January 27, 2021 • 42 mins
It was Thanksgiving Eve when Maureen Fernandez went to a few of her usual bars with an unknown man in a black Monte Carlo. The next morning, her body was discovered in an empty lot, where the night watchman had seen a white car leaving in the early hours. Detectives and their star witness got really creative when the case went cold.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
It was Thanksgiving the eve, and after visiting her daughter
at Wycoff Hospital in Queen's, Maureen Fernandez went to a
few of her usual bars with a man who was
unfamiliar to the other bar patrons. The next morning, her
body was found in an empty lot next to a
stretch of the Long Island Railroad. She had been stabbed
thirty five times. Investigators spoke with the bar patrons and
(00:25):
a night watchman near the empty lot, who described a
white Cadillac type car leaving the lot at four am.
The detectives began looking into people who worked at the hospital,
and it turned out that a security guard named Taper
Ramos owned a white Oldsmobile. Detectives leaned hard on Ramo's
extracted a confession about lending his car to a friend
(00:46):
named Richard Pereira. Ramos claimed Pereira had returned the vehicle
with a mysterious red liquid on the passengers side, and
admitted to the murder before Ramos thoroughly cleaned the car.
When Pereira was cleared in the line, police arranged for
Pereira to record a conversation with Ramos, who admits to
making up the story, even admitting that his car battery
(01:09):
was dead denighted the murder, but instead of switching directions,
the cops interrogate Ramos again, extracting the same story with
a new suspect, Phelipe Rodriguez, without the Pereira recording being
presented at trial. Phelipe ended up spending over twenty six
years in prison after being identified by a man who
(01:31):
knew nothing about the murder of a woman who Phelipe
had never even met. This is Wrongful Conviction with Jason Flam.
(01:53):
Welcome back to Wrongful Conviction with Jason Flam. That's me.
I'm your host, and today I am well you can
probably hear. I'm excited because we have not one, but
two of my favorite human beings on the show today. First,
Nina Morrison is the senior litigation attorney at the Instance
Project in New York and just all around certified badass lawyer,
(02:15):
human mom, person, friend, and so Nina, I'm really excited
to have you back on. Welcome Thanks, Jason. Great to
be back. And now, in our tradition of saving the
best for last, we have one of the kindest, gentlest,
funniest and best dressed humans that you're ever going to
come across so Phelippe Rodriguez. Welcome to wrongful Conviction. Thank you, Jason,
(02:39):
I appreciate it. Philippa. Let's start at the beginning. You
grew up in Puerto Rico, right, Yes, I was born
in Bosta, Puerto Rico, on August fifteen, nineteen And you
came to New York and at what time? I actually
came to New York with my mother and my stepfather,
late seventies. I was like thirteen or fourteen years old.
Can you just describe to us what your life was
(02:59):
like for this incident. In nineteen five, I actually get
married to my now ex wife, Glaris Rodriguez, and I
had a kid with her, Felippe Wiland Rodriguez, Jr. He
was born on July two x. By eighty six, I
(03:20):
started working for a subcontracting company for the City of
New York. I was getting paid good, I had good
health care, so I was doing pretty well for myself.
And then you were implicated in a murder that you
had absolutely nothing to do with. And this particular murder
was really gruesome, Nina. Can you take us back to
(03:40):
the crime itself and how they came to sort of
I'm gonna say settled because they settled on Philippe. Yeah, Phelippe.
I wasn't arrested and charged for this crime until sixteen
months after the victim in this case, Marini Fernandez, was murdered.
As you mentioned, it was an extraordinarily brutal crime. She
(04:00):
was stabbed thirty five times and her body was found
in a deserted lot in Queens, New York, near the
Long Island railroad tracks, behind a food warehouse. Her body
was actually found on Thanksgiving morning. She had been at
a local hospital visiting her two year old daughter, who
was in the hospital the night before, went out to
a bar with a man that the other bar patrons
(04:23):
didn't recognize, but it was a bar that she went
to with some frequency, left there around two in the
morning and was never seen again. You know, we get
a lot of cases, Jason, where there's some reasonable evidence
pointing to our clients as a suspect, and then later
through DNA or further investigation or advanced science some other evidence,
we find the picture changes. And when we at the
(04:45):
Innocence Project took on Philippe's case, it was just so
clear that this investigation was pointing far away from Phelipe
for the beginning, and eventually, sixteen months later, when they
had no viable suspect, the police just decided to coerce
witnesses and argh Philippe. The police had the description of
the most likely culprit from the bar patrons, right, you know.
(05:05):
The thing that was so obvious was that the man
who was with the victim is Fernandez at the bar,
did not remotely resemble Philippe. Phelipe is your desk and
see if they google him is a tall, slender, very
dark haired, handsome man of Puerto Rican descent. And yet
the man at the bar, who was the last person
to come to the bar with and leave with the victim,
(05:27):
the obvious likely suspect, was described by witnesses as white
or Italian, clean shaven. Phelippe, had a black mustache stocky
which Phelippe definitely is not and never was, and had
reddish brown hair Recasalies. I mean, the list goes on
and on. One of the patrons at the bar, Robert Thompson,
(05:48):
who was heavily intoxicated, said that he had tried to
sell a watch to Maureene Fernandez and the man she
was with and then this Thompson described the potential perpetrator's
hands as large, calloused and wearing rings. Then later on
he sort of agreed with the detectives that the man
who may have had writing on his left hand. Again,
(06:08):
you wouldn't want to hang a murder conviction on this.
And then there's this Peter Saloni guy. He was a
night watchman at the food wholesaler near the empty lot
where the body was found, and he told police that
he witnessed a white car with a lone mail driver
leaving the warehouse area at four am. He said the
car may have been aes ere at Catillac. There wasn't
(06:29):
really any evidence that anybody's white car was necessarily the
car used in this crime. The security guard thought he
saw a white car with a loan drive or leaving
the warehouse area around four am. No one knows what
time Ms Fernandez was brought there or when she was killed.
There were different reports about when she left the bar,
and originally the investigation focused on a black car, which
(06:50):
had a much closer connection to the crime because several
witnesses described seeing an unfamiliar shiny black Monte Carlo with
nted windows outside the bar, and people started suggesting to
police that maybe the perpetrator drove her to and from
the bar in that car. And it was only when
six eight months later the case remained unsolved that suddenly
(07:13):
a new detective on the case, Jack Bizell, said oh, well,
maybe it's maybe it was the white car scene by
the security guard, and from that little read of a hypothesis,
they reverse engineered a case designed to find anyone they
could with a connection to White Coff Hospital who happened
to have a white car of that general description. So
(07:35):
the Texas began looking at the staff of the hospital
that this poor woman had been visiting her sick child
at a pediatric ward. Because people were staying around the neighborhood.
It was like a picked up spot, which is bizarre
in itself, but okay. So the detective started talking about
the staff and there was a security guard named Javier
Ramos who had a white oldmobile at the time of
(07:56):
the murdera a Catillac. But he had gotten off work
at the hospital at midnight on the night of the murder,
and a few months later, in February or March of
Ramos had sold the oldsmobile to another staff or a
guy named Pedro Sierra, and he had painted the roof
of the Oldsmobile read and Saloni. The night watchman guy
was taken to the area where the car formerly owned
(08:18):
by Ramos was parked. They drove him around the block,
pasted it several times and he didn't pick it out,
and then by self finally says to him or detective
said to him, Hey, if that car didn't have a
red roof, couldn't have been the car. And he said, probably,
maybe like an eight out of ten. So that's not
exactly an unbiased, spontaneous identification of the car. It's about
(08:41):
a suggestive and equivocal as you get. And then Detective
by Zell aggressively interrogated and intimidated, i would say Ramos
for hours and hours, and finally the interrogation ended when
Ramos told the story that they wanted to hear, and
he signed the state not implicating Phelippe, but a friend
(09:02):
and co worker named Richard Pereira. Ramass original story implicating
Pereira said, Tarrera Barrow the car, brought it back on
Thanksgiving morning. There was a reddish stain in the car.
It smelled terrible, and that Pereira allegedly said to him
that he had to stab some bitch to show her
that he was a man and not some boy. So
essentially admitted to a murder, and it was a very
(09:24):
damning statement. The problem is it was completely hit up.
The police bringing Richie. We don't know the full extent
of the investigation they did, but we know that he
was not picked out of a lineup by any of
the eyewitnesses from the bar, or by the security guard,
and for that or for other reasons, they decided Ray
must have given them the wrong guy. So they go
back to Ramos and they work him over, and they
(09:44):
work him over, but before they do that, they go
to Pereira and they say, hey, Ramos implicated you. We
think Ramos might be the killer. Can you wear a
wire and go talk to him? Now. None of this
was heard by Phelippe jury. This didn't come out till
after he was convicted. But Ramos was taped by Pereira,
(10:05):
the man he falsely implicated, essentially admitting he made up
the whole story, and on this audio tape that none
of the juror's ever heard, Ramos said, look, the cops
were coming at me. And coming at me. It was
going to be me or you, and I had to
give them somebody or else I was going to go
to prison for the rest of my life. And then
he said my car wasn't even working that day, the
(10:25):
battery was dead, and there was no blood on the cushion.
That was juice that my girlfriend's kid spilled there. He
admitted the whole thing was fabricated, not just naming Pereira,
but the whole entire story, and Felippe's jury never heard that.
What they did here at Phelippe's trial was that Ramos
(10:46):
gave another version of that statement implicating Phelippe. The only
two differences in that statement we're one, and most importantly,
he switched the names. So he gave the exact same statement,
but he said, oh, was actually Felippe Rodriguez who brought
the car back to me that morning and said all
these terrible things, not Richie Perga. Okay, So to believe
he's telling the truth, you have to believe he implicated
(11:08):
one innocent man to protect another man. Felippea Rodriguez not
exactly the most reliable witness in the world. In addition,
another thing that always jumped out at us, is that
Ramo said in his second statement that he cleaned the
car himself. In his first statement, the false one implicating
Richie Pereira, he said that his grandfather helped him clean
(11:30):
the car, and suddenly, in the second statement, the grandfather disappears.
Grandfather never testifies a trial, and to this day we
have never seen a single piece of paper indicating whether
the police ever talked to the grandfather. And you know, Jason,
I probably don't need to connect the dots for your
very crime savvy listeners are even the ones who aren't right. Like,
(11:51):
the first thing you would do as a rookie cop
if somebody says, oh, I cleaned blood off of a
vehicle that was used in a grizzly murder and this
person helped me, is you'd go find that person and
interview them and see if they corroborate or contradict what
this witness has just told you. And the fact that
there is no record of them talking to the grandfather,
along with the fact that we now now Ramos made
(12:12):
it all up, leads me to the conclusion that the
police absolutely talked to him, and that he told them
my grandson's full of you know what, I never went
near a stinky, bloody car or also what it called
the cops. So they took that detail out of the
second statement, but everything else he subbed one name for another,
and in the second statement he subbed in an innocent
(12:33):
man who did twenty seven years in prison for a
crime commit felipe. Had you even heard about it? When
they get to me, that was the first I heard it,
and I was shocked this out. So they put Phelipe
in a live lineup, and they brought in several of
the people from the bar, and none of them identified
Phelipe except for the one guy who had admitted that
(12:54):
he was drunk as a skunk that night, And you
would have to be drunk as a skunk to pix
up a guy who's described as Italian five eight with
reddish brown hair and chunky too with a guy who's
slender eleven, jet black hair and a mustache. But with
Ramos's statement and Thompson's identification that they felt was enough
(13:16):
to indicte Phelipe for murder, you know, I was truly
truly baffled of y. Phelippe also passed a polygraph denying
his involvement and was released on bail pre trial, which
again gives me some indication that they didn't think he
was that dangerous or they wouldn't have sent it back
to the neighborhood. And then there was the issue with
(13:37):
the trial itself. Right, So, originally Philippe was represented by
Kenneth Litwack, but then replaced by an attorney named Jennifer Maalo.
As we later found out, she was defending Phelipe with
one hand time behind her back because there was a
lot of evidence of his innocence that she never got.
Some of the best lawyers in the world will lose
(14:00):
trials when the prosecution doesn't play fair and the police
don't play fair and they don't get all the evidence
that they're entitled to get. And that was exactly the
situation that was happening here in April. Your trial was
held in the Queen's County Supreme Court, and I know
that Ramos repeated his false narrative about lending his car
(14:21):
to Phelippe, and he said that he had delaid reporting
the crime and initially shifted the blame to Pieric because
Phelippe was quote like a brother to me. I mean,
the whole thing stinks. As you know, many jurors, when
they show up for jury duty, assume that the police
have it right, that the person who's charged with the
crime wouldn't be sitting there if they weren't guilty, and
(14:41):
despite the legal burden of innocent until proven guilty, in
reality it's often just the opposite, where jurors assumed the
person is guilty, and if there's any evidence to support
that conclusion, they often latch onto that evidence. And so
I can see a world where a man who represents
himself to be a close friend of Phelippe's, claims to
be like a rather to him, comes in and says
(15:02):
I didn't want to turn him in, but I had
to because it was the right thing to do. Never
mind that he implicated another admittedly innocent person in between
might give them what they need, or they might have
been swayed by just the horrible glory nature of the
crime and not want to let it go unsolved. So
the prosecution calls these two witnesses that claimed to have
seen the writing on Felippe's hands in the past. This
(15:25):
so this also seems just so dicey. You know, it's
a sign of how thin the case was that they're
relying on things like a witness twenty months later who
says she thought she saw something written on Felippe's hands
that happens to match something that another drunkenness said ten
months after the crime that he thought he saw written
on Phelippe's hand. And that's really emblematic of just how
(15:46):
weak a case this was. But um and the other
key piece of it was that the police witnesses testified
really to back up the whole theory about the white car.
You know, the prosecution was allowed to walk detectives by
cell and Sullivan through the investigation. Oh and also they
had the bartender who would initially not pickedly be out
of a lineup, came into court and said, oh, yeah,
(16:06):
that's the guy between the white car. Romis a testimony
some of the other incredibly shaky ideas and some dubious
testimony about writing and things Philippe elegedly said. And that
was enough to send this man away for what could
have been the rest of his life. Phelippe was convicted
of second degree murder and since the twenty five years
to life in prison. When they said that they had
(16:27):
found me guilty of murder in the second degree. My
niece buckled. Man, I m put both of my hands
on the table, and I just that was a rough date. Man.
It was at that time I was married to Loida Castagnero,
and all I heard was her screens. It was like
(16:50):
a screen when somebody dies. And then the judge said,
you remanded, and he told the alto to take meet
cross and that's what the whole time may began. This
(17:15):
episode is brought to you by Stand Together. Stand Together
is a philanthropic community dedicated to helping people improve their lives.
For more than twenty years, Stand Together and its partners
have been on the front lines of criminal justice reform.
By empowering people to take action, supporting nonprofits, and working
with businesses, Stand Together tackles the root causes of problems
(17:36):
in our communities and empowers those closest to the problems
to drive solutions. Solutions like reducing unjust prison sentences through
the First Step Act, empowering community based programs that help
people re enter society, and now working to bridge divides
in our communities. To learn how you may get involved,
visit stand together dot org. Slash conviction. I was twenty
(18:04):
three four. One of the first maximum security persons that
I arrived at was Great Metals Correctional Facility better known
as Gladiator School or Calm Stock. There I seen the violence,
almo sexuality, the drugs, the gangs, and I said, how
can I pull myself out of this dungeon safely and
(18:27):
returned to my son. So the first few months were crucial.
I prayed a lot, I cried a lot. That was
nice when you know, I put myself to sleep crying
thinking about my son and you know who was being
there for him. I was angry, of course, I was angry.
I was angry at the system. I was angry that
(18:49):
I was thrown in prison for twenty five to life
for something that I haven't done. And I was completely
confused on how I was going to solve this mystery.
But quickly I understood that in order for me to
think clearly, in order for me to see things for
(19:10):
what they were, I needed to forgive everybody. I needed
to take all hatred, I needed to take all resentment,
and I needed to get that out of my system
so that I won't get more hurt than what I
was already, because you know, most people don't understand hatred, resentiment.
(19:32):
All that does. It hurts you, It doesn't hurt the
person you're angry at, because the person you're angry at
is actually in the house, sleeping or having fun with
their family while you are doing in all this madness.
So very early in my incarceration, I got rid of
all that, and I devoted myself to giving thanks to
(19:52):
God for me being healthy and alive and ask him
to protect my son. And I started learning and reading
every book I get my hands on. And it was
a hell of a quest for sure. I can't picture
you in this gladiator school, but you turned it into
a positivity. But then there was still so much more
(20:15):
to come, right, and we're gonna go quickly through the proceedings.
In the early nineties, Philippe got appointed some terrific lawyers
from the Legal Aid Society for his initial round of
appeals right after his conviction. Right, and this is Martin Lucente,
of course, of the Legal Aid Society. We're talking about
a very very talented lawyer, and they very quickly through
(20:36):
some catching a reference to it in another report, discovered
that this tape of the lead witness against Philippe. I
have your Ramos existed, was in the state's possession and
had never been turned over. So they got a copy
of the tape in which Ramos admits to making up
the whole story about the car and the bloodstains and
his car having into the battery, and they go to
(20:57):
a hearing. And as we've seen so many times times,
when you go toal hearing with the claim that the
prosecution withheld evidence you're supposed to have, it's a very
hard claim to win because the prosecutor will often come
in and say, well, I turned it over, I handed
it to the defense layer. I gave it to her.
And that's exactly what he said here. And at the
end of the day, the judge's decision denying Phelippe a
(21:18):
new trial didn't say this wasn't significant evidence. He never says, oh, well,
this wouldn't have made a difference anyway, it was so
obvious how important it is. He says, I find that
there's not enough proof or evidence that it wasn't disclosed.
I'm not going to call the prosecutor a liar. So
essentially he's saying that maybe Phelippe's trial or missed it.
(21:38):
But you know, she was cross examining Ramo's pretty hard.
It's something that would have been almost impossible to miss
if she'd had this kind of ammo to cross examine
him further about making it up. So he lost that round,
but it was still more evidence that, by the time
the Innocence Project took the case was on record, further
undermining this already incredible, way tenuous conviction. So none of
(22:02):
these initial emotions or appeals led to the result that
they should have, which is of course for Philippa to
come home. And then it comes to two thousand one,
when Philippe you wrote to the Innocence Project, they sent
me a letter. They said, look, we have a lot
of requests and right now, you know, we only have
a certain amount of staff, so we will take a
(22:24):
look at it. We'll let you know. And but then
I was transferred to Sullivan, and the Sullivan I met
Father Bona, who became my mentor. I really got immerged
into the Calcolic religion and and I started serving. They
made population. It became chaplain's aide, and the Chaplain Kirk,
(22:46):
the eucharistic minister. I was in charge of the entire mass,
and I was also in charge of the prayer nice
the Bible studies. You know, we started a formation class
that allow people to become secular Franciscans, which I am today.
And I forgot about the instance project. I just you know,
(23:06):
I left it up to God. And and then I
started working with a sir killer. His name is author
John show Cross. He was a Stanic worshiper and everybody
hated him in the prison. Actually, one day I came
from formation class on a Sunday after Mass, and I
was sitting at my table with two of the chairs empty,
(23:27):
and Mr shaw Cross, when he rest in peace, was
sitting on the floor because nobody wanted them on their tables.
And I felt so hypocritical. I felt like, here I
am teaching Bible study and holding mass, and and I
have a guy that's sitting on the stairs eating its
food because people think that they are better than him.
(23:49):
I said, who am I to judge this guy? Or
what saying do I have? And saying that this guy
is indeed mobile not redeemable, that's not all to me,
that's not all to any human being deserved. That's up
to God. Whatever we want to call God. So I
got up from my table and I went up to
short Cross and I said, come on, man, sit on
the table. So he came up and side on the table.
(24:10):
I said, as long as I'm in this prison, you
sit on this table with me, and whoever has a
problem with it, I'll take care of it. He said,
why why are you doing that? I said, everybody this
searched a little bit of humanity. I'm not here to
deprive you of that. I've been deprived of that myself,
so I'm not going to deprive you of that. And
from that day he started asking me questions about religion
(24:31):
and what I believe and why I didn't believe. And
one day he came out and he said, um, what
would you do if I wanted to go to church?
You think they allowed me in church? I said, well,
I'll tell you what. Why don't you come Sunday to
Mass with me? If you don't like it, you don't
never have to come again, and nobody's gonna judge you
or whatever. And he said, are you sure? People, I said, listen,
(24:53):
I'm sure God would love to have you in his house.
And he said okay. That day was the greatest day
from me. I got blessed by God for me. It
was the best letter I've ever received. Nina Morrison was
assigned to my case. From there, Nina became my guardian Andrew,
(25:14):
I don't think there's ever gonna be a woman more
important to me aside from my mother than Nina Morrison.
And I'm married and I love Karen, but I'm gonna
tell you and I told Karen a hundred times and
you can ask, and she could tell you. Eve. Nina
called me from China today and told me that she
needed me over there. Karen will stay here and I
go to China, because that's just the way it's gonna be.
(25:36):
This is where the Innocence Project stands with me. Nina
takes a case and the physical evidence had been destroyed.
There was almost nothing left to go on. Philippe's case
for a few years in our office was literally hanging
by some hairs because the hairs were among the few
things we haven't found yet. We actually managed, with the
help of a pretty diligent newer prosecutor in the years
(26:00):
office or rosen Bomb, tracked down some of the hairs,
and then Hurricane Sandy hit and they lost. The enemy
had to wait another eighteen months, and after that testing
and some testings we found on some biological material left
over from the car yielded no DNA that was of
any use to the investigation. The hairs were all from
(26:22):
the victim herself. The cuttings from the car didn't yield
a thing, no nothing. We were kind of stuck. You know,
it would have been at that point not an illogical
thing for someone in Nina's position to say, well, you know,
like we would love to help you, but we just
don't have what we need. But that's not how this
rolled out. I was to joke in the office that
(26:44):
we could have a TV show, you know, like the
old show Everybody Loves Raymond called Everybody Loves Phelipe, because
if I so much as suggested that we might close
his case, I was going to have five law students
in my office telling me I was insane or worse.
So we just kind of kept it open. So I
brought in my old law school classmate, Zach Margatie's anama
(27:06):
to do some work with me on the case and
lighten the load so I could justify keeping full this
file up in And then in the Hall of Seen
we started to think we might be able to get
Flip out of prison another way, not a prison break,
although I think that had this failed, that probably would
have been Nina and a helicopter. I have no problems
(27:32):
prison breaks. I'm glad it didn't come to that. So
the next and only probably remaining option was couberatorial clemency.
So we actually got a call in our office, the
Innocence Project, from one of the lawyers in Governor Cuomo's
office in New York saying that they were actively soliciting
(27:54):
clemency applications from people who had I think what they
called exemplary prison work, So people who had done very
well inside and had proven that they would be no
threat to anyone on the outside. And of course it
helps if you have a lot of evidence that they're innocent,
and you know, many of our innocent clients, they're they're
in the middle of a healthscape, nightmare, get into some fights,
(28:15):
get into drugs, get into all kinds of things just
to survive. And you know who among us can judge
who has never spent a night in one of those places.
But Philippe and a few of our other clients had
managed to have really truly extraordinary records inside of community service, peacefulness,
the respect and trust of the staff and the CEOs,
and so it was pretty obvious that Philippe would be
(28:38):
one of the people who we would want to put forward.
But when I went to go talk to Philippe about it,
he said, well, it's not an exoneration. And Philippe, before
you get into that, as the man of principle that
you are, you had refused to go in front of
the parole board because of the fact that they were
expecting or even insisting that you were going to admit
(28:59):
guilt and remorse a crime you didn't commit. So you
had made a conscious decision that you would rather stay
in prison than tell a lie and admit to something
you didn't do. When they told me that I was
for parole, I told the depth of security at the time,
Peter Early. He came to see me and said, you listen,
you offer parole. You know I'm gonna. I want to
(29:19):
give you a letter of commendation so that you could
give parole. I said, I don't want a letter. With
all due respect, I appreciate your intentions, but I'm not
appearing before parole. I don't want to go out that way.
I'm not negotiating my innocence. I said, I am willing
to die in prison if they're not going to recognize
(29:40):
that I'm an innocent man. And then came Nina surely thereafter,
with this great idea of a partner or a commentation
from the governor. I said, no, I said, I'm not
interested in that. I that's not an exameration. She said,
hold on, I got some nice tickets to the Yankees,
great box seats. When you want to go to a game,
(30:00):
we Filippino and you know, man, she saw that ship
to me immediately though, Dude, she said, well, we're still
fine for your exageration, and we're gonna we're gonna cut
your name, but at least we'll get you out of here.
So I said, all right, try it. So it was
almost by Christmas the depth of security came Tepp early
he would come like with buddies and and I was
(30:21):
on the ladder painting, and the death of security came,
and he said, a rod get down from the ladder.
So the way he said it, I thought I was
in trouble. I said, in what did I do? So
I getting answer? What's up? That? He said? Get in
my truck. I said, what happened? What did I do?
He said, you didn't do nothing. Get in the truck.
So I got in the truck. You can't get in
(30:43):
the depth struck, dude, no inmate guests you no depth truck.
So I knew something was was amiss when a depth
of security tell you to get on his struck and
then take you outside of the jail to his office.
So once I've seen that, I was going outside the gate,
I said, you're death. He said, relaxed, everything is good.
So we went to his office and there it is
the Superintendent, the dep of Administration, dep of Programs, tepperarily
(31:07):
and the Lieutenant. So he says, sit on my chair man.
I say, I mean I can tell the bricks. I
supposed up that. He said, sit on my chair. Go ahead.
So I sat on the depth chair and the Superintendent said,
in all the years that I've been in corrections, I
never had the privilege to do this. The governor of
(31:29):
the state, under your constitu grant you a commutation. Dep said, um,
my phone is your phone. You could do whatever you
want with my phone. Go ahead and die whatever you
want to die. This is your phone. Is your office
for today. The first phone call I made my son.
(32:01):
I called my son and I don't flip it, I said,
R I said, he's overdue. I said, uh, coming home.
I called Nina, and you already knew. She's a bump.
She didn't let me know, but she already knew. And
Zack knew too. And he's another bomb. He didn't tell
(32:24):
me either, So it was like a big bomb dropped
on me. You know. I didn't think a commentation will
feel the way that felt. But to get out and
be able to hold my son and and see the
city after almost three decades, see it and walk free
and smell the air, and get in the car and
(32:46):
and do the things that we so much take for granted.
It was amazing to be restarted back to some extent
of humanity, to feel that sense of belonging, to sense
that freedom that only comes from you doing what you
want when you want to do it. Most people don't
(33:07):
know what it feels like because they never lost their freedom.
Freedom is a gift. It is the greatest gift any
human being ever has. I am in eternal debt to
the entire staff of the INS Project. Governor Cuomo also
deserves some gratitude from me, and the next step was
even better. But this was a crucial moment in my
(33:30):
life after spending twenty six years and nine months in prison,
So the best was yet to come. And I'll never
forget your sort of homecoming lunch in New York City.
I was sort of very blessed to be there for
your first free hug with your son. I had some
amazing photographs. I think I was a designated photographer for
(33:51):
that moment, and it was just the type of moment
that I think we live for all of us who
work in this field. And of course then there's still
more good news. On a cold day in Queens, New York,
we witnessed the formal exoneration three years to the day
after he got his clemency. December is Philippe's lucky day,
(34:15):
So watch out powerball people, because if he plays the
lottery on that day, things his way exactly. And I
didn't plan it that way. It just happened, and it
was pretty much the last official act from the outgoing
administration of Richard Brown. Mr Brown died in office about
six months before Philip they was exonerated, but one of
(34:36):
his top aids. Bob Masters agreed. After Philip they was
granted clemency. Bob Masters, who was one of the most
senior officials in a very large Day's office, agreed to
my pleading to have somebody with authority take a closer
look at the case. And I spent about close to
the better part of those three years working with him
to dig up every last bit of paper that they
(34:58):
could find and help them understand on the significance of
what they saw by explaining and really opening up our
files for the whole case to them. And on December
twenty three I finally got a call from Bob Masters
that he agreed that there was a lot of evidence
in that Day's file and then the police file that
(35:18):
none of us had ever seen the Philippe based trial
lawyers certainly never had, and that the jury never had.
That convinced him that philip Based right to a fair
trial had been egregiously violated. Okay, so they found a
statement from Ramos taken by a Long Island Railroad detective
with Ramo's claiming that Philippe was with a black man
when he allegedly returned the car. So that's a totally
(35:41):
different story. There and then, in front of Robert Masters,
Ramos recanted his identification of Phelipe, blaming pressure from police
at the time. I mean, there was also a statement
from a bar patron named William Perry that a friendly
stated that the couple had arrived in the black Monty car,
which undermined the entire theory about the white car seen
(36:04):
by Soloni. And if that wasn't enough, one of the
biggest red flags of all was that Detective by Zell
had gained permission to arrest Phelippe. Get this eight days
before Ramos had changed his story from Pereira to Phelipe.
I mean, it's unsucking believable, and it left the d
(36:26):
a's office no choice. Finally, Bob Masters agreed, and he
had convinced the district Attorney that throwing out fully based
conviction and exonerating him was the right thing to do.
And I was able to give fully by pretty good
Christmas presents. I called him on Christmas Eve and said,
can you come to the office. And I couldn't tell
him why I wanted him to come in, because he'd
(36:47):
want to know what was going on, and so what
do I don't you look? I think I said, I
need you to look at some papers. You need to
start scions of papers. Come look at some papers. Every
typical lawyer excuse. And he was working at a hotel
and town and on the way home he stopped off.
And when I got there, she's all smiley and you know,
(37:08):
being you know, you know how you doing? What's up?
And I said, was a documents? Because the documents? She said, relax.
You know Santa Claus brought you a gift. And I
said what gift? She said, what You finally got what
you wanted. And I looked at Nina say like, nah,
I don't drive this again. And she said, well, on decembertery,
(37:28):
you will be exagerated. I made my whole world turned
upside down, dude, and my then eighteen years of the
Innocence Project, this was the first client that I'd ever
gotten to tell in person that he was getting exonerated.
I done a lot of joyful phone calls, but the
first time, because he was a New Yorker and he
was already free and body if not a name, that
(37:49):
I got to actually tell someone in my office and
be there with him when he got to call all
his family members and tell them the good news. So
that was pretty special. So now we get to the
part of the show that everyone especially looks forward to,
and that part of the show is called closing arguments,
and this is where, first of all, I thank each
of you. Um Nina Morrison, thank you so much for
(38:11):
being on the show again. Thanks Jason, great to be back.
And Felipe Rodriguez, thanks again for being here and sharing
your story with us. Thank you very much. And now
I'm gonna I'm gonna turn my mic off, kick back
in my chair, closed my eyes and leave the mic on. Nina,
why don't you go first, and then when you're done,
just hand the mike off to Felipe, and then Felipe
(38:32):
you do the mic drop. It's hard to know what
to say to some up or make meaning out of
what Felipe went through. We do know a few things.
Why is that he never should have been arrested or
charged in the first place, That there was so much
evidence even at the time that made very clear that
they had the wrong man. Another is that if police
(38:56):
and prosecutors had turned over still more evidence that no
one on the defense team in Phelippe himself didn't know
was there, he never would have been convicted. Fortunately, New
York has since changed its laws on what's called pre
trial discovery, meaning the universe of documents that you get
not but as a prosecutor says, well, I think this
(39:18):
is helpful to you, so I'm going to provide it,
and I'm legally obligated to provide it. But all of
the documents collected in connection with an investigation, police reports
and notes now need to be turned over as a
matter of right. So had these laws been in place
at the time Phelipe was charged, I like to think
that he never would have been convicted. So we are
grateful to the legislature and to the governor for enacting
(39:41):
its discovery reform, as we call it, into law, and
for keeping the bill strong because it will prevent more
Phelifa Rodrigous. It's from going to prison for crimes I
didn't commit. So I came out of prison on January.
A week and a half later, Nina Morrison got me
to go and walk into the President of Locals six
Total Trades Council Union, Mr Peter Ward. He was really
(40:04):
taken aback by what I've been through, and he said, look,
if nobody wants to hire you, I'll make the call myself.
And I became a hotel worker and I just got
laid off because of the COVID, But I was making
good money healthcare. I got a great family and it.
Nina is the one responsible for me marrying Karen Rodriguez.
(40:25):
Nina has done so much for me. Nina is so
intertwined in my home, in my life, in my future,
in my past. It's amazing. I'm in a great position
even though with this COVID. You know, I hear people
saying that, oh, we feel like we're in jail. They
don't even know what jeal is like. This is no
(40:46):
way compared to jail. Trust me, I'm going to tell
you something that people should be thanking COVID. COVID has
given the people a chance to know their children, to
know their wives, to know their mothers, to talk to
share moments with them. So what I say to people
is I took prison and I made something good out
of it. Let's take COVID and make something good out
(41:07):
of it. I mean, sometimes it's stressful, you know, overwhelming
with kids, you know, because you're not used to it.
But let's see the positive. I mean, prison is a
dark place. I welcomed it. I used the tool that
that was placed on my feet and I did something positive.
We could do that during COVID. We we just gotta
take it one day at a time, you know, and
(41:28):
the rest should be history. Man, 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 wrong
(41:49):
for convictions. Go to Innocence Project dot org to learn
how to donate and get involved. I'd like to thank
our production team, Connor Hall and Kevin wardas The music
on 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
(42:12):
Good Podcasts and association with Signal Company Number one
It was Thanksgiving the eve, and after visiting her daughter
at Wycoff Hospital in Queen's, Maureen Fernandez went to a
few of her usual bars with a man who was
unfamiliar to the other bar patrons. The next morning, her
body was found in an empty lot next to a
stretch of the Long Island Railroad. She had been stabbed
thirty five times. Investigators spoke with the bar patrons and
(00:25):
a night watchman near the empty lot, who described a
white Cadillac type car leaving the lot at four am.
The detectives began looking into people who worked at the hospital,
and it turned out that a security guard named Taper
Ramos owned a white Oldsmobile. Detectives leaned hard on Ramo's
extracted a confession about lending his car to a friend
(00:46):
named Richard Pereira. Ramos claimed Pereira had returned the vehicle
with a mysterious red liquid on the passengers side, and
admitted to the murder before Ramos thoroughly cleaned the car.
When Pereira was cleared in the line, police arranged for
Pereira to record a conversation with Ramos, who admits to
making up the story, even admitting that his car battery
(01:09):
was dead denighted the murder, but instead of switching directions,
the cops interrogate Ramos again, extracting the same story with
a new suspect, Phelipe Rodriguez, without the Pereira recording being
presented at trial. Phelipe ended up spending over twenty six
years in prison after being identified by a man who
(01:31):
knew nothing about the murder of a woman who Phelipe
had never even met. This is Wrongful Conviction with Jason Flam.
(01:53):
Welcome back to Wrongful Conviction with Jason Flam. That's me.
I'm your host, and today I am well you can
probably hear. I'm excited because we have not one, but
two of my favorite human beings on the show today. First,
Nina Morrison is the senior litigation attorney at the Instance
Project in New York and just all around certified badass lawyer,
(02:15):
human mom, person, friend, and so Nina, I'm really excited
to have you back on. Welcome Thanks, Jason. Great to
be back. And now, in our tradition of saving the
best for last, we have one of the kindest, gentlest,
funniest and best dressed humans that you're ever going to
come across so Phelippe Rodriguez. Welcome to wrongful Conviction. Thank you, Jason,
(02:39):
I appreciate it. Philippa. Let's start at the beginning. You
grew up in Puerto Rico, right, Yes, I was born
in Bosta, Puerto Rico, on August fifteen, nineteen And you
came to New York and at what time? I actually
came to New York with my mother and my stepfather,
late seventies. I was like thirteen or fourteen years old.
Can you just describe to us what your life was
(02:59):
like for this incident. In nineteen five, I actually get
married to my now ex wife, Glaris Rodriguez, and I
had a kid with her, Felippe Wiland Rodriguez, Jr. He
was born on July two x. By eighty six, I
(03:20):
started working for a subcontracting company for the City of
New York. I was getting paid good, I had good
health care, so I was doing pretty well for myself.
And then you were implicated in a murder that you
had absolutely nothing to do with. And this particular murder
was really gruesome, Nina. Can you take us back to
(03:40):
the crime itself and how they came to sort of
I'm gonna say settled because they settled on Philippe. Yeah, Phelippe.
I wasn't arrested and charged for this crime until sixteen
months after the victim in this case, Marini Fernandez, was murdered.
As you mentioned, it was an extraordinarily brutal crime. She
(04:00):
was stabbed thirty five times and her body was found
in a deserted lot in Queens, New York, near the
Long Island railroad tracks, behind a food warehouse. Her body
was actually found on Thanksgiving morning. She had been at
a local hospital visiting her two year old daughter, who
was in the hospital the night before, went out to
a bar with a man that the other bar patrons
(04:23):
didn't recognize, but it was a bar that she went
to with some frequency, left there around two in the
morning and was never seen again. You know, we get
a lot of cases, Jason, where there's some reasonable evidence
pointing to our clients as a suspect, and then later
through DNA or further investigation or advanced science some other evidence,
we find the picture changes. And when we at the
(04:45):
Innocence Project took on Philippe's case, it was just so
clear that this investigation was pointing far away from Phelipe
for the beginning, and eventually, sixteen months later, when they
had no viable suspect, the police just decided to coerce
witnesses and argh Philippe. The police had the description of
the most likely culprit from the bar patrons, right, you know.
(05:05):
The thing that was so obvious was that the man
who was with the victim is Fernandez at the bar,
did not remotely resemble Philippe. Phelipe is your desk and
see if they google him is a tall, slender, very
dark haired, handsome man of Puerto Rican descent. And yet
the man at the bar, who was the last person
to come to the bar with and leave with the victim,
(05:27):
the obvious likely suspect, was described by witnesses as white
or Italian, clean shaven. Phelippe, had a black mustache stocky
which Phelippe definitely is not and never was, and had
reddish brown hair Recasalies. I mean, the list goes on
and on. One of the patrons at the bar, Robert Thompson,
(05:48):
who was heavily intoxicated, said that he had tried to
sell a watch to Maureene Fernandez and the man she
was with and then this Thompson described the potential perpetrator's
hands as large, calloused and wearing rings. Then later on
he sort of agreed with the detectives that the man
who may have had writing on his left hand. Again,
(06:08):
you wouldn't want to hang a murder conviction on this.
And then there's this Peter Saloni guy. He was a
night watchman at the food wholesaler near the empty lot
where the body was found, and he told police that
he witnessed a white car with a lone mail driver
leaving the warehouse area at four am. He said the
car may have been aes ere at Catillac. There wasn't
(06:29):
really any evidence that anybody's white car was necessarily the
car used in this crime. The security guard thought he
saw a white car with a loan drive or leaving
the warehouse area around four am. No one knows what
time Ms Fernandez was brought there or when she was killed.
There were different reports about when she left the bar,
and originally the investigation focused on a black car, which
(06:50):
had a much closer connection to the crime because several
witnesses described seeing an unfamiliar shiny black Monte Carlo with
nted windows outside the bar, and people started suggesting to
police that maybe the perpetrator drove her to and from
the bar in that car. And it was only when
six eight months later the case remained unsolved that suddenly
(07:13):
a new detective on the case, Jack Bizell, said oh, well,
maybe it's maybe it was the white car scene by
the security guard, and from that little read of a hypothesis,
they reverse engineered a case designed to find anyone they
could with a connection to White Coff Hospital who happened
to have a white car of that general description. So
(07:35):
the Texas began looking at the staff of the hospital
that this poor woman had been visiting her sick child
at a pediatric ward. Because people were staying around the neighborhood.
It was like a picked up spot, which is bizarre
in itself, but okay. So the detective started talking about
the staff and there was a security guard named Javier
Ramos who had a white oldmobile at the time of
(07:56):
the murdera a Catillac. But he had gotten off work
at the hospital at midnight on the night of the murder,
and a few months later, in February or March of
Ramos had sold the oldsmobile to another staff or a
guy named Pedro Sierra, and he had painted the roof
of the Oldsmobile read and Saloni. The night watchman guy
was taken to the area where the car formerly owned
(08:18):
by Ramos was parked. They drove him around the block,
pasted it several times and he didn't pick it out,
and then by self finally says to him or detective
said to him, Hey, if that car didn't have a
red roof, couldn't have been the car. And he said, probably,
maybe like an eight out of ten. So that's not
exactly an unbiased, spontaneous identification of the car. It's about
(08:41):
a suggestive and equivocal as you get. And then Detective
by Zell aggressively interrogated and intimidated, i would say Ramos
for hours and hours, and finally the interrogation ended when
Ramos told the story that they wanted to hear, and
he signed the state not implicating Phelippe, but a friend
(09:02):
and co worker named Richard Pereira. Ramass original story implicating
Pereira said, Tarrera Barrow the car, brought it back on
Thanksgiving morning. There was a reddish stain in the car.
It smelled terrible, and that Pereira allegedly said to him
that he had to stab some bitch to show her
that he was a man and not some boy. So
essentially admitted to a murder, and it was a very
(09:24):
damning statement. The problem is it was completely hit up.
The police bringing Richie. We don't know the full extent
of the investigation they did, but we know that he
was not picked out of a lineup by any of
the eyewitnesses from the bar, or by the security guard,
and for that or for other reasons, they decided Ray
must have given them the wrong guy. So they go
back to Ramos and they work him over, and they
(09:44):
work him over, but before they do that, they go
to Pereira and they say, hey, Ramos implicated you. We
think Ramos might be the killer. Can you wear a
wire and go talk to him? Now. None of this
was heard by Phelippe jury. This didn't come out till
after he was convicted. But Ramos was taped by Pereira,
(10:05):
the man he falsely implicated, essentially admitting he made up
the whole story, and on this audio tape that none
of the juror's ever heard, Ramos said, look, the cops
were coming at me. And coming at me. It was
going to be me or you, and I had to
give them somebody or else I was going to go
to prison for the rest of my life. And then
he said my car wasn't even working that day, the
(10:25):
battery was dead, and there was no blood on the cushion.
That was juice that my girlfriend's kid spilled there. He
admitted the whole thing was fabricated, not just naming Pereira,
but the whole entire story, and Felippe's jury never heard that.
What they did here at Phelippe's trial was that Ramos
(10:46):
gave another version of that statement implicating Phelippe. The only
two differences in that statement we're one, and most importantly,
he switched the names. So he gave the exact same statement,
but he said, oh, was actually Felippe Rodriguez who brought
the car back to me that morning and said all
these terrible things, not Richie Perga. Okay, So to believe
he's telling the truth, you have to believe he implicated
(11:08):
one innocent man to protect another man. Felippea Rodriguez not
exactly the most reliable witness in the world. In addition,
another thing that always jumped out at us, is that
Ramo said in his second statement that he cleaned the
car himself. In his first statement, the false one implicating
Richie Pereira, he said that his grandfather helped him clean
(11:30):
the car, and suddenly, in the second statement, the grandfather disappears.
Grandfather never testifies a trial, and to this day we
have never seen a single piece of paper indicating whether
the police ever talked to the grandfather. And you know, Jason,
I probably don't need to connect the dots for your
very crime savvy listeners are even the ones who aren't right. Like,
(11:51):
the first thing you would do as a rookie cop
if somebody says, oh, I cleaned blood off of a
vehicle that was used in a grizzly murder and this
person helped me, is you'd go find that person and
interview them and see if they corroborate or contradict what
this witness has just told you. And the fact that
there is no record of them talking to the grandfather,
along with the fact that we now now Ramos made
(12:12):
it all up, leads me to the conclusion that the
police absolutely talked to him, and that he told them
my grandson's full of you know what, I never went
near a stinky, bloody car or also what it called
the cops. So they took that detail out of the
second statement, but everything else he subbed one name for another,
and in the second statement he subbed in an innocent
(12:33):
man who did twenty seven years in prison for a
crime commit felipe. Had you even heard about it? When
they get to me, that was the first I heard it,
and I was shocked this out. So they put Phelipe
in a live lineup, and they brought in several of
the people from the bar, and none of them identified
Phelipe except for the one guy who had admitted that
(12:54):
he was drunk as a skunk that night, And you
would have to be drunk as a skunk to pix
up a guy who's described as Italian five eight with
reddish brown hair and chunky too with a guy who's
slender eleven, jet black hair and a mustache. But with
Ramos's statement and Thompson's identification that they felt was enough
(13:16):
to indicte Phelipe for murder, you know, I was truly
truly baffled of y. Phelippe also passed a polygraph denying
his involvement and was released on bail pre trial, which
again gives me some indication that they didn't think he
was that dangerous or they wouldn't have sent it back
to the neighborhood. And then there was the issue with
(13:37):
the trial itself. Right, So, originally Philippe was represented by
Kenneth Litwack, but then replaced by an attorney named Jennifer Maalo.
As we later found out, she was defending Phelipe with
one hand time behind her back because there was a
lot of evidence of his innocence that she never got.
Some of the best lawyers in the world will lose
(14:00):
trials when the prosecution doesn't play fair and the police
don't play fair and they don't get all the evidence
that they're entitled to get. And that was exactly the
situation that was happening here in April. Your trial was
held in the Queen's County Supreme Court, and I know
that Ramos repeated his false narrative about lending his car
(14:21):
to Phelippe, and he said that he had delaid reporting
the crime and initially shifted the blame to Pieric because
Phelippe was quote like a brother to me. I mean,
the whole thing stinks. As you know, many jurors, when
they show up for jury duty, assume that the police
have it right, that the person who's charged with the
crime wouldn't be sitting there if they weren't guilty, and
(14:41):
despite the legal burden of innocent until proven guilty, in
reality it's often just the opposite, where jurors assumed the
person is guilty, and if there's any evidence to support
that conclusion, they often latch onto that evidence. And so
I can see a world where a man who represents
himself to be a close friend of Phelippe's, claims to
be like a rather to him, comes in and says
(15:02):
I didn't want to turn him in, but I had
to because it was the right thing to do. Never
mind that he implicated another admittedly innocent person in between
might give them what they need, or they might have
been swayed by just the horrible glory nature of the
crime and not want to let it go unsolved. So
the prosecution calls these two witnesses that claimed to have
seen the writing on Felippe's hands in the past. This
(15:25):
so this also seems just so dicey. You know, it's
a sign of how thin the case was that they're
relying on things like a witness twenty months later who
says she thought she saw something written on Felippe's hands
that happens to match something that another drunkenness said ten
months after the crime that he thought he saw written
on Phelippe's hand. And that's really emblematic of just how
(15:46):
weak a case this was. But um and the other
key piece of it was that the police witnesses testified
really to back up the whole theory about the white car.
You know, the prosecution was allowed to walk detectives by
cell and Sullivan through the investigation. Oh and also they
had the bartender who would initially not pickedly be out
of a lineup, came into court and said, oh, yeah,
(16:06):
that's the guy between the white car. Romis a testimony
some of the other incredibly shaky ideas and some dubious
testimony about writing and things Philippe elegedly said. And that
was enough to send this man away for what could
have been the rest of his life. Phelippe was convicted
of second degree murder and since the twenty five years
to life in prison. When they said that they had
(16:27):
found me guilty of murder in the second degree. My
niece buckled. Man, I m put both of my hands
on the table, and I just that was a rough date. Man.
It was at that time I was married to Loida Castagnero,
and all I heard was her screens. It was like
(16:50):
a screen when somebody dies. And then the judge said,
you remanded, and he told the alto to take meet
cross and that's what the whole time may began. This
(17:15):
episode is brought to you by Stand Together. Stand Together
is a philanthropic community dedicated to helping people improve their lives.
For more than twenty years, Stand Together and its partners
have been on the front lines of criminal justice reform.
By empowering people to take action, supporting nonprofits, and working
with businesses, Stand Together tackles the root causes of problems
(17:36):
in our communities and empowers those closest to the problems
to drive solutions. Solutions like reducing unjust prison sentences through
the First Step Act, empowering community based programs that help
people re enter society, and now working to bridge divides
in our communities. To learn how you may get involved,
visit stand together dot org. Slash conviction. I was twenty
(18:04):
three four. One of the first maximum security persons that
I arrived at was Great Metals Correctional Facility better known
as Gladiator School or Calm Stock. There I seen the violence,
almo sexuality, the drugs, the gangs, and I said, how
can I pull myself out of this dungeon safely and
(18:27):
returned to my son. So the first few months were crucial.
I prayed a lot, I cried a lot. That was
nice when you know, I put myself to sleep crying
thinking about my son and you know who was being
there for him. I was angry, of course, I was angry.
I was angry at the system. I was angry that
(18:49):
I was thrown in prison for twenty five to life
for something that I haven't done. And I was completely
confused on how I was going to solve this mystery.
But quickly I understood that in order for me to
think clearly, in order for me to see things for
(19:10):
what they were, I needed to forgive everybody. I needed
to take all hatred, I needed to take all resentment,
and I needed to get that out of my system
so that I won't get more hurt than what I
was already, because you know, most people don't understand hatred, resentiment.
(19:32):
All that does. It hurts you, It doesn't hurt the
person you're angry at, because the person you're angry at
is actually in the house, sleeping or having fun with
their family while you are doing in all this madness.
So very early in my incarceration, I got rid of
all that, and I devoted myself to giving thanks to
(19:52):
God for me being healthy and alive and ask him
to protect my son. And I started learning and reading
every book I get my hands on. And it was
a hell of a quest for sure. I can't picture
you in this gladiator school, but you turned it into
a positivity. But then there was still so much more
(20:15):
to come, right, and we're gonna go quickly through the proceedings.
In the early nineties, Philippe got appointed some terrific lawyers
from the Legal Aid Society for his initial round of
appeals right after his conviction. Right, and this is Martin Lucente,
of course, of the Legal Aid Society. We're talking about
a very very talented lawyer, and they very quickly through
(20:36):
some catching a reference to it in another report, discovered
that this tape of the lead witness against Philippe. I
have your Ramos existed, was in the state's possession and
had never been turned over. So they got a copy
of the tape in which Ramos admits to making up
the whole story about the car and the bloodstains and
his car having into the battery, and they go to
(20:57):
a hearing. And as we've seen so many times times,
when you go toal hearing with the claim that the
prosecution withheld evidence you're supposed to have, it's a very
hard claim to win because the prosecutor will often come
in and say, well, I turned it over, I handed
it to the defense layer. I gave it to her.
And that's exactly what he said here. And at the
end of the day, the judge's decision denying Phelippe a
(21:18):
new trial didn't say this wasn't significant evidence. He never says, oh, well,
this wouldn't have made a difference anyway, it was so
obvious how important it is. He says, I find that
there's not enough proof or evidence that it wasn't disclosed.
I'm not going to call the prosecutor a liar. So
essentially he's saying that maybe Phelippe's trial or missed it.
(21:38):
But you know, she was cross examining Ramo's pretty hard.
It's something that would have been almost impossible to miss
if she'd had this kind of ammo to cross examine
him further about making it up. So he lost that round,
but it was still more evidence that, by the time
the Innocence Project took the case was on record, further
undermining this already incredible, way tenuous conviction. So none of
(22:02):
these initial emotions or appeals led to the result that
they should have, which is of course for Philippa to
come home. And then it comes to two thousand one,
when Philippe you wrote to the Innocence Project, they sent
me a letter. They said, look, we have a lot
of requests and right now, you know, we only have
a certain amount of staff, so we will take a
(22:24):
look at it. We'll let you know. And but then
I was transferred to Sullivan, and the Sullivan I met
Father Bona, who became my mentor. I really got immerged
into the Calcolic religion and and I started serving. They
made population. It became chaplain's aide, and the Chaplain Kirk,
(22:46):
the eucharistic minister. I was in charge of the entire mass,
and I was also in charge of the prayer nice
the Bible studies. You know, we started a formation class
that allow people to become secular Franciscans, which I am today.
And I forgot about the instance project. I just you know,
(23:06):
I left it up to God. And and then I
started working with a sir killer. His name is author
John show Cross. He was a Stanic worshiper and everybody
hated him in the prison. Actually, one day I came
from formation class on a Sunday after Mass, and I
was sitting at my table with two of the chairs empty,
(23:27):
and Mr shaw Cross, when he rest in peace, was
sitting on the floor because nobody wanted them on their tables.
And I felt so hypocritical. I felt like, here I
am teaching Bible study and holding mass, and and I
have a guy that's sitting on the stairs eating its
food because people think that they are better than him.
(23:49):
I said, who am I to judge this guy? Or
what saying do I have? And saying that this guy
is indeed mobile not redeemable, that's not all to me,
that's not all to any human being deserved. That's up
to God. Whatever we want to call God. So I
got up from my table and I went up to
short Cross and I said, come on, man, sit on
the table. So he came up and side on the table.
(24:10):
I said, as long as I'm in this prison, you
sit on this table with me, and whoever has a
problem with it, I'll take care of it. He said,
why why are you doing that? I said, everybody this
searched a little bit of humanity. I'm not here to
deprive you of that. I've been deprived of that myself,
so I'm not going to deprive you of that. And
from that day he started asking me questions about religion
(24:31):
and what I believe and why I didn't believe. And
one day he came out and he said, um, what
would you do if I wanted to go to church?
You think they allowed me in church? I said, well,
I'll tell you what. Why don't you come Sunday to
Mass with me? If you don't like it, you don't
never have to come again, and nobody's gonna judge you
or whatever. And he said, are you sure? People, I said, listen,
(24:53):
I'm sure God would love to have you in his house.
And he said okay. That day was the greatest day
from me. I got blessed by God for me. It
was the best letter I've ever received. Nina Morrison was
assigned to my case. From there, Nina became my guardian Andrew,
(25:14):
I don't think there's ever gonna be a woman more
important to me aside from my mother than Nina Morrison.
And I'm married and I love Karen, but I'm gonna
tell you and I told Karen a hundred times and
you can ask, and she could tell you. Eve. Nina
called me from China today and told me that she
needed me over there. Karen will stay here and I
go to China, because that's just the way it's gonna be.
(25:36):
This is where the Innocence Project stands with me. Nina
takes a case and the physical evidence had been destroyed.
There was almost nothing left to go on. Philippe's case
for a few years in our office was literally hanging
by some hairs because the hairs were among the few
things we haven't found yet. We actually managed, with the
help of a pretty diligent newer prosecutor in the years
(26:00):
office or rosen Bomb, tracked down some of the hairs,
and then Hurricane Sandy hit and they lost. The enemy
had to wait another eighteen months, and after that testing
and some testings we found on some biological material left
over from the car yielded no DNA that was of
any use to the investigation. The hairs were all from
(26:22):
the victim herself. The cuttings from the car didn't yield
a thing, no nothing. We were kind of stuck. You know,
it would have been at that point not an illogical
thing for someone in Nina's position to say, well, you know,
like we would love to help you, but we just
don't have what we need. But that's not how this
rolled out. I was to joke in the office that
(26:44):
we could have a TV show, you know, like the
old show Everybody Loves Raymond called Everybody Loves Phelipe, because
if I so much as suggested that we might close
his case, I was going to have five law students
in my office telling me I was insane or worse.
So we just kind of kept it open. So I
brought in my old law school classmate, Zach Margatie's anama
(27:06):
to do some work with me on the case and
lighten the load so I could justify keeping full this
file up in And then in the Hall of Seen
we started to think we might be able to get
Flip out of prison another way, not a prison break,
although I think that had this failed, that probably would
have been Nina and a helicopter. I have no problems
(27:32):
prison breaks. I'm glad it didn't come to that. So
the next and only probably remaining option was couberatorial clemency.
So we actually got a call in our office, the
Innocence Project, from one of the lawyers in Governor Cuomo's
office in New York saying that they were actively soliciting
(27:54):
clemency applications from people who had I think what they
called exemplary prison work, So people who had done very
well inside and had proven that they would be no
threat to anyone on the outside. And of course it
helps if you have a lot of evidence that they're innocent,
and you know, many of our innocent clients, they're they're
in the middle of a healthscape, nightmare, get into some fights,
(28:15):
get into drugs, get into all kinds of things just
to survive. And you know who among us can judge
who has never spent a night in one of those places.
But Philippe and a few of our other clients had
managed to have really truly extraordinary records inside of community service, peacefulness,
the respect and trust of the staff and the CEOs,
and so it was pretty obvious that Philippe would be
(28:38):
one of the people who we would want to put forward.
But when I went to go talk to Philippe about it,
he said, well, it's not an exoneration. And Philippe, before
you get into that, as the man of principle that
you are, you had refused to go in front of
the parole board because of the fact that they were
expecting or even insisting that you were going to admit
(28:59):
guilt and remorse a crime you didn't commit. So you
had made a conscious decision that you would rather stay
in prison than tell a lie and admit to something
you didn't do. When they told me that I was
for parole, I told the depth of security at the time,
Peter Early. He came to see me and said, you listen,
you offer parole. You know I'm gonna. I want to
(29:19):
give you a letter of commendation so that you could
give parole. I said, I don't want a letter. With
all due respect, I appreciate your intentions, but I'm not
appearing before parole. I don't want to go out that way.
I'm not negotiating my innocence. I said, I am willing
to die in prison if they're not going to recognize
(29:40):
that I'm an innocent man. And then came Nina surely thereafter,
with this great idea of a partner or a commentation
from the governor. I said, no, I said, I'm not
interested in that. I that's not an exameration. She said,
hold on, I got some nice tickets to the Yankees,
great box seats. When you want to go to a game,
(30:00):
we Filippino and you know, man, she saw that ship
to me immediately though, Dude, she said, well, we're still
fine for your exageration, and we're gonna we're gonna cut
your name, but at least we'll get you out of here.
So I said, all right, try it. So it was
almost by Christmas the depth of security came Tepp early
he would come like with buddies and and I was
(30:21):
on the ladder painting, and the death of security came,
and he said, a rod get down from the ladder.
So the way he said it, I thought I was
in trouble. I said, in what did I do? So
I getting answer? What's up? That? He said? Get in
my truck. I said, what happened? What did I do?
He said, you didn't do nothing. Get in the truck.
So I got in the truck. You can't get in
(30:43):
the depth struck, dude, no inmate guests you no depth truck.
So I knew something was was amiss when a depth
of security tell you to get on his struck and
then take you outside of the jail to his office.
So once I've seen that, I was going outside the gate,
I said, you're death. He said, relaxed, everything is good.
So we went to his office and there it is
the Superintendent, the dep of Administration, dep of Programs, tepperarily
(31:07):
and the Lieutenant. So he says, sit on my chair man.
I say, I mean I can tell the bricks. I
supposed up that. He said, sit on my chair. Go ahead.
So I sat on the depth chair and the Superintendent said,
in all the years that I've been in corrections, I
never had the privilege to do this. The governor of
(31:29):
the state, under your constitu grant you a commutation. Dep said, um,
my phone is your phone. You could do whatever you
want with my phone. Go ahead and die whatever you
want to die. This is your phone. Is your office
for today. The first phone call I made my son.
(32:01):
I called my son and I don't flip it, I said,
R I said, he's overdue. I said, uh, coming home.
I called Nina, and you already knew. She's a bump.
She didn't let me know, but she already knew. And
Zack knew too. And he's another bomb. He didn't tell
(32:24):
me either, So it was like a big bomb dropped
on me. You know. I didn't think a commentation will
feel the way that felt. But to get out and
be able to hold my son and and see the
city after almost three decades, see it and walk free
and smell the air, and get in the car and
(32:46):
and do the things that we so much take for granted.
It was amazing to be restarted back to some extent
of humanity, to feel that sense of belonging, to sense
that freedom that only comes from you doing what you
want when you want to do it. Most people don't
(33:07):
know what it feels like because they never lost their freedom.
Freedom is a gift. It is the greatest gift any
human being ever has. I am in eternal debt to
the entire staff of the INS Project. Governor Cuomo also
deserves some gratitude from me, and the next step was
even better. But this was a crucial moment in my
(33:30):
life after spending twenty six years and nine months in prison,
So the best was yet to come. And I'll never
forget your sort of homecoming lunch in New York City.
I was sort of very blessed to be there for
your first free hug with your son. I had some
amazing photographs. I think I was a designated photographer for
(33:51):
that moment, and it was just the type of moment
that I think we live for all of us who
work in this field. And of course then there's still
more good news. On a cold day in Queens, New York,
we witnessed the formal exoneration three years to the day
after he got his clemency. December is Philippe's lucky day,
(34:15):
So watch out powerball people, because if he plays the
lottery on that day, things his way exactly. And I
didn't plan it that way. It just happened, and it
was pretty much the last official act from the outgoing
administration of Richard Brown. Mr Brown died in office about
six months before Philip they was exonerated, but one of
(34:36):
his top aids. Bob Masters agreed. After Philip they was
granted clemency. Bob Masters, who was one of the most
senior officials in a very large Day's office, agreed to
my pleading to have somebody with authority take a closer
look at the case. And I spent about close to
the better part of those three years working with him
to dig up every last bit of paper that they
(34:58):
could find and help them understand on the significance of
what they saw by explaining and really opening up our
files for the whole case to them. And on December
twenty three I finally got a call from Bob Masters
that he agreed that there was a lot of evidence
in that Day's file and then the police file that
(35:18):
none of us had ever seen the Philippe based trial
lawyers certainly never had, and that the jury never had.
That convinced him that philip Based right to a fair
trial had been egregiously violated. Okay, so they found a
statement from Ramos taken by a Long Island Railroad detective
with Ramo's claiming that Philippe was with a black man
when he allegedly returned the car. So that's a totally
(35:41):
different story. There and then, in front of Robert Masters,
Ramos recanted his identification of Phelipe, blaming pressure from police
at the time. I mean, there was also a statement
from a bar patron named William Perry that a friendly
stated that the couple had arrived in the black Monty car,
which undermined the entire theory about the white car seen
(36:04):
by Soloni. And if that wasn't enough, one of the
biggest red flags of all was that Detective by Zell
had gained permission to arrest Phelippe. Get this eight days
before Ramos had changed his story from Pereira to Phelipe.
I mean, it's unsucking believable, and it left the d
(36:26):
a's office no choice. Finally, Bob Masters agreed, and he
had convinced the district Attorney that throwing out fully based
conviction and exonerating him was the right thing to do.
And I was able to give fully by pretty good
Christmas presents. I called him on Christmas Eve and said,
can you come to the office. And I couldn't tell
him why I wanted him to come in, because he'd
(36:47):
want to know what was going on, and so what
do I don't you look? I think I said, I
need you to look at some papers. You need to
start scions of papers. Come look at some papers. Every
typical lawyer excuse. And he was working at a hotel
and town and on the way home he stopped off.
And when I got there, she's all smiley and you know,
(37:08):
being you know, you know how you doing? What's up?
And I said, was a documents? Because the documents? She said, relax.
You know Santa Claus brought you a gift. And I
said what gift? She said, what You finally got what
you wanted. And I looked at Nina say like, nah,
I don't drive this again. And she said, well, on decembertery,
(37:28):
you will be exagerated. I made my whole world turned
upside down, dude, and my then eighteen years of the
Innocence Project, this was the first client that I'd ever
gotten to tell in person that he was getting exonerated.
I done a lot of joyful phone calls, but the
first time, because he was a New Yorker and he
was already free and body if not a name, that
(37:49):
I got to actually tell someone in my office and
be there with him when he got to call all
his family members and tell them the good news. So
that was pretty special. So now we get to the
part of the show that everyone especially looks forward to,
and that part of the show is called closing arguments,
and this is where, first of all, I thank each
of you. Um Nina Morrison, thank you so much for
(38:11):
being on the show again. Thanks Jason, great to be back.
And Felipe Rodriguez, thanks again for being here and sharing
your story with us. Thank you very much. And now
I'm gonna I'm gonna turn my mic off, kick back
in my chair, closed my eyes and leave the mic on. Nina,
why don't you go first, and then when you're done,
just hand the mike off to Felipe, and then Felipe
(38:32):
you do the mic drop. It's hard to know what
to say to some up or make meaning out of
what Felipe went through. We do know a few things.
Why is that he never should have been arrested or
charged in the first place, That there was so much
evidence even at the time that made very clear that
they had the wrong man. Another is that if police
(38:56):
and prosecutors had turned over still more evidence that no
one on the defense team in Phelippe himself didn't know
was there, he never would have been convicted. Fortunately, New
York has since changed its laws on what's called pre
trial discovery, meaning the universe of documents that you get
not but as a prosecutor says, well, I think this
(39:18):
is helpful to you, so I'm going to provide it,
and I'm legally obligated to provide it. But all of
the documents collected in connection with an investigation, police reports
and notes now need to be turned over as a
matter of right. So had these laws been in place
at the time Phelipe was charged, I like to think
that he never would have been convicted. So we are
grateful to the legislature and to the governor for enacting
(39:41):
its discovery reform, as we call it, into law, and
for keeping the bill strong because it will prevent more
Phelifa Rodrigous. It's from going to prison for crimes I
didn't commit. So I came out of prison on January.
A week and a half later, Nina Morrison got me
to go and walk into the President of Locals six
Total Trades Council Union, Mr Peter Ward. He was really
(40:04):
taken aback by what I've been through, and he said, look,
if nobody wants to hire you, I'll make the call myself.
And I became a hotel worker and I just got
laid off because of the COVID, But I was making
good money healthcare. I got a great family and it.
Nina is the one responsible for me marrying Karen Rodriguez.
(40:25):
Nina has done so much for me. Nina is so
intertwined in my home, in my life, in my future,
in my past. It's amazing. I'm in a great position
even though with this COVID. You know, I hear people
saying that, oh, we feel like we're in jail. They
don't even know what jeal is like. This is no
(40:46):
way compared to jail. Trust me, I'm going to tell
you something that people should be thanking COVID. COVID has
given the people a chance to know their children, to
know their wives, to know their mothers, to talk to
share moments with them. So what I say to people
is I took prison and I made something good out
of it. Let's take COVID and make something good out
(41:07):
of it. I mean, sometimes it's stressful, you know, overwhelming
with kids, you know, because you're not used to it.
But let's see the positive. I mean, prison is a
dark place. I welcomed it. I used the tool that
that was placed on my feet and I did something positive.
We could do that during COVID. We we just gotta
take it one day at a time, you know, and
(41:28):
the rest should be history. Man, 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 wrong
(41:49):
for convictions. Go to Innocence Project dot org to learn
how to donate and get involved. I'd like to thank
our production team, Connor Hall and Kevin wardas The music
on 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
(42:12):
Good Podcasts and association with Signal Company Number one
Hosts And Creators
Lauren Bright Pacheco
Maggie Freleng
Jason Flom
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