January 13, 2021 • 41 mins
This is an updated episode that originally aired on November 7, 2016.
On September 7th, 1988, Marty Tankleff awoke for his 1st day of his senior year of high school only to find his mother had been killed, while his father held on by a thread. Curiously, he became the target of the investigation, despite some glaringly suspicious characters.
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https://www.makinganexoneree.com/
https://metcalflawnyc.com/attorneys/martin-tankleff/
https://www.wrongfulconvictionpodcast.com/with-jason-flom
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:03):
For those not already familiar with the story of Marty
tank Cliffe, his case began on the night of September six,
when Marty was just about to start his senior year
of high school in an affluent area of Long Island,
New York. Marty's father was an entrepreneur and investor who
was playing poker with some friends and business associates in
the house. That night, Marty awoke to two absolutely gruesome
(00:27):
scenes in which both of his loving parents had been
brutally beaten and stabbed. His mother was dead, his father
was dying. When authorities arrived, they kept him separate from
any of the adults in his life as they focused
their investigations solely on Marty instead of Marty's father's business partner,
Jerry Stearman, who all signs pointed to being the obvious
(00:51):
suspect in this awful crime. In our original two thousand
seventeen release of Marty's story, we touched on many of
these details, but at that time, with ongoing civil litigation,
we were not at liberty to delve more deeply into
the details of the reinvestigation of Marty's case that ultimately
led to his exoneration. In this episode. You'll hear excerpts
(01:14):
of that original interview, which included both Marty and false
confession experts Paul Cassine, to set the stage for not
only the evidence and witnesses that made Marty's freedom possible,
as well as all the amazing things Marty has been
able to accomplish since winning his freedom, but also what
Marty intends to do to bring closure to this harrowing tragedy.
(01:36):
This is Wrongful Conviction with Jason Flom. Welcome back to
Wrongful Conviction with Jason Flam. Especially excited today because I
have two people who I consider to be well, let's
(01:57):
just call it what it is. They're heroes of mine,
but for very different sets of reasons. Marty Tankleff is
here today. Marty is an exonoree who was wrongfully convicted
of murdering his parents, UM, which I get the chills
just hearing myself say that. UM. And he's going to
share his remarkable story of going through what could be
(02:19):
considered one of the most traumatic experiences that any human
being could ever endure and his subsequent triumph post exoneration.
You will be amazed at at what he's been able
to accomplish and overcome. We also have today Saw Casson.
Saw pioneered in the eighties the scientific study of false
confessions by introducing a taxonomy that distinguished between three types
(02:42):
of false confessions, voluntary, compliant, and internalized that is universally
accepted today. He has recently studied forensic confirmation biases and
the impact that confessions have on judges, juries, lay witnesses,
forensic science examiners, and the plea bargaining process. He is
widely considered the foremost expert on false confession. So welcome
(03:03):
both of you. Thanks for coming in and joining us today.
Thank you for having us. Marty, Let's start with you,
So let's go back to you grew up in Long Island.
I grew up in an affluent area called Belta, New York,
which is a little hamlet in Portrepson, New York, north Shore,
Suffolk County. I went to Portrefs in high school, where
the norm was we drove nice cars, we went on boats.
(03:28):
And what happened to me was not something myself or
anyone in my neighborhood could have ever imagined. No, no
one could imagine it. Um. You had a happy childhood,
nuclear family, right, you and your sister. Your parents idyllic
a little bit more idyllic because I was adopted, so
my parents were older. So a lot of what we
did growing up, my father lived vicariously through me because
(03:51):
he didn't have a very good childhood. So you know,
we had the boats, the a t v s, We
traveled a lot. People used to joke that I was
a spoiled kid, and I was, but my father instill
amazing work values in me. I was working since I
was probably eleven or twelve years old, and he was
the bagel king, right. My father was an entrepreneur who
invested with Jerry Stewarman, who was then known as the
(04:15):
bagel King of Long Island. My father had invested over
a half a million dollars with Jerry and his bagel
stores and horses, and in the summer of night, their
relationship significantly deteriorated. What I later learned was that we
believe my father learned that the bagel businesses may have
been a money wandering operation for Jerry's son, Todd's drug
(04:36):
dealing business. We're talking hard drugs. Todd was arrested, went
to prison for possession of cocaine, marijuana and other drugs,
and he served time in New York State prisons. UM,
but my father was a tough older man. Nothing would
stop him. And one of the things that he was
involved with was is there was a weekly poker game,
(04:59):
and in September six was his night to hold the
weekly poker game, and one of the members at that
game was Jerry Struman. My father was the type of
man it didn't matter, you know, how much threatening Jerry
Struman did. And there were threats. We later learned about
two weeks before September six, Jerry Struman threatened to cut
my father's tongue out, and it got so bad that
(05:21):
my father was even looking into buying a shotgun because
he was fearful. Now we've set the stage. There's the
poker game right, There's obviously it's a tense environment right
with the two of him in the room. But you
went to sleep. I went to sleep because September seven,
who was the first day of my high school year,
I was gonna be a senior. And I woke up
and my life was never the same again. The lights
(05:43):
were on in my house, the house wasn't locked up.
UM walked through the house and we're upstairs. It's a
ranch house. It's a very long ranch house. Where the
bedrooms were in one end of the house. Um, where
the card game was was in the complete opposite end
of the house, right, So you wouldn't have heard anything,
would have heard anything. And I discovered my father who
was still sitting in his office chair. Um. And he
(06:05):
was alive. Um. And he was bleeding. And what did
you do? I called nine one one and I followed
their instructions, right. They told you to wrap them as
best you could, gave you some medical tips whatever, try
to stop the bleeding, that kind of stuff, right. Um.
And within a short period of time, law enforcement showed
up at the house. Where's your mom? My mother was
(06:25):
actually in her bedroom. Cops come and immediately they removed
me from the house. And what I kind of can
say now is that the process of questioning me, trying
to find out what happened started almost immediately. Even when
I had family members show up that morning, there was
this immediate separation. When my brother in law showed up,
he was ripped away. When my godfather, who was also
(06:49):
the family attorney, showed up, I saw him. He never
saw me. But McCready who was the lead detective. His
name is Kay James McCready was the lead detective on
the case. Ran two him and basically told him I
was already on the way to the hospital. I wasn't
at the house. Even though I was at the house,
I was told consistently I was being taken to the hospital.
(07:10):
Unfortunately I was never taken to the hospital. I ended
up being taken to police headquarters. At this point, were
you aware that your mom had been killed? Um? So
you're in a state of total shock, panic. Words can't
describe it. Your parents were beaten to death? Is that right?
There was a bludgeon instrument uh and a knife uh,
(07:32):
And to this day neither one has been discovered. And
there was some forensic evidence which I can talk about.
There was glove prints, so whoever did do this, we're
wearing gloves. Um that they still haven't found the gloves. So,
I mean there's all these little things that actually the
jury was aware of, but they chose just to ignore.
So they took you to police headquarters because and obviously
(07:55):
this whole sort of pattern is emerging right where they
wanted to. They had an agenda. Yeah, I mean, you know,
at that day. I didn't know that. I was seventeen
years old. My father was the police commissioner of our
little community. I was raised to trust law enforcement, believe
in them. Law enforcement wouldn't lie to you, they wouldn't
deceive you. Unfortunately, that's everything that they did that morning. Right,
(08:17):
And you're in an extremely fragile state, and you need help, right,
you need someone to help you. You're seventeen years old, right,
we know that they have misled, is it not probably
nice way to put it? His family guardian at this point, right,
your godfather, who was also the only lawyer that was
available to you at this time. They kind of mislike
everybody though. I mean I had other cousins and aunts
and uncles who were at the hospitals, and they were
(08:38):
lied to too. They were told Marty's on the way
to the hospital, Mars on the way to the hospital. Right.
So they're basically doing everything they can to prevent you
from having any responsible guardian or legal representative that might
be able to stand in the way of them getting
the conviction that they wanted. Regardless of truth. Yes, there
was no truth seeking here. I mean, you have a
man who was business partners with my father half a
(09:01):
million dollars involved was there the night before. My father
also had in the weeks prior, had demanded he had
two notes fifty dollars. Back in the days after the murders,
Jerry Steuerman cleaned out a joint bank account. He faked
his death. He fled to California. He had a hair
(09:21):
weave back then, and he went to a club that
he wasn't a member. Full of um. He had five
or six different aliases at that moment um. But law
enforcement never considered a suspect. And every time I tell people,
you know, the average person would say, well, how is
he not a suspect? I mean, you could have stopped that.
He faked his own death. So let's get to the
(09:43):
interrogation and the false confession in prison and the whole Saturday.
So let's I mean, you're obviously very familiar with Marty's case.
You've known Marty since all right, he started writing letters
to me from prison. So here's Marty in a state
of panic and shock and grief. And as we discussed,
he's still a child. And his confession is different than
(10:04):
any of the other ones I've studied, right, because it
may or may not have ever even actually happened, right,
Usually they actually get somebody to say something on video,
or they'll get a written statement or something. But in
Marty's case, it's much more highly nuance, isn't it. Yes? Yes,
And in Martie's cases, you've got to ask yourself the
first question, why did Marty, seventeen year old, without a
(10:25):
criminal record, without a history of violence, with good parents
and good relationships, in an affluent community, why would Marty
kill his parents? And in a brutal way, in a
brutal in the in the most brutal of ways. And
you have to ask yourself the question, how in God's
name did he become their suspect? You know, most people said, well,
you know, he did it for the money, because they
thought my parents were affluent. The way the wills were structured,
(10:46):
I would have gotten everything. And we later learned that
law enforcement never really understood the way the wills and
never looked into the way the wills were structured. I
wasn't going to benefit financial until I was twenty five,
and I was seventeen, and so, you know, as one
of my aunts said, what was he supposed to do?
From seven? Live on the streets so there he is
in the interrogation room, alone, alone, seventeen, not street wise,
(11:11):
never been in trouble before, never had to worry about
how do you behave when you get picked up by police.
He had done nothing wrong. And the funny thing about
innocent people is even if they had read him as
miranda rights, he would have waived those rights. So miranda
becomes not a safeguard that's particularly effective at this point.
Keep in mind, they've got him in police headquarters. The
whole family is with his father, who is dying but
(11:34):
still alive in the hospital. That's where Marty wants to be.
So he's already in a state where he's motivated to cooperate.
And they started asking him questions about what he saw,
how he saw it, what had happened, and he gives
them answers, and the answers are consistent. They don't believe him,
They tell him they don't believe him. They asked for
the story to be told again, and they're searching for
inconsistencies and they're calling him a liar, and they're not
(11:57):
believing the story that he keeps telling over and over again.
But then they shift gears and they shift gears towards
a procedure now where they start to lie about the evidence. Now,
the average American doesn't realize that in the United States
police are allowed to bring in a suspect and lie
about the evidence. They're allowed to say to the suspect,
we have your fingerprints on the murder weapon, even if
(12:19):
that's not true. What happened in Marty's case is they
bring him in they say, well, you know, it appears
that your mother was in a struggle and there's hair
in her grasp and it turns out it's your hair.
We did the analysis, that's your hair, and that confused
Marty wasn't true, but he got confused as to how
that was possible. And then because it was such a
(12:39):
bloody scene, it was too bloody scenes. There just wasn't
enough blood on Marty to account for that. They suggested
to him that he had showered before calling. He said, no,
I didn't use the shower. They came back and said, well,
we did a humidity test in your bathroom and we
found that the shower had been used that morning. A
humidity test. I don't believe even on c side, they've
given us humidity test um. Now they have delivered two lies,
(13:03):
and then the detective delivers the ultimate lie. He leaves
the room. There are two detectives and they're the lead detective.
McCready leaves the room, stages a phone call, and comes
back to deliver the news to Marty. Marty, I've got
good news and I got bad news. I just spoke
to the folks at the hospital. The good news is
your father has come out of his coma. He's regained consciousness.
(13:24):
The bad news is he said you did it. Now,
think about this for a month. Insane. You've got a
seventeen year old and you're now delivering one lie after another,
culminating in a lie that to Marty, the person he
trusts most in his life has just said he committed
this crime. And not only did Marty of course, had
(13:48):
no choice but to believe that that evidence, because he
doesn't believe police would lie to him. Certainly, not like that.
Even McCready's partner believed that presentation. So what choice is
Marty have now but to wonder, how is it possible
that they have this kind of objective evidence. My father
doesn't lie, he said. Marty has almost no cognitive choice
(14:11):
but to accept that information. Because he's got two things right.
His father doesn't lie and the cops don't lie. Right,
these are the two things that he believes exactly. So
those things lead to one conclusion, one conclusion, I must
have done it. And the conversation turns to memory consciousness,
the possibility of sleepwalking and doing it without awareness, and
generate theories from Marty to explain how come you don't
(14:34):
remember doing this. So we know that that was the
nature of the conversation. We know that for some degree
of transient time, Marty became confused about even his own innocence.
His confession was a handwritten statement, handwritten by the detective,
that is inaccurate as a description of the crime. It
(14:55):
doesn't complete itself, it's actually ends in mid sense, and
it is un signed. This confession, the so called confession,
was written by the detective and not signed by Marty.
And yet that allegation of that confession is the one
and only piece of evidence that was used to convict him.
You're at trial, You still believe that justice is going
(15:18):
to be at trial? Still believe it? I mean, this
is what the lawyers are telling me. The system works. Um,
I was innocent. I testified in my own behalf. The
prosecution have tried me with intentional murder and depraved in
difference murder. So when we got called back in the
first verdict that was read was not guilty, and then
(15:38):
all of a sudden, the second one was guilty. The
one thing I vividly remember is the walk after they
read the guilty verdicts over to the county jails. They
have these tunnel systems, and I remember just I felt
like I was being led like a dog because I
was just listening. And I remember getting to the property
room and I remember the property and most saying what
(16:00):
are you doing here, Marty? And I go, why else
would I be here? And been everything else went blank
for about the next six or seven days. But now
you're thrown into this environment. You're in maximum security prison,
is that right? Yeah? I was. Basically every day it's
a fight for your life because you never know in
maximum security facilities what could happen, whether it be the
gang's going to war with each other, the alcers taking
(16:22):
you know, their aggression out on you, or just the
random attacks that occur just for no reason whatsoever. Right,
I mean, we know that people are being killed every
day in prisons in America, UM, sometimes by guards, even
absolutely for me. My case was very high profile, so
prisoners knew about the case. Guards knew about the case.
UM And I had a guy come up to me
(16:43):
and he solicity. He goes, if you want to survive,
he says, don't do drugs, don't get involid drugs, don't
get involved homosexuality, don't get involved in gambling gangs, he said.
And work your way into the college program or the library.
He said. One of the hardest things is once you're innocent,
is getting out, he said. But you'll figure out a
way to do it. My lawyers said, okay, what's never
(17:04):
been done here before? And we said a full investigation.
And that's when I started looking for private investigators and
end up hiring Jason Peter. And one of the things
that Jay said to me was, if you're innocent, hire me.
If you're guilty, don't. I said, I'm innocent, I'll hire you.
I just find the truth, giant. And it took years.
You ended up serving six thousand, three and thirty eight days,
(17:27):
which is about seventeen and a half years now that
we're up to speed from our two thousand seventeen release,
and with party's civil litigation out of the way, he
(17:50):
was finally able to tell us about the mountain of
exculpatory evidence that they built, how his freedom came to pass,
all of the amazing things he's been able to accomplish,
and of course his plans to finally bring the people
who conspired to murder his parents to justice. Witness is
an evidence slowly emerged over the years pointing towards a
(18:11):
conspiracy involving at least Peter Kent, Joseph Creeden, Glenn Harris,
and of course the Stewarman's and more continues to come
to light to this day. But the process started back
in the early nineties when a woman named Carlene Kovaks
went to a party. In the early nineties nineties, Joseph Creeden,
(18:34):
who was an enforcer for Todd Steuerman, was at a
party where he admitted his involvement in the murders to
Carlin Kovacs. So the idea that Todd Strum and Jerry
Schuhman were responsible for this not only from day one,
but every year subsequent to my conviction investigation, more and
(18:55):
more evidence would come forward, continuously pointing back towards the
Stearman's and it was around three when we presented the
D's office with that information. And as the years would
go on, throughout the nineteen nineties and the two thousands,
the court system failed me. It feels to me like
(19:18):
the tides started to turn around two thousand three when
you hired j Sawpeter. Jay started from the very beginning
was kind of like who been intited financially and let's
just start branching out from there. The criminal ties around
the Stewardmans. It was pretty well known when Jay took
(19:38):
on this case of investigating it, and he just started
looking at Todd Storman and Jerry Stewarman and started branching out,
and eventually they found Glenn Harris. Glenn Harris said something
to the effect that I've been waiting for this day
for twelve or thirteen years. Glenn Harris gave us one
statement saying that he had been high fired by Stewartman
(20:01):
to drive the two hitman Joe Creeden and Peter Kent
to and from the Tank Cliff House where you lived
on the night of decline, and that just kind of
started the snowball effect. We assembled a body of evidence
of witnesses, and in two thousand five we presented everything
(20:23):
to the Suffolk County d A with the hopes that
with their subpoena power and wire top power, that they
would actually take a real serious look at this case.
And we said, you know, if you don't do anything
after forty five days, we will file a post conviction
most in New York, and we learned that it wasn't
(20:43):
until the forty four day that they actually went out
and went to interview the first witness, and we thereafter
filed a post conviction motion. Judge Braslow granted a hearing,
and throughout the hearing of very his technical issues came up,
and more witnesses came forward. Throughout the hearing, carly and
(21:05):
Kovac's claimed that Joe Creten told her about how he
and another man hid in the bushes outside the tankleff House,
evaded capture and got rid of the bloody clothes. And
then there was more. There were family members of the killers, right,
there were murder weapons that were actually had been hidden
that were found. Am I wrong about that? Mighty? So
the culminating witness at the hearing was Joseph Creeding's son,
(21:29):
who said that his father confessed to him of his involvement.
There was a pipe that was discovered on a piece
of property that Glenn Harris said, I pipe was thrown.
Nobody knows if the pipe was actually used, but what
are the chances that somebody could know or say, look,
(21:50):
go search on this piece of property. We threw something
there eighteen years ago, seventeen years ago and it was found.
The actual murder weapons, the non have never been found.
By now we're talking about two thousand five, two thousand six.
The defense your team had assembled twenty witnesses who all
painted collectively a picture of how Storman had orchestrated these murders.
(22:14):
Two of the witnesses had seen McCready with Storman just
before the murders. Hello. There was also the matter of
the murder weapon not having been found. There was a
bloody stain of what appeared to be a knife imprinted
on one of our lead tank cliffs sheets, but no
match was found, suggesting that someone had taken it. But
justice was right around the corner, right so March seventeenth,
(22:37):
two thousand six, the petition for the new trial was denied,
but then December two thousand seven, tell us about that. Well,
in New York State, after you fill a post conviction motion,
you have to seek permission to appeal the case. Thankfully,
the Appel Division that had denied me relief in three
(22:58):
had granted me permission to hear my case and my
lawyers argued before four amazing judges in September of two
thousand seven, and I remember it was December that I
was calling home, calling the lawyers every single day, trying
(23:19):
to find out how the decision come down. And I
had four different appeals in the Appel Division, including one
for a new trial, one for DNA testing. So I
was finally able to get through to one of my
lawyer's offices and the receptionists said to me, She's like,
don't tell Bruce, I told you, But we won the
(23:40):
big one. And my legs started to shake a little bit,
and I kind of almost didn't believe it because it
was kind of that moment when you or just waiting
for that day for day after day, year after year.
And when I finally spoke to Bruce Barquette, I'll never
forget his words. He said, act your ship. You're coming home,
(24:02):
and you'll never see the inside of a jail cell again.
And at that very moment. Don't ask me why I
said this, but I was kind of sarcastic, and I said, Bruce,
and I said, I've been studying a little long enough.
I said, it's an oral agreement and I'm going to
hold you to it. And he kept his word. I
was brought down to the Subvin County jail December twenty six,
(24:23):
the day after Christmas, and on December twenty seven, I
was freed and I have never returned to a jail
cell since. So Bruce Bork kept his word. In the
book A Criminal Injustice, which is I recommend so highly
that reads like a Grisham novel, but it's true and
(24:43):
you lived it. And in that book, one of the
things that sticks out so much and about your story
is that Suffolk County was like a criminal enterprise. And
I'm talking about the justice system. Can you describe it well?
I think it was best described. I think it was
William Hellerstein described it as the wild wild West of
(25:03):
law enforcement and the court system. Um And essentially he said,
is that in Subfolk County, they do whatever the hell
they want to do, whatever they want to do it
because they are almighty um. And I think that almighty
attitude can be traced back to the homicide division where
in the eighties they used to wear these shirts that
(25:25):
said and that referred to their confession and conviction rates
for homicide cases and they were proud of it. And
Suboc County has a long history of turmoil and corruption.
When the Attorney General reinvestigated the case during some of
the post conviction proceedings, they uncovered forensics that were in
(25:47):
the possession of Subbok County the entire time, and they
proved to be exculpatory nature. You know, it just goes
to the depths of how sinister and evil the criminals
injustice system was in Suffolk County back then, even up
to recently where the district attorney that was in office
(26:08):
during my post conviction litigation, Tom Spota, was recently criminally
charged while he was a district attorney. When Tom Spota
was in private practice, he and his firm had represented
Todd Stearman and Jerry Steuerman and the chief of Police
William Burke, was also criminally charged and he went to prison.
(26:29):
It's unbelievable. And this gets deeper and deeper because the creedy.
The detective was under investigation for perjury, and let's not
forget the creedy wanted to business with your sister, who
became the heir to the family fortune. Shortly after my conviction,
my half sister through a celebratory party at a country
(26:52):
club for family and friends, and right around the same time,
went into business with money she received from my parents
estate with the lead detective who put me in prison,
and they opened up a bar restaurant Diggaro Dells and
the Riverhead, New York. Yeah, I didn't want to go
(27:14):
down in history as being known as the person who
was convicted of murdering my parents because I didn't do it,
and nobody stands criminally charged or convicted of those murders
as of today. I knew that I wanted to continue
fighting until the truth came out, and we continue to
(27:35):
explore every lead, and even to this day, we've had
new witnesses who have come forward and the only reason
why they've come forward was because Peter Kennon Joseph Cream
have died. They've come forward with exculpatory evidence that no
one has ever heard before that I'm hoping by the
end of the year it will get out there. Are
(27:56):
you still hoping for the authorities to do what they
should have done decades ago and prosecute the people responsible
for this tragedy. There is a new district attorney who
ran on a line of exposing injustice. He set up
a conviction integrity unit. He has clearly stated time and
(28:18):
time again that he owes no allegiance to the prior administration.
And I'm currently working on putting a package together. I'm
confident that any fair minded prosecutor, if they look at
the body of evidence that we have now, someone should
be criminally charged. And I'm going to be asking the
(28:41):
SUBFLK County District Attorney's office to reopen the case. July
eight the charges were dismissed, and your life began again
or a new I mean, you hit the ground running.
(29:03):
And there's so much to talk about still, because there's
the federal civil suit against New York State in the
Suffolk County Police Department, and this was not a frivolous suit.
In fact that July two thousand fourteen, New York State
settled for three point three seven five million, and in
two thousand eighteen, Suffolk County settled for another ten. They
(29:24):
didn't do that willingly. They did that because they had
no way out. I mean, you had them literally dead
to rights. And then you go and graduate from law school. Now,
I mean seriously, Marty, like, are you trying to make
the rest of us look? It's unbelievable. I was just
gonna say that, you know, when you when you say
get up and start running. It was three weeks effort.
(29:44):
I was out of prison, I started producing on my
Bachelor Glory at Hatstraw, and I knew that, you know,
what I went through, no one should go through. And
if there was somebody that could help make a difference,
it would be me. I am out Now I'm a
lawyer um also an adjunct professor at Georgetown University and
(30:08):
Atoral Law School. There's very hard to miss message of
what the rest of us have as an excuse not
to live out our dreams. I mean, you, that's an
unbelievable transformation, and I am so so proud of you.
So you're now the head of the Prisoner in Civil
Rights litigation group at Metcalf and Metcalf. You're living your
best life. And they say living well is the best revenge.
(30:30):
I mean, I think you can attest to that, but
we can't leave alone. The other thing that you're doing now,
which I'm gonna I'm gonna guess is probably the most
rewarding thing other than your family of everything, which is
of course, be making an axotari program. You're, of course,
as we talked about, an adjunct professor at Georgetown. Let's
(30:51):
just say that again, you're a professor at Georgetown, like,
what the hell anyway, and you're working with your childhood
friend and my dear friend, Mark Howard co teaching a
class called making an Axonoree. And one of the students
from that class was on this show in our episode
of the Awful Awful Case of Terrell Barrows, and she said,
(31:11):
and I think any of the students would say that
her life has been forever changed by this experience. So please,
anyone go back and listen to the Terrell Barrows episode.
Terrell really needs and deserves our help. Listen and you'll
get some ideas of how you may be able to
make a difference in his life. He's just as innocent
as Marty was and is so tell us about some
of the people that you've helped Wherever you want to
(31:32):
go with this just to get people a little background
and making fun a lot more on our website, making
an asoni dot com. Mark and I have been friends
since we were three years old going to Love a
w preschool, and every I got out, Mark would invite
me to come down to his class and speak to
him about my experience about the criminal justice system. And
(31:53):
as the years went on, we start talking about the
idea about teaching a class together, and the idea of
making exon are kind of came together one day, just
us talking taking undergraduate students and having them reinvestigate real
cases of men and women in prison, try to track
(32:15):
down new witnesses and try to develop a body of
evidence that could help get them exonerated. And their final
project was to create short documentaries. And we started the
class in ten and one of our cases was Valentin
at Dixon, and our students were able to uncover enough
(32:37):
evidence that we share with Valentino's lawyer and he was
exonerated in September of that year. And each year our
students have done this amazing work, and there's not a
single student who's taken our class that hasn't walked away
and said that the opportunity to try to impact someone's
(33:01):
life is life altering for them. Our students become friends
with the individuals who incarcerated tragically. John Moss, who was
from our first semester, our students and covered evidence that
convinced the Innocence Project to represent him tragically. He passed
away in Martin Luther King Jr. Day this year, but
(33:22):
the students became so close to him and his family
they went to his funeral. I mean, it's kind of
unheard of that students can develop a bond like that.
Every one of the student groups, even after they've graduated,
continue to work on any of the cases that they
were connected with, and if they're in a position where
(33:44):
they can't work, they want to know what's going on.
Because in Valentino and Dixon's case, when he walked free
in September, of Ellie and Julie, who were to the
young women that worked on his case, flew back from
France and England to be there when he walked out
of prison. And I think it's something that they will
(34:05):
never forget their entire life. And Valentino has said time
and time again that they have lifelong friends and if
they ever need anything, he would be there for them.
The relationship you developed with these men and women is
just different. You know. We walk in and we tell
our students that there's no guarantees here other than you're
(34:26):
putting a thousand percent in, and they do more than that.
Our students can sometimes work thirty hours a week outside
of class. They travel around the country, They track down witnesses,
they confront former prosecutors. In one case, they confronted a
currently sitting judge who was a former prosecutor. There really
(34:48):
is no fear that our students have, and it's just,
to me an amazing experience having the opportunity to work
with them, and it really hasn't does even feel like work.
From times, it feels like such an honor and pleasure
to work with students that want to come to class,
want to work. I want to sacrifice their time. And
(35:11):
I remember this year when the idea of spring break,
are going to see somebody in a maximum security prison
during spring break. Our students said, who cares about spring break,
Let's go to prison. Who cares about spring break, Let's
go to prison. Wow, that really does say it all.
And the fact is that those of us who work
(35:32):
in this area now that the first time you get
to be a part I don't care how small the
part is of helping somebody out of this Kafka esque nightmare.
It is unlike anything else that I've ever experienced, and
it makes me feel useful. You know, you now get
(35:53):
to live that to the tense power or to the
nth degree what you want to call it, because you're
doing it again and again, and you're doing it from
a place that the rest of us can't possibly understand,
and doing it for all the right reasons. So it's
wonderful to see. And people can go to making an
exonoree dot com and see these eight minute videos which
are so powerful, and I know that every one of
(36:15):
those students is going to be forever changed by this
experience and they're gonna become freedom fighters in their own right.
And so there there goes the Marty tank Cliff force
multiplier effect. Marty, you've been on the show before, you
know how it works. At this point, we turned to
my favorite part of the show. It's the part of
(36:36):
the show we call closing arguments, where first of all,
I thank you for being here, sharing your story and
just being this sort of beacon of hope and light
that you are and then I turn off my microphone
leave yours on for what we call closing arguments. I
(36:57):
remember when I talked about becoming a lawyer, I said,
you know, I said, I don't think I can ever
reach the pinnacle of exonerations of Barry Scheck or Steve
Drisen or anybody like that. But I know if I'm
instrumental in helping one innocent person walk free, you know,
I kind of joke I've done my job, um, And
I was there the day Valentino walked out, but I'm
(37:20):
far from over. You know, it is so rewarding. And
I know, Jason, you've had the opportunity to be there
when people have walked free and been involved in exonerations.
Its impacts your life in a way that I think
nothing else does. Um. And I know one of my
lawyers said, you know, those who do this work are
doing God's work. And he explained it was simply that,
(37:44):
you know, when you fight to get somebody who's innocent
out of prison, you were almost giving them an opportunity
of new life. So it's almost like a rebirth for
them because some of them have been locked up longer
than they were free, and now all of a sudden
you help them gain their freedom back. It really is
(38:04):
probably some of the most rewarding work. And you know,
Mark is somebody who is just amazing because you know,
Mark was a tenured professor of government and it was
because his involvement in his choice to go to law
school to join my defense team to fight to get
me out of prison, that his career essentially changed. Where
(38:26):
he teaches prisons and justice. He goes into prisons and
teaches college credit courses. He's established the Frederick Douglas Project,
and Mark and I have made a decision that we
will teach this class every year going forward, just because
(38:46):
so many innocent people don't have the ability to have
their voices told. You know, after Just Mercy came out,
I told our students that you have to watch the
scene where Jamie Boxes talking to his lawyer after the
evidentiary hearing and he says something to the fact that
even if I don't get out of prison, I'm good
(39:10):
because the truth came out. And that's what we empower
our students to do. Get the truth out there, because
those who are incarcerated, that's what they want. We can't
control the criminal justice system, but we can control investigating
these cases and telling the stories and having those who
(39:31):
are incarcerated have their stories told through our voices. I
think anybody who walks away and watch the videos, we'll
just find that our system is is so flawed on
so many levels. And everyone across America can do something,
because that's a question. I'm sure you get asked all
(39:52):
the time, what can we do? And we tell people,
you know, find something you're good at and just offered
a help, you know, whether it be writing a letter
to somebody who's in prison, social media development sharing, passing
along petitions, if there are fundraising efforts, do fundraising because
(40:13):
so often people sit back and say, I'm not a lawyer,
I know nothing about the system. And when I tell
people that the system is about humanity at its core,
because our system succeeds and fails based on humans on
so many levels that if we go deep into our hearts,
we can find something that we can do to make
(40:35):
a difference. Don't forget to give us a fantastic review.
Wherever you get your podcasts, it really helps. And I'm
a proud donor to the Innocence Project and I really
hope you'll join me in supporting this very important cause
and helping to prevent future wrongful convictions. Go to Innocence
(40:57):
Project dot org to learn how to donate and get
an involved. I'd like to thank our production team, Connor
Hall and Kevin Wardis. The music in the show is
by three time OSCAR nominated composer Jay Ralph. Be sure
to follow us on Instagram at Wrongful Conviction and on
Facebook at Wrongful Conviction Podcast. Wrongful Conviction with Jason Flam
is a production of Lava for Good Podcasts in association
(41:20):
with Signal Company Number one
For those not already familiar with the story of Marty
tank Cliffe, his case began on the night of September six,
when Marty was just about to start his senior year
of high school in an affluent area of Long Island,
New York. Marty's father was an entrepreneur and investor who
was playing poker with some friends and business associates in
the house. That night, Marty awoke to two absolutely gruesome
(00:27):
scenes in which both of his loving parents had been
brutally beaten and stabbed. His mother was dead, his father
was dying. When authorities arrived, they kept him separate from
any of the adults in his life as they focused
their investigations solely on Marty instead of Marty's father's business partner,
Jerry Stearman, who all signs pointed to being the obvious
(00:51):
suspect in this awful crime. In our original two thousand
seventeen release of Marty's story, we touched on many of
these details, but at that time, with ongoing civil litigation,
we were not at liberty to delve more deeply into
the details of the reinvestigation of Marty's case that ultimately
led to his exoneration. In this episode. You'll hear excerpts
(01:14):
of that original interview, which included both Marty and false
confession experts Paul Cassine, to set the stage for not
only the evidence and witnesses that made Marty's freedom possible,
as well as all the amazing things Marty has been
able to accomplish since winning his freedom, but also what
Marty intends to do to bring closure to this harrowing tragedy.
(01:36):
This is Wrongful Conviction with Jason Flom. Welcome back to
Wrongful Conviction with Jason Flam. Especially excited today because I
have two people who I consider to be well, let's
(01:57):
just call it what it is. They're heroes of mine,
but for very different sets of reasons. Marty Tankleff is
here today. Marty is an exonoree who was wrongfully convicted
of murdering his parents, UM, which I get the chills
just hearing myself say that. UM. And he's going to
share his remarkable story of going through what could be
(02:19):
considered one of the most traumatic experiences that any human
being could ever endure and his subsequent triumph post exoneration.
You will be amazed at at what he's been able
to accomplish and overcome. We also have today Saw Casson.
Saw pioneered in the eighties the scientific study of false
confessions by introducing a taxonomy that distinguished between three types
(02:42):
of false confessions, voluntary, compliant, and internalized that is universally
accepted today. He has recently studied forensic confirmation biases and
the impact that confessions have on judges, juries, lay witnesses,
forensic science examiners, and the plea bargaining process. He is
widely considered the foremost expert on false confession. So welcome
(03:03):
both of you. Thanks for coming in and joining us today.
Thank you for having us. Marty, Let's start with you,
So let's go back to you grew up in Long Island.
I grew up in an affluent area called Belta, New York,
which is a little hamlet in Portrepson, New York, north Shore,
Suffolk County. I went to Portrefs in high school, where
the norm was we drove nice cars, we went on boats.
(03:28):
And what happened to me was not something myself or
anyone in my neighborhood could have ever imagined. No, no
one could imagine it. Um. You had a happy childhood,
nuclear family, right, you and your sister. Your parents idyllic
a little bit more idyllic because I was adopted, so
my parents were older. So a lot of what we
did growing up, my father lived vicariously through me because
(03:51):
he didn't have a very good childhood. So you know,
we had the boats, the a t v s, We
traveled a lot. People used to joke that I was
a spoiled kid, and I was, but my father instill
amazing work values in me. I was working since I
was probably eleven or twelve years old, and he was
the bagel king, right. My father was an entrepreneur who
invested with Jerry Stewarman, who was then known as the
(04:15):
bagel King of Long Island. My father had invested over
a half a million dollars with Jerry and his bagel
stores and horses, and in the summer of night, their
relationship significantly deteriorated. What I later learned was that we
believe my father learned that the bagel businesses may have
been a money wandering operation for Jerry's son, Todd's drug
(04:36):
dealing business. We're talking hard drugs. Todd was arrested, went
to prison for possession of cocaine, marijuana and other drugs,
and he served time in New York State prisons. UM,
but my father was a tough older man. Nothing would
stop him. And one of the things that he was
involved with was is there was a weekly poker game,
(04:59):
and in September six was his night to hold the
weekly poker game, and one of the members at that
game was Jerry Struman. My father was the type of
man it didn't matter, you know, how much threatening Jerry
Struman did. And there were threats. We later learned about
two weeks before September six, Jerry Struman threatened to cut
my father's tongue out, and it got so bad that
(05:21):
my father was even looking into buying a shotgun because
he was fearful. Now we've set the stage. There's the
poker game right, There's obviously it's a tense environment right
with the two of him in the room. But you
went to sleep. I went to sleep because September seven,
who was the first day of my high school year,
I was gonna be a senior. And I woke up
and my life was never the same again. The lights
(05:43):
were on in my house, the house wasn't locked up.
UM walked through the house and we're upstairs. It's a
ranch house. It's a very long ranch house. Where the
bedrooms were in one end of the house. Um, where
the card game was was in the complete opposite end
of the house, right, So you wouldn't have heard anything,
would have heard anything. And I discovered my father who
was still sitting in his office chair. Um. And he
(06:05):
was alive. Um. And he was bleeding. And what did
you do? I called nine one one and I followed
their instructions, right. They told you to wrap them as
best you could, gave you some medical tips whatever, try
to stop the bleeding, that kind of stuff, right. Um.
And within a short period of time, law enforcement showed
up at the house. Where's your mom? My mother was
(06:25):
actually in her bedroom. Cops come and immediately they removed
me from the house. And what I kind of can
say now is that the process of questioning me, trying
to find out what happened started almost immediately. Even when
I had family members show up that morning, there was
this immediate separation. When my brother in law showed up,
he was ripped away. When my godfather, who was also
(06:49):
the family attorney, showed up, I saw him. He never
saw me. But McCready who was the lead detective. His
name is Kay James McCready was the lead detective on
the case. Ran two him and basically told him I
was already on the way to the hospital. I wasn't
at the house. Even though I was at the house,
I was told consistently I was being taken to the hospital.
(07:10):
Unfortunately I was never taken to the hospital. I ended
up being taken to police headquarters. At this point, were
you aware that your mom had been killed? Um? So
you're in a state of total shock, panic. Words can't
describe it. Your parents were beaten to death? Is that right?
There was a bludgeon instrument uh and a knife uh,
(07:32):
And to this day neither one has been discovered. And
there was some forensic evidence which I can talk about.
There was glove prints, so whoever did do this, we're
wearing gloves. Um that they still haven't found the gloves. So,
I mean there's all these little things that actually the
jury was aware of, but they chose just to ignore.
So they took you to police headquarters because and obviously
(07:55):
this whole sort of pattern is emerging right where they
wanted to. They had an agenda. Yeah, I mean, you know,
at that day. I didn't know that. I was seventeen
years old. My father was the police commissioner of our
little community. I was raised to trust law enforcement, believe
in them. Law enforcement wouldn't lie to you, they wouldn't
deceive you. Unfortunately, that's everything that they did that morning. Right,
(08:17):
And you're in an extremely fragile state, and you need help, right,
you need someone to help you. You're seventeen years old, right,
we know that they have misled, is it not probably
nice way to put it? His family guardian at this point, right,
your godfather, who was also the only lawyer that was
available to you at this time. They kind of mislike
everybody though. I mean I had other cousins and aunts
and uncles who were at the hospitals, and they were
(08:38):
lied to too. They were told Marty's on the way
to the hospital, Mars on the way to the hospital. Right.
So they're basically doing everything they can to prevent you
from having any responsible guardian or legal representative that might
be able to stand in the way of them getting
the conviction that they wanted. Regardless of truth. Yes, there
was no truth seeking here. I mean, you have a
man who was business partners with my father half a
(09:01):
million dollars involved was there the night before. My father
also had in the weeks prior, had demanded he had
two notes fifty dollars. Back in the days after the murders,
Jerry Steuerman cleaned out a joint bank account. He faked
his death. He fled to California. He had a hair
(09:21):
weave back then, and he went to a club that
he wasn't a member. Full of um. He had five
or six different aliases at that moment um. But law
enforcement never considered a suspect. And every time I tell people,
you know, the average person would say, well, how is
he not a suspect? I mean, you could have stopped that.
He faked his own death. So let's get to the
(09:43):
interrogation and the false confession in prison and the whole Saturday.
So let's I mean, you're obviously very familiar with Marty's case.
You've known Marty since all right, he started writing letters
to me from prison. So here's Marty in a state
of panic and shock and grief. And as we discussed,
he's still a child. And his confession is different than
(10:04):
any of the other ones I've studied, right, because it
may or may not have ever even actually happened, right,
Usually they actually get somebody to say something on video,
or they'll get a written statement or something. But in
Marty's case, it's much more highly nuance, isn't it. Yes? Yes,
And in Martie's cases, you've got to ask yourself the
first question, why did Marty, seventeen year old, without a
(10:25):
criminal record, without a history of violence, with good parents
and good relationships, in an affluent community, why would Marty
kill his parents? And in a brutal way, in a
brutal in the in the most brutal of ways. And
you have to ask yourself the question, how in God's
name did he become their suspect? You know, most people said, well,
you know, he did it for the money, because they
thought my parents were affluent. The way the wills were structured,
(10:46):
I would have gotten everything. And we later learned that
law enforcement never really understood the way the wills and
never looked into the way the wills were structured. I
wasn't going to benefit financial until I was twenty five,
and I was seventeen, and so, you know, as one
of my aunts said, what was he supposed to do?
From seven? Live on the streets so there he is
in the interrogation room, alone, alone, seventeen, not street wise,
(11:11):
never been in trouble before, never had to worry about
how do you behave when you get picked up by police.
He had done nothing wrong. And the funny thing about
innocent people is even if they had read him as
miranda rights, he would have waived those rights. So miranda
becomes not a safeguard that's particularly effective at this point.
Keep in mind, they've got him in police headquarters. The
whole family is with his father, who is dying but
(11:34):
still alive in the hospital. That's where Marty wants to be.
So he's already in a state where he's motivated to cooperate.
And they started asking him questions about what he saw,
how he saw it, what had happened, and he gives
them answers, and the answers are consistent. They don't believe him,
They tell him they don't believe him. They asked for
the story to be told again, and they're searching for
inconsistencies and they're calling him a liar, and they're not
(11:57):
believing the story that he keeps telling over and over again.
But then they shift gears and they shift gears towards
a procedure now where they start to lie about the evidence. Now,
the average American doesn't realize that in the United States
police are allowed to bring in a suspect and lie
about the evidence. They're allowed to say to the suspect,
we have your fingerprints on the murder weapon, even if
(12:19):
that's not true. What happened in Marty's case is they
bring him in they say, well, you know, it appears
that your mother was in a struggle and there's hair
in her grasp and it turns out it's your hair.
We did the analysis, that's your hair, and that confused
Marty wasn't true, but he got confused as to how
that was possible. And then because it was such a
(12:39):
bloody scene, it was too bloody scenes. There just wasn't
enough blood on Marty to account for that. They suggested
to him that he had showered before calling. He said, no,
I didn't use the shower. They came back and said, well,
we did a humidity test in your bathroom and we
found that the shower had been used that morning. A
humidity test. I don't believe even on c side, they've
given us humidity test um. Now they have delivered two lies,
(13:03):
and then the detective delivers the ultimate lie. He leaves
the room. There are two detectives and they're the lead detective.
McCready leaves the room, stages a phone call, and comes
back to deliver the news to Marty. Marty, I've got
good news and I got bad news. I just spoke
to the folks at the hospital. The good news is
your father has come out of his coma. He's regained consciousness.
(13:24):
The bad news is he said you did it. Now,
think about this for a month. Insane. You've got a
seventeen year old and you're now delivering one lie after another,
culminating in a lie that to Marty, the person he
trusts most in his life has just said he committed
this crime. And not only did Marty of course, had
(13:48):
no choice but to believe that that evidence, because he
doesn't believe police would lie to him. Certainly, not like that.
Even McCready's partner believed that presentation. So what choice is
Marty have now but to wonder, how is it possible
that they have this kind of objective evidence. My father
doesn't lie, he said. Marty has almost no cognitive choice
(14:11):
but to accept that information. Because he's got two things right.
His father doesn't lie and the cops don't lie. Right,
these are the two things that he believes exactly. So
those things lead to one conclusion, one conclusion, I must
have done it. And the conversation turns to memory consciousness,
the possibility of sleepwalking and doing it without awareness, and
generate theories from Marty to explain how come you don't
(14:34):
remember doing this. So we know that that was the
nature of the conversation. We know that for some degree
of transient time, Marty became confused about even his own innocence.
His confession was a handwritten statement, handwritten by the detective,
that is inaccurate as a description of the crime. It
(14:55):
doesn't complete itself, it's actually ends in mid sense, and
it is un signed. This confession, the so called confession,
was written by the detective and not signed by Marty.
And yet that allegation of that confession is the one
and only piece of evidence that was used to convict him.
You're at trial, You still believe that justice is going
(15:18):
to be at trial? Still believe it? I mean, this
is what the lawyers are telling me. The system works. Um,
I was innocent. I testified in my own behalf. The
prosecution have tried me with intentional murder and depraved in
difference murder. So when we got called back in the
first verdict that was read was not guilty, and then
(15:38):
all of a sudden, the second one was guilty. The
one thing I vividly remember is the walk after they
read the guilty verdicts over to the county jails. They
have these tunnel systems, and I remember just I felt
like I was being led like a dog because I
was just listening. And I remember getting to the property
room and I remember the property and most saying what
(16:00):
are you doing here, Marty? And I go, why else
would I be here? And been everything else went blank
for about the next six or seven days. But now
you're thrown into this environment. You're in maximum security prison,
is that right? Yeah? I was. Basically every day it's
a fight for your life because you never know in
maximum security facilities what could happen, whether it be the
gang's going to war with each other, the alcers taking
(16:22):
you know, their aggression out on you, or just the
random attacks that occur just for no reason whatsoever. Right,
I mean, we know that people are being killed every
day in prisons in America, UM, sometimes by guards, even
absolutely for me. My case was very high profile, so
prisoners knew about the case. Guards knew about the case.
UM And I had a guy come up to me
(16:43):
and he solicity. He goes, if you want to survive,
he says, don't do drugs, don't get involid drugs, don't
get involved homosexuality, don't get involved in gambling gangs, he said.
And work your way into the college program or the library.
He said. One of the hardest things is once you're innocent,
is getting out, he said. But you'll figure out a
way to do it. My lawyers said, okay, what's never
(17:04):
been done here before? And we said a full investigation.
And that's when I started looking for private investigators and
end up hiring Jason Peter. And one of the things
that Jay said to me was, if you're innocent, hire me.
If you're guilty, don't. I said, I'm innocent, I'll hire you.
I just find the truth, giant. And it took years.
You ended up serving six thousand, three and thirty eight days,
(17:27):
which is about seventeen and a half years now that
we're up to speed from our two thousand seventeen release,
and with party's civil litigation out of the way, he
(17:50):
was finally able to tell us about the mountain of
exculpatory evidence that they built, how his freedom came to pass,
all of the amazing things he's been able to accomplish,
and of course his plans to finally bring the people
who conspired to murder his parents to justice. Witness is
an evidence slowly emerged over the years pointing towards a
(18:11):
conspiracy involving at least Peter Kent, Joseph Creeden, Glenn Harris,
and of course the Stewarman's and more continues to come
to light to this day. But the process started back
in the early nineties when a woman named Carlene Kovaks
went to a party. In the early nineties nineties, Joseph Creeden,
(18:34):
who was an enforcer for Todd Steuerman, was at a
party where he admitted his involvement in the murders to
Carlin Kovacs. So the idea that Todd Strum and Jerry
Schuhman were responsible for this not only from day one,
but every year subsequent to my conviction investigation, more and
(18:55):
more evidence would come forward, continuously pointing back towards the
Stearman's and it was around three when we presented the
D's office with that information. And as the years would
go on, throughout the nineteen nineties and the two thousands,
the court system failed me. It feels to me like
(19:18):
the tides started to turn around two thousand three when
you hired j Sawpeter. Jay started from the very beginning
was kind of like who been intited financially and let's
just start branching out from there. The criminal ties around
the Stewardmans. It was pretty well known when Jay took
(19:38):
on this case of investigating it, and he just started
looking at Todd Storman and Jerry Stewarman and started branching out,
and eventually they found Glenn Harris. Glenn Harris said something
to the effect that I've been waiting for this day
for twelve or thirteen years. Glenn Harris gave us one
statement saying that he had been high fired by Stewartman
(20:01):
to drive the two hitman Joe Creeden and Peter Kent
to and from the Tank Cliff House where you lived
on the night of decline, and that just kind of
started the snowball effect. We assembled a body of evidence
of witnesses, and in two thousand five we presented everything
(20:23):
to the Suffolk County d A with the hopes that
with their subpoena power and wire top power, that they
would actually take a real serious look at this case.
And we said, you know, if you don't do anything
after forty five days, we will file a post conviction
most in New York, and we learned that it wasn't
(20:43):
until the forty four day that they actually went out
and went to interview the first witness, and we thereafter
filed a post conviction motion. Judge Braslow granted a hearing,
and throughout the hearing of very his technical issues came up,
and more witnesses came forward. Throughout the hearing, carly and
(21:05):
Kovac's claimed that Joe Creten told her about how he
and another man hid in the bushes outside the tankleff House,
evaded capture and got rid of the bloody clothes. And
then there was more. There were family members of the killers, right,
there were murder weapons that were actually had been hidden
that were found. Am I wrong about that? Mighty? So
the culminating witness at the hearing was Joseph Creeding's son,
(21:29):
who said that his father confessed to him of his involvement.
There was a pipe that was discovered on a piece
of property that Glenn Harris said, I pipe was thrown.
Nobody knows if the pipe was actually used, but what
are the chances that somebody could know or say, look,
(21:50):
go search on this piece of property. We threw something
there eighteen years ago, seventeen years ago and it was found.
The actual murder weapons, the non have never been found.
By now we're talking about two thousand five, two thousand six.
The defense your team had assembled twenty witnesses who all
painted collectively a picture of how Storman had orchestrated these murders.
(22:14):
Two of the witnesses had seen McCready with Storman just
before the murders. Hello. There was also the matter of
the murder weapon not having been found. There was a
bloody stain of what appeared to be a knife imprinted
on one of our lead tank cliffs sheets, but no
match was found, suggesting that someone had taken it. But
justice was right around the corner, right so March seventeenth,
(22:37):
two thousand six, the petition for the new trial was denied,
but then December two thousand seven, tell us about that. Well,
in New York State, after you fill a post conviction motion,
you have to seek permission to appeal the case. Thankfully,
the Appel Division that had denied me relief in three
(22:58):
had granted me permission to hear my case and my
lawyers argued before four amazing judges in September of two
thousand seven, and I remember it was December that I
was calling home, calling the lawyers every single day, trying
(23:19):
to find out how the decision come down. And I
had four different appeals in the Appel Division, including one
for a new trial, one for DNA testing. So I
was finally able to get through to one of my
lawyer's offices and the receptionists said to me, She's like,
don't tell Bruce, I told you, But we won the
(23:40):
big one. And my legs started to shake a little bit,
and I kind of almost didn't believe it because it
was kind of that moment when you or just waiting
for that day for day after day, year after year.
And when I finally spoke to Bruce Barquette, I'll never
forget his words. He said, act your ship. You're coming home,
(24:02):
and you'll never see the inside of a jail cell again.
And at that very moment. Don't ask me why I
said this, but I was kind of sarcastic, and I said, Bruce,
and I said, I've been studying a little long enough.
I said, it's an oral agreement and I'm going to
hold you to it. And he kept his word. I
was brought down to the Subvin County jail December twenty six,
(24:23):
the day after Christmas, and on December twenty seven, I
was freed and I have never returned to a jail
cell since. So Bruce Bork kept his word. In the
book A Criminal Injustice, which is I recommend so highly
that reads like a Grisham novel, but it's true and
(24:43):
you lived it. And in that book, one of the
things that sticks out so much and about your story
is that Suffolk County was like a criminal enterprise. And
I'm talking about the justice system. Can you describe it well?
I think it was best described. I think it was
William Hellerstein described it as the wild wild West of
(25:03):
law enforcement and the court system. Um And essentially he said,
is that in Subfolk County, they do whatever the hell
they want to do, whatever they want to do it
because they are almighty um. And I think that almighty
attitude can be traced back to the homicide division where
in the eighties they used to wear these shirts that
(25:25):
said and that referred to their confession and conviction rates
for homicide cases and they were proud of it. And
Suboc County has a long history of turmoil and corruption.
When the Attorney General reinvestigated the case during some of
the post conviction proceedings, they uncovered forensics that were in
(25:47):
the possession of Subbok County the entire time, and they
proved to be exculpatory nature. You know, it just goes
to the depths of how sinister and evil the criminals
injustice system was in Suffolk County back then, even up
to recently where the district attorney that was in office
(26:08):
during my post conviction litigation, Tom Spota, was recently criminally
charged while he was a district attorney. When Tom Spota
was in private practice, he and his firm had represented
Todd Stearman and Jerry Steuerman and the chief of Police
William Burke, was also criminally charged and he went to prison.
(26:29):
It's unbelievable. And this gets deeper and deeper because the creedy.
The detective was under investigation for perjury, and let's not
forget the creedy wanted to business with your sister, who
became the heir to the family fortune. Shortly after my conviction,
my half sister through a celebratory party at a country
(26:52):
club for family and friends, and right around the same time,
went into business with money she received from my parents
estate with the lead detective who put me in prison,
and they opened up a bar restaurant Diggaro Dells and
the Riverhead, New York. Yeah, I didn't want to go
(27:14):
down in history as being known as the person who
was convicted of murdering my parents because I didn't do it,
and nobody stands criminally charged or convicted of those murders
as of today. I knew that I wanted to continue
fighting until the truth came out, and we continue to
(27:35):
explore every lead, and even to this day, we've had
new witnesses who have come forward and the only reason
why they've come forward was because Peter Kennon Joseph Cream
have died. They've come forward with exculpatory evidence that no
one has ever heard before that I'm hoping by the
end of the year it will get out there. Are
(27:56):
you still hoping for the authorities to do what they
should have done decades ago and prosecute the people responsible
for this tragedy. There is a new district attorney who
ran on a line of exposing injustice. He set up
a conviction integrity unit. He has clearly stated time and
(28:18):
time again that he owes no allegiance to the prior administration.
And I'm currently working on putting a package together. I'm
confident that any fair minded prosecutor, if they look at
the body of evidence that we have now, someone should
be criminally charged. And I'm going to be asking the
(28:41):
SUBFLK County District Attorney's office to reopen the case. July
eight the charges were dismissed, and your life began again
or a new I mean, you hit the ground running.
(29:03):
And there's so much to talk about still, because there's
the federal civil suit against New York State in the
Suffolk County Police Department, and this was not a frivolous suit.
In fact that July two thousand fourteen, New York State
settled for three point three seven five million, and in
two thousand eighteen, Suffolk County settled for another ten. They
(29:24):
didn't do that willingly. They did that because they had
no way out. I mean, you had them literally dead
to rights. And then you go and graduate from law school. Now,
I mean seriously, Marty, like, are you trying to make
the rest of us look? It's unbelievable. I was just
gonna say that, you know, when you when you say
get up and start running. It was three weeks effort.
(29:44):
I was out of prison, I started producing on my
Bachelor Glory at Hatstraw, and I knew that, you know,
what I went through, no one should go through. And
if there was somebody that could help make a difference,
it would be me. I am out Now I'm a
lawyer um also an adjunct professor at Georgetown University and
(30:08):
Atoral Law School. There's very hard to miss message of
what the rest of us have as an excuse not
to live out our dreams. I mean, you, that's an
unbelievable transformation, and I am so so proud of you.
So you're now the head of the Prisoner in Civil
Rights litigation group at Metcalf and Metcalf. You're living your
best life. And they say living well is the best revenge.
(30:30):
I mean, I think you can attest to that, but
we can't leave alone. The other thing that you're doing now,
which I'm gonna I'm gonna guess is probably the most
rewarding thing other than your family of everything, which is
of course, be making an axotari program. You're, of course,
as we talked about, an adjunct professor at Georgetown. Let's
(30:51):
just say that again, you're a professor at Georgetown, like,
what the hell anyway, and you're working with your childhood
friend and my dear friend, Mark Howard co teaching a
class called making an Axonoree. And one of the students
from that class was on this show in our episode
of the Awful Awful Case of Terrell Barrows, and she said,
(31:11):
and I think any of the students would say that
her life has been forever changed by this experience. So please,
anyone go back and listen to the Terrell Barrows episode.
Terrell really needs and deserves our help. Listen and you'll
get some ideas of how you may be able to
make a difference in his life. He's just as innocent
as Marty was and is so tell us about some
of the people that you've helped Wherever you want to
(31:32):
go with this just to get people a little background
and making fun a lot more on our website, making
an asoni dot com. Mark and I have been friends
since we were three years old going to Love a
w preschool, and every I got out, Mark would invite
me to come down to his class and speak to
him about my experience about the criminal justice system. And
(31:53):
as the years went on, we start talking about the
idea about teaching a class together, and the idea of
making exon are kind of came together one day, just
us talking taking undergraduate students and having them reinvestigate real
cases of men and women in prison, try to track
(32:15):
down new witnesses and try to develop a body of
evidence that could help get them exonerated. And their final
project was to create short documentaries. And we started the
class in ten and one of our cases was Valentin
at Dixon, and our students were able to uncover enough
(32:37):
evidence that we share with Valentino's lawyer and he was
exonerated in September of that year. And each year our
students have done this amazing work, and there's not a
single student who's taken our class that hasn't walked away
and said that the opportunity to try to impact someone's
(33:01):
life is life altering for them. Our students become friends
with the individuals who incarcerated tragically. John Moss, who was
from our first semester, our students and covered evidence that
convinced the Innocence Project to represent him tragically. He passed
away in Martin Luther King Jr. Day this year, but
(33:22):
the students became so close to him and his family
they went to his funeral. I mean, it's kind of
unheard of that students can develop a bond like that.
Every one of the student groups, even after they've graduated,
continue to work on any of the cases that they
were connected with, and if they're in a position where
(33:44):
they can't work, they want to know what's going on.
Because in Valentino and Dixon's case, when he walked free
in September, of Ellie and Julie, who were to the
young women that worked on his case, flew back from
France and England to be there when he walked out
of prison. And I think it's something that they will
(34:05):
never forget their entire life. And Valentino has said time
and time again that they have lifelong friends and if
they ever need anything, he would be there for them.
The relationship you developed with these men and women is
just different. You know. We walk in and we tell
our students that there's no guarantees here other than you're
(34:26):
putting a thousand percent in, and they do more than that.
Our students can sometimes work thirty hours a week outside
of class. They travel around the country, They track down witnesses,
they confront former prosecutors. In one case, they confronted a
currently sitting judge who was a former prosecutor. There really
(34:48):
is no fear that our students have, and it's just,
to me an amazing experience having the opportunity to work
with them, and it really hasn't does even feel like work.
From times, it feels like such an honor and pleasure
to work with students that want to come to class,
want to work. I want to sacrifice their time. And
(35:11):
I remember this year when the idea of spring break,
are going to see somebody in a maximum security prison
during spring break. Our students said, who cares about spring break,
Let's go to prison. Who cares about spring break, Let's
go to prison. Wow, that really does say it all.
And the fact is that those of us who work
(35:32):
in this area now that the first time you get
to be a part I don't care how small the
part is of helping somebody out of this Kafka esque nightmare.
It is unlike anything else that I've ever experienced, and
it makes me feel useful. You know, you now get
(35:53):
to live that to the tense power or to the
nth degree what you want to call it, because you're
doing it again and again, and you're doing it from
a place that the rest of us can't possibly understand,
and doing it for all the right reasons. So it's
wonderful to see. And people can go to making an
exonoree dot com and see these eight minute videos which
are so powerful, and I know that every one of
(36:15):
those students is going to be forever changed by this
experience and they're gonna become freedom fighters in their own right.
And so there there goes the Marty tank Cliff force
multiplier effect. Marty, you've been on the show before, you
know how it works. At this point, we turned to
my favorite part of the show. It's the part of
(36:36):
the show we call closing arguments, where first of all,
I thank you for being here, sharing your story and
just being this sort of beacon of hope and light
that you are and then I turn off my microphone
leave yours on for what we call closing arguments. I
(36:57):
remember when I talked about becoming a lawyer, I said,
you know, I said, I don't think I can ever
reach the pinnacle of exonerations of Barry Scheck or Steve
Drisen or anybody like that. But I know if I'm
instrumental in helping one innocent person walk free, you know,
I kind of joke I've done my job, um, And
I was there the day Valentino walked out, but I'm
(37:20):
far from over. You know, it is so rewarding. And
I know, Jason, you've had the opportunity to be there
when people have walked free and been involved in exonerations.
Its impacts your life in a way that I think
nothing else does. Um. And I know one of my
lawyers said, you know, those who do this work are
doing God's work. And he explained it was simply that,
(37:44):
you know, when you fight to get somebody who's innocent
out of prison, you were almost giving them an opportunity
of new life. So it's almost like a rebirth for
them because some of them have been locked up longer
than they were free, and now all of a sudden
you help them gain their freedom back. It really is
(38:04):
probably some of the most rewarding work. And you know,
Mark is somebody who is just amazing because you know,
Mark was a tenured professor of government and it was
because his involvement in his choice to go to law
school to join my defense team to fight to get
me out of prison, that his career essentially changed. Where
(38:26):
he teaches prisons and justice. He goes into prisons and
teaches college credit courses. He's established the Frederick Douglas Project,
and Mark and I have made a decision that we
will teach this class every year going forward, just because
(38:46):
so many innocent people don't have the ability to have
their voices told. You know, after Just Mercy came out,
I told our students that you have to watch the
scene where Jamie Boxes talking to his lawyer after the
evidentiary hearing and he says something to the fact that
even if I don't get out of prison, I'm good
(39:10):
because the truth came out. And that's what we empower
our students to do. Get the truth out there, because
those who are incarcerated, that's what they want. We can't
control the criminal justice system, but we can control investigating
these cases and telling the stories and having those who
(39:31):
are incarcerated have their stories told through our voices. I
think anybody who walks away and watch the videos, we'll
just find that our system is is so flawed on
so many levels. And everyone across America can do something,
because that's a question. I'm sure you get asked all
(39:52):
the time, what can we do? And we tell people,
you know, find something you're good at and just offered
a help, you know, whether it be writing a letter
to somebody who's in prison, social media development sharing, passing
along petitions, if there are fundraising efforts, do fundraising because
(40:13):
so often people sit back and say, I'm not a lawyer,
I know nothing about the system. And when I tell
people that the system is about humanity at its core,
because our system succeeds and fails based on humans on
so many levels that if we go deep into our hearts,
we can find something that we can do to make
(40:35):
a difference. Don't forget to give us a fantastic review.
Wherever you get your podcasts, it really helps. And I'm
a proud donor to the Innocence Project and I really
hope you'll join me in supporting this very important cause
and helping to prevent future wrongful convictions. Go to Innocence
(40:57):
Project dot org to learn how to donate and get
an involved. I'd like to thank our production team, Connor
Hall and Kevin Wardis. The music in the show is
by three time OSCAR nominated composer Jay Ralph. Be sure
to follow us on Instagram at Wrongful Conviction and on
Facebook at Wrongful Conviction Podcast. Wrongful Conviction with Jason Flam
is a production of Lava for Good Podcasts in association
(41:20):
with Signal Company Number one
Hosts And Creators
Lauren Bright Pacheco
Maggie Freleng
Jason Flom
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