,
almost all of the western world degrees. America is in
the very in the top five of all countries in

(38:39):
the world in terms of the number of people we execute,
and it's not a good list to be on. And
we know now that we execute a lot of innocent people.
We can't prove the exact numbers, but it's been proven
that something like five percent of people on death row
will have been exonerated, But that doesn't that doesn't tell
us how many are in there still that we haven't.

Speaker 4 (39:01):
Been able to get to because, as you said, it's.

Speaker 5 (39:04):
A time consuming, difficult, and expensive process.

Speaker 1 (39:10):
And there's also estimates now people who do work in
this field, like the Southern Poverty Law Center organizations like that,
they're now estimating that as many as one out of
every ten to twenty five people on death row are innocent.
So think about the fact, say, if it's one out
of every ten, if they told you that one out
of every ten planes were going to crash, you wouldn't

(39:30):
fly anymore. Everybody would demand that the system be fixed.
But since it doesn't affect everybody, you know, it's executions.
Most people don't have a loved one, a family member,
anybody else they know on death row. It sort of
slips under the radar.

Speaker 4 (39:43):
Yeah, it's a really scary number. And we know some
of the ones.

Speaker 5 (39:47):
I mean, Cameron Todd Willingham as a movie being made
by a professor of Columbia now about that case in
Texas and an instant guy who was executed for the
arson fire that wasn't arson.

Speaker 4 (39:57):
It was an electrical fire that killed his kids, three
of his kids. What a fate that was.

Speaker 5 (40:02):
And so we know that there are we have a
number of names of people who have been executed who
we know now were factually innocent, where people have confessed
to the crimes that they were convicted of. It. It's
all just very very troubling and disgusting and it needs
to be abolished. It doesn't accomplish anything, it doesn't help,
it doesn't reduce crime, it doesn't scare anybody off a murder.

(40:23):
No thinking that anyone who's crazy enough to go and
do something like that is not thinking, well, life in prison, okay,
but death penalty.

Speaker 4 (40:29):
Yeah, I'm a whole off.

Speaker 1 (40:30):
You know what I mean exactly.

Speaker 4 (40:31):
I'll just go have a v eight you know what
I mean, Like it's not happening.

Speaker 5 (40:33):
So but for you, how I mean the execution date itself,
how did how did you? I mean, I want to
know how you dealt with any of this right and
then ultimately talk about your exoneration and what you're doing now.
So were you aware? When did you have a date set?

(40:54):
How many times was it moved? And how did you?
I mean, how are you even here and not just
bouncing off the wor not sitting in the corner of
some bar down to you with a bottle of gosh.

Speaker 1 (41:05):
I think my original execution date was May fifth of
either ninety four or ninety five. Well ninety five, I
think something like that.

Speaker 4 (41:17):
But they weren't going to waste any time.

Speaker 1 (41:18):
No, no, they weren't. And I got even closer to
it than I should have gotten because the attorneys that
I had were so incompetent that they thought I was
automatically going to be given a state. I got within
weeks of my execution date before they realized, oh, we
actually have to file a state to keep them from
killing this guy. So I could have been killed just
by accident, just sure incompetence yes. After that, Usually what

(41:43):
happens is you get an execution date. Whenever you go
from state court to federal court, like after your state
court your state supreme court denies your appeal, they set
you an execution date. The federal courts then decide whether
they're going to hear your case or not. If they
do decide, and they don't have to, if they do
decide to hear your case, they'll give you a stay

(42:04):
of execution, and then they'll hear your case and it'll
go on for a while longer. If they decide we're
not even going to hear it, then they're just going
to kill you. I bring with that again.

Speaker 5 (42:15):
So if they if they decide not to hear your case,
they're going to kill you, right And here you are,
back in ninety five, ready to be executed within weeks.

Speaker 3 (42:22):
That was it.

Speaker 1 (42:22):
So what happened is by this time, you know, the
documentaries had started coming out. People all over the world
had started to hear about the case. You know, they
were I don't even you know, can't even count how
many TV shows and magazine articles and newspaper articles, and
you know, people had started putting together websites. So I
mean what was happening to us was spreading like crazy.

(42:43):
They knew that if our case went from state court
to federal court, there was a good chance the federal
courts were going to hear it, that they were going
to realize what was screwed up, and they were going
to throw the whole case out. They didn't want that
to happen, so instead of setting me an execution and
allowing me to appeal it to federal court, they just
sat on it and held it. In the eighteen years

(43:05):
and seventy six days that I was on death row,
I never got to go to federal court. It was
still I mean, the swelling of support grew so much
that finally the state court decided, we're going to have
to do something about this because it's making us look really,
really bad. It's bringing too much attention. And just like whenever,
you know, when I was in the hole and I

(43:26):
told you, the only thing they cared about in the
prison is that people on the outside world are going
to realize what they're doing. Same way with judges, prosecutors,
all that the only thing they're concerned with is that
people in the outside are going to realize that this
case isn't what they're telling people it is. So after
that amount of time, they finally decided there's going They said,

(43:46):
we're going to have a new evidenciary hearing, and all
the evidence is finally going to be hurt, all the
new DNA evidence. By that point, not only did we
have the DNA evidence, but we had all sorts of
witnesses that had come forward and said, you know, one
woman admitted that the only reason that she tried to
implicate us was because the police told her she had
she had committed credit card fraud and they were going

(44:07):
to charge her unless she helped them out with this case.
So she came forward and admitted to that. There were
eyewitnesses who said they saw one of the victim's family
members with all three victims within an hour of the
time they were murdered. And this was not known at
the time that we went to trial. So the prosecutors
know all this stuff is about to come out in court,

(44:27):
so they start talking with our attorneys and they come
up with this deal called an Alfred plea. I'd never
even heard of. This thing made no sense whatsoever. What
an Alfred plea means is that you are accepting a
guilty plea while being allowed to legally maintain your innocence.
The only reason this thing exists is so that the

(44:47):
state can't be held responsible for what they've done to you,
you know. And like I said, I was dying physically,
you know, health wise. I knew that if I didn't
take this deal one way or another to live to
see the outside of those walls. You know. The prosecutor
came to us and pretty much said, yeah, you'll win
this case if you go to federal court, but we

(45:09):
can draw this out for another five years, another ten years.
Every time the judge sets a date, we can ask
for an extension, we can appeal any decisions made, or
you can accept this deal and go home tomorrow, literally tomorrow.
But you can sign these papers and walk out of
this prison.

Speaker 5 (45:25):
But there was another catch, which is that they insisted.

Speaker 4 (45:28):
That all three guys do it exactly.

Speaker 5 (45:30):
And they had an amazing amount of leverage there too,
because now it goes back to your friend Jason Baldwin, right,
And Jason was ready to fight the case, but he
wanted to be declared Ennison after everything he had been through.
But they held a little bit of a I mean,
not a little bit.

Speaker 4 (45:47):
They held a huge.

Speaker 5 (45:51):
A huge hammer, which was that they made it known
to him that if he decided he wanted to fight
the case, they were going to execute you. And that
friendship that you guys had had from when you were
teenagers now here it is eighteen years later. And it's
really interesting, right that one woman that you spoke about,
who also changed her story over time, she got to

(46:12):
keep her credit cards while sentencing you to death. That's really,
let's face it, right, that was the deal she made.
She somewhere in her head she decided that was a
good deal. Now, maybe she thought you really were guilty,
and they probably convinced her of that. Let's hope that
was really the case. But one or another, for the
sake of a couple of credit cards and the difficulties
it would have caused her if that you know, went

(46:34):
to court, whatever, she was more than willing to roll
over on you and have an innocent guy go to
his death. But so Jason now had really a sophie's choice,
right he had to accept this Alfred plea allow the
state to force him to live his life as a
convicted felon and never be able to sue for compensation.

(47:00):
There's the added element of the fact that when Alfred
pleas are given and accepted, typically it means that they
won't go reopen the case because as.

Speaker 4 (47:08):
Far as they're concerned, it's still closed.

Speaker 5 (47:10):
So there's no justice for the kids, there's no justice
for their families. But it was a convenient thing that
allowed a certain number of people to say face and
allowed you to go home. So you took the Alfred play,
I think anybody in your situation would have. And when

(47:32):
the alternative was death, it's a pretty easy decision to make.
And how long after you took that did you get
to go home?

Speaker 1 (47:40):
About a week later?

Speaker 4 (47:42):
What the hell was that? Like?

Speaker 1 (47:43):
I mean, it was honestly, it was kind of horrendous
because I didn't know that I was going to get
out until the night before I got out. The night
before I got out, they came and got me and
took me to the county jail, and I knew then
they wouldn't be I went through this amount of trouble
because the county jail was like several hours away from
the prison, So I knew they wouldn't be going through

(48:05):
this amount of trouble, you know, taking me several hours
away from the prison unless I am getting out. So
I knew there was a chance I might get out,
but I didn't know I was going to. So in
that week, I did not sleep, I did not eat.
I began, at that point edging towards a nervous breakdown.
The day we walked out of prison, I did not

(48:27):
have one single penny of money in my pocket. I
didn't have so much as a suit of clothes to
change in too. I had nowhere to go. I had nothing.
We didn't think of stuff like that whenever I was
in prison. We're just thinking, keep these people from killing me.
Go home. That's the finish line, that's it. So that's

(48:47):
what we had always been working towards. We didn't realize
what was going to happen whenever I walked out of
those gates. Keep in mind that not only had I
been in prison for almost twenty years by that point,
I had spent almost the last decade of that in
solitary confinement. So I went from a decade of solitary
confinement to being out on the streets of Manhattan literally overnight,
and it shattered me psychologically. I can't remember the first

(49:11):
two years that I was out of prison. If you
put together everything I can remember within the first two
years that I walked out, it may equal a couple hours.
It destroyed me in every way that it possibly could.
We weren't counting on any of that. I've I had
two nervous breakdowns due to not only that, but also

(49:31):
once we're out, you know, you're constantly You've got the
media coming at you, asking you every day, all these
questions about being in prison, about the case, all this,
so you get to the point where you're thinking, why
the fuck did I even get out. I'm not even
out of prison, you know, I'm out here, but it's
the only thing people are asking me about. It's the
only thing people are talking to me about. You know,

(49:52):
random people walk up to you on the street and
start talking about the case. So it's not even like
you're out of prison anymore. It's just like the prison
is in your hit all the time. You know, you
may be It was like when I was in prison,
at least I could have a mental and emotional life
separate from the prison. Entire days, weeks, months would go
by when I wouldn't even think about the fact that

(50:14):
I was in prison because I was so busy trying
to build a life for myself. When I got out,
it almost felt like I was having to think more
about prison than when I was in, and it destroyed
me in every way that it possibly could.

Speaker 5 (50:29):
But there's a there's a real silver lining here right
and that silver lining I'm sitting only a few feet
away from us right now. And how did you meet Laurie?
And what's the I mean, I can see when you
tour together, it's like there's like an orb, like a
glowing orb.

Speaker 4 (50:48):
I think you can probably see it from the space station.
So how did you meet her? And what's and what
does that meant to you?

Speaker 1 (50:55):
Laurie was one of the very first people who saw
the first documentary back in nineteen ninety whenever it came out.
She was living in New York at the time. She
was a landscape architect, and she used to get before
it came out on HBO, they had like several small
screenings and like you know, art house type theaters, and
she got tickets to one of those, went and saw
the movie and said she couldn't stop thinking about it.

(51:17):
And you know, just like I was saying while ago
about how much letters mean to people inside the prison.
She sat down and wrote me a letter. And this
was back, you know, before the Internet was everywhere and
you could find anything in the world just by googling
it in three seconds. You know, she had to go
through a lot of effort in trouble just to get
the address of the prison, just to find out where
I even was. Whenever I got the very first letter

(51:40):
from her, the minute I opened it, I knew that
this was someone unlike anyone else that I'd ever known.
And it kind of goes back to what you were
just saying about the ORB. Honest to God, felt like
as long as we were together, as long as she
was looking after me, as long as she was in
my life and working on this case. From that moment on,

(52:01):
I honestly felt like these people cannot hurt me anymore.
I'm safe. And it was true as long as she
was in my life. I mean, yeah, there was a
lot of bad stuff in prison, but it was like
it never got to worst case scenario. Somehow or another.
Things would always turn around, Things would always work out.
It was like we had divine intervention on our side.

(52:24):
In a lot of ways, Laurie ended up doing more
work on my case than the attorneys, private investigators and
everybody else put together after they did the DNA testing.
She's the one out there digging through people's garbage to
find cigarette butts to try to match the DNA to
She was the one out there, you know, doing the fundraising. Really,
she was doing everything she could to keep people from

(52:46):
forgetting about this case.

Speaker 4 (52:48):
Wow.

Speaker 5 (52:48):
I mean, for a landscape arbit tap, for a landscape architect,
she's a damn good investigator. Just you know, publicists advocate
and you know, it's just just a ton of respect
and admiration for you, Laurie, and I can say that
because you're sitting here and everything that you've done and
everything that you are so so you you're together now

(53:13):
you're here at the Church of Rock and Roll at
opening weekend, which I'm so like, I said, so grateful
to both of you for coming.

Speaker 4 (53:21):
And what's this experience been like for you?

Speaker 1 (53:25):
It's been actually pretty amazing, you know. I think I've
only started to come out of shock and trauma and
become happy and everything else, probably within the last two years.
We've been out for about seven years now, so probably
within the past two years is whenever the real actual
healing started and I started being able to focus on
things that I wanted to focus on building a life.

(53:47):
And you know, one of those things was doing what
we did here today or last night, like with the
commitment ceremonies, and being able to talk to people about,
you know, things that mean something to me personally, and
develop real relationships with people based on things other than
just the case last night. I would have people like

(54:07):
twenty one year old kids who have no idea who
the hell I even am, don't care. They were coming
to the commitment ceremonies, wanted to do the commitments not
because it was me, but because they love each other.
They want to be part of it, whatever it is.
Stuff like that, that is what's rewarding. That's what I
love doing, you know, things that are real.

Speaker 5 (54:28):
Yeah, and I've I had the opportunity to see parts
of some of the ceremonies and also to talk to
some of the people who participated in them, and the
stories are beautiful. I mean, people who were on the
verge of breaking up after twelve years of marriage and came.

Speaker 4 (54:46):
I think they came because you were you and they
wanted to have that They wanted to get some of
your special brand of magic.

Speaker 5 (54:54):
And now they're you know, now they're recommitted to each
other and other people who found some new level to
go to in whatever relationship they're in, and you're giving
them their certificates and the embossing on the Church of
Rock and Roll logo, and I mean, for me, it's
just an unbelievable feeling to know that we're having that

(55:14):
kind of a positive impact on them, on you because
of them, and then on everyone who's around sitting in
the pews, because we have pews outside and we have
the what do you call that when people do the
fingers the two fingers up in the air the rock
and roll sort of the horns. We have those a
neon out by the So I'm trying to give people

(55:36):
a visual.

Speaker 4 (55:36):
And we're going to be taking this on the road
and hopefully bringing it to other cities near you, whoever
you are, wherever you're listening. And I'm really excited about that,
and I think we're just going to do a lot
of really really great stuff together. And so.

Speaker 5 (55:53):
My favorite part of the podcast everyone, and we're now
in our seventh season, is when I get to stop
talking entirely and just turn the mic over to you
and get your final thoughts on anything you want to

(56:15):
talk about, whether it's how people can get involved or
what people anything at all. I mean, you can talk
about the weather if you want. So before I do that,
I want to say again that I appreciate you being
here and sharing your your thoughts and your wisdom and
your your courage and your story, because I know it's

(56:37):
not easy with our audience and with everyone in the
room here at the Church of Rock and Roll. So
and then I'm going to turn it over you for
final thoughts, and then we're all gonna we're all going
to meditate under your guidance, which I'm super excited about.

Speaker 1 (56:50):
So actually, what I usually do instead of, you know,
always tell people the reason I do stuff like this
is not to force everyone to hear me ramble on
like a jackass. I'm here to talk about whatever people
want to talk about, you know. That's That's the reason
I'm here is because and that's the reason everybody else
is here. I'm sure you know, when people hear these stories,

(57:10):
they probably have things that come to mind that they
wonder about that maybe we didn't touch on or whatever
it is. So I usually just like to give people
the opportunity if there was anybody that had a question
or anything out of everything we just talked about that
you'd like to know the answer to, or hear more about,
or anything else, I'm willing to you know, whether it's
prison life, whether it's the case, whether it's life after,

(57:31):
whatever the hell it is you want to know about.
If there's any question you have, I'm open to it.

Speaker 5 (57:35):
Oh, well, this is a new thing. Since we usually
record in the studio without an audience. Now we have
that opportunity, so we will open it up for just
a few questions, because then we do want to get
to the to the meditation. Does anybody have a question
for Damien?

Speaker 7 (57:48):
Damien, thank you for sharing your story with us. It's
fabergasting here that all that actually happened to you and
you had to live through it, through all of your
darkest hours. How did you find the strength to fight
through that?

Speaker 1 (57:59):
I think for those at home who might not be
able to hear the question he asked, even before Laurie
found me, before she started taking on the case, Like
during my darkest hours, what it was that allowed me
to keep surviving? On a daily basis in prison. And
really what it comes down to, and this is incredibly important.
You know, keep in mind they say that your average

(58:20):
person in prison, even when you take you know, we're
talking about the guy in our case that gave the
confession that only had an IQ of seventy to seventy two.
Even when you take that out of the equation, the
average IQ of the person in prison is only about
eighty five. So that's still well below you know, average
IQ level. So a lot of people aren't capable of

(58:41):
even doing this, which is why it's so important that
helped come from the outside world. But what it comes
down to is finding something to focus on other than
the prison. You know, I would see guys in there
on a daily basis that didn't have people in the
outside world, that weren't capable of constructing a routine or

(59:02):
anything else to give them something to focus on. So
their full attention was taken up by the fact that
they were on death road. They're waiting to be executed,
and you see him snap all the time.

Speaker 4 (59:11):
You know.

Speaker 1 (59:11):
I would see things like one day, this guy he
just starts screaming and beating on the walls of his
cell with both fists until both of his fists are
just busted and bloody. They take him. He's screaming that
the devil is in his cell. All they do they
take him out, wrap his hands up, and throw him
back in his cell. People go insane because they are
focused on the prison all the time. So really, what

(59:34):
I did was I had to find ways to give
myself a life outside of that environment. And for me,
a lot of it was, you know, like we were
talking about earlier reading at one point, you know, like
I said, also, I only had a ninth grade education.
So after Lori especially came into my life, I started
hearing about all these things that I didn't have within
my frame of reference, you know, like Camu and Dickens

(59:56):
and Tolstoy and Dousteroyevsky and all these sorts of things.
So I decided, I want to know what the hell
people are even talking about whenever they're talking about these things.
So I started devouring books that I honestly didn't even
really have a great deal of interest in, you know,
even things like the works of Freud and Young and
things like that, just because I wanted to know what

(01:00:18):
it was about. And it I did eventually reach a
point where I thought, none of this stuff is really
feeding me in any substantial way. You know, I'm taking
in a lot of abstract knowledge and concepts and stories
and writing styles and things like this, but it doesn't

(01:00:38):
make me happy in any way. So one day, after
we had filled up an entire storage facility with books,
I stopped and went back to the things that meant
something to me. So a lot of it for me
was reading a lot, working out a lot, meditation a lot.

(01:01:00):
You know, the heart and soul of my life when
I was in prison, and even now that I'm out
of prison, was ceremonial magic. By the time I got
out of prison, I was doing meditation and energy work
for up to eight hours a day. And part of
what destroyed me whenever I got out, you know, the
psychological devastation. For some reason, when I walked out of prison,

(01:01:20):
I could not read anymore. Like I would try to
read a page, and I would read the same page
over and over and over, and I couldn't retain what
I had just read when I got to the bottom
of the page. I couldn't watch TV shows like I said.
I didn't even have facial recognition so I would go
to dinner with people, meet them two days later and
not be able to even remember who they were. So

(01:01:45):
that screwed me up a lot. But really what it
came down to in prison, what allowed me to survive
was not thinking about prison, coming up with something else
to focus on other than the horror that was going
on around me.

Speaker 4 (01:02:00):
Damian, I love your optimism and your lust for life.
I would love to know what your idea of a
perfect day is, now, what does that look like?

Speaker 1 (01:02:08):
A perfect day is one when I live in New
York up in Harlem. A perfect day to me is
a day when I don't have to get on the subway,
when I don't have to walk out my front door
at all. I get up in the morning, I start
going through my daily meditations, daily energy work, take a break,
and this may sound crazy, but I actually take pleasure

(01:02:31):
and clean in the house. That's really one of the
things that also helped me whenever I first got out
was doing laundry. I had never done laundry in my life,
but I would go into the laundry room where the
washer and dryer was, and something about that was like
being in a rocking chair to me. It calmed and
soothed my nerves. So really a perfect day to me.

(01:02:52):
I don't leave my apartment, I don't get on the subway.
I'm back up now. Like I said, you know, it
shattered me, like I couldn't even read, so couldn't do magic,
I couldn't meditate, I couldn't do anything. I went from
eight hours a day to not even being able to
do eight minutes a day. So I've gradually built up
over time until now I'm back up. Some days I
can do on a really good day between five and

(01:03:12):
seven hours, So that's a perfect day to me doing that,
ordering pizza and playing with my cats.

Speaker 4 (01:03:25):
I think we got to tell you for one more question.

Speaker 7 (01:03:27):
I was just wondering if you were aware of any
groups that are fighting for justice for the three boys.
Do you think the real killer will ever come to light?

Speaker 1 (01:03:36):
I think, honestly, I do. I think that it will
come to light. But you know, like I was saying
earlier about the politics of everything involved, I honestly think
before that happens, a lot of the people who have
a vested interest in keeping this covered up, who you know,
to preserve their jobs, can't let the truth come out.

(01:03:56):
I think a lot of those people will either have
to retire or move on or whatever it is, and
new people who don't have a vested interest in this
will have to come on board. Who will actually look
at the evidence, who will actually hear the case. So yeah,
I do think one day, eventually something will happen. I honestly,
I don't keep up with the case, so I don't
know of any organization. The only organization I know of

(01:04:18):
two legal organizations. One is the Innocence Project, which Jason
is on, and the other one is Proclaimed Justice, which
Jason Baldwin is on. And the only reason I know
about those two is because of, you know, personal relationships
I don't keep up with. To me, you know, like

(01:04:38):
I was just describing a perfect day, to me, a
hellish day would be a day when I had to
read like a court brief or a legal brief, or
you know, watch a true crime show or any of
that sort of thing. So those are honestly the only
two organizations that I know anything about at all.

Speaker 4 (01:04:54):
I'm really glad you asked that question. That was a
great question.

Speaker 5 (01:04:57):
So anyway, now I just want to say again, this
has been an awesome experience for me. Thank you everyone
for being here at the Church of Rock and Roll,
and thank you Damian for everything you're doing and for
being a guest on Wrongful Conviction.

Speaker 1 (01:05:11):
Thank you so much for having me.

Speaker 5 (01:05:13):
Well, let's fucking meditate. Don't forget to give us a
fantastic review. Wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 4 (01:05:33):
It really helps.

Speaker 5 (01:05:34):
And I'm a proud donor to the Innocence Project and
I really hope you'll join me in supporting this very
important cause and helping to prevent future wrongful convictions. Go
to Innocence Project dot orgorg to learn how to donate
and get involved. I'd like to thank our production team,
Connor Hall and Kevin Wartis. The music in the show
is by three time OSCAR nominated.

Speaker 4 (01:05:54):
Composer Jay Ralph.

Speaker 5 (01:05:56):
Be sure to follow us on Instagram at Wrongful Conviction
and on faceboo.

Speaker 4 (01:06:00):
Book at Wrongful Conviction podcast.

Speaker 5 (01:06:02):
Wrongful Conviction with Jason Flaum is a production of Lava
for Good Podcasts and association with Signal Company Number one