November 17, 2021 • 37 mins
Brothers, Dennis and Lee Horton, were having a pleasant Memorial Day in 1993 until they decided to visit their father in North Philadelphia and ran into a childhood friend, Robert Leaf. Unbeknownst to the Hortons, Robert Leaf had committed an armed robbery turned homicide earlier that day. Shortly after Robert joined the brothers in their car, police pulled them over. All three were arrested and tried for second degree murder. Robert Leaf's attorney used confusion among the witnesses about the identity of the shooter to win Leaf a lesser sentence, while the Hortons received life without the possibility of parole. After all appeals were denied on procedural grounds, they applied for commutation with the support of an up and coming politician named John Fetterman who was recently elected to the United States Senate for the state of Pennsylvania.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
On May thirty one, Dennis Horton went to his brother
Lee's home for a Memorial Day weekend cook out. Later
in the day, they visited their father in North Philadelphia,
as well as their childhood friend Robert Leaf. Unbeknownst to
the Hortons, Robert Leaf had committed an armed robbery earlier
that day in which two women were injured and one
(00:23):
man was fatally shot. The Hortons pulled up to their
friend Robert Leaf on the street and made plans to
watch a basketball game back at Lee's. Robert asked the
brothers to meet him one block up, where he got
into their car with a gun. Police had been following
Robert and immediately pulled them over, where all three men
were arrested. The two injured women, who initially had said
(00:46):
that there were only two armed robbers, gave a shaky
idea of all three men, sending them to trial together.
Robert Leaf's attorney used confusion amongst the witnesses over the
identities of the three men to change the narrative from
Robert Leaf as the shooter to Dennis delivering a lighter
sentence to the actual culprit. While the Hortons were sentenced
(01:06):
to life without parole. Years later, a statement by Robert
Leaf admitting his role and excluding the Horton brothers was unearthed,
along with the fact that police had identified Robert Leef
as the shooter from the very start. However, with this
new evidence being ruled inadmissible on purely procedural grounds, it
took the tireless advocacy of Pennsylvania Lieutenant Governor John Fetterman
(01:29):
to win a commutation and release for the brothers after
nearly three long decades in prison. This is wrongful conviction.
(01:53):
Welcome back to wrongful conviction. My best advice to you
right now is fasten your seatbelt because this is going
to be a crazy ride that you're about to go on.
But before I introduced the two brothers who were wrongly
convicted of the same crime together and ended up serving
almost twenty seven years together in the same cell for
the crime didn't commit. I just want to say that
(02:17):
this is Philadelphia in the nineties. You've heard stories on
here before about Philadelphia and in the nineties, and it
was it was the time and place where a black
man had a better chance of getting justice in Philadelphia,
Mississippi than in Philadelphia Pennsylvania and this is another example
of that. So without further ado, let me introduced to you.
(02:38):
I'm so excited to have these guys on the show
today because there's such inspiring people. Lee and Dennis Horton,
the brothers Horton. Welcome to Wrong for Conviction. Alright, good afternoon.
How was everybody doing out there. I'm glad to be here.
Thank you for brightness on. So let's get right into it.
First of all, I want to say to both of
you guys that while I am obviously delighted to have
(02:59):
you on the show, I'm sorry that you're here because
of what you had to go through and it should
have never happened. So let's go back to the beginning.
I'm talking about how was childhood for you guys growing
up together while you moved to Philly and seventy seven, right,
but give us a quick look at what your childhood
was like. So when we was young, growing up, we
(03:20):
lived uneventful but a wonderful life. You know, my mom
and my father was married in the early sixties. Four
of us, four kids. We grew up in some of
the roughest places in the city. But our family, my
mom my grandmother. My father always instilled in us that
you had to work for what you wanted in life,
and so we started working at an early age. My
(03:42):
mom and father. Unfortunately they split up in nineteen seventy two.
My mom, she was trying to take care four kids
on on. We wind up moving to the Projects, which
was at the time East Falls Projects. I was around
twelve years old, My brother was seven at the time.
So the projects was a rough project. You know, you
had to prove the people up there that you was
willing to fight in order for you to be able
(04:03):
to stay, or they chased you out the projects. That's
how it was. And so I had got into a
fight with an individual and I wanted to fight. That
was a blessing to some degree, but it was also
a curse because now I was at I with a
lot of guys my age twelve and thirteen year olds
in the projects, and one day I wound up on
(04:24):
the wrong side of the projects when we was approached
by a group of individuals and it was maybe about
twenty something thirty guys, and they approached this and they
wanted me to fight a guy. And you know that
it was a bunch of guys that was about to
jump us. And then these other guys came out of
nowhere and came to our rescue. And it was only
a few of them, but they were like the neighborhood
(04:45):
tough guys to some degree. One of these guys who
would become a really good friend of mine was an
individual named Robert Leef, And so I fell in with
these guys and we became really good friends. He came
to my house, stayed at my house, slept in my house,
ate at my house. My mom said somebody, we became
his mom. And then we moved out of projects. By
(05:08):
that time, we kind of veered off a little bit,
although I would go see my friends who were still
living in the products and some living in North Philadelphia,
from town to town. And so now we move up
towards the time of the actual crime, and I'm talking
about Memorial Day weekend, May thirty first. So there was
(05:28):
an arm robbery at Poldo's Bar. Now, initial descriptions say
it was two men, but later it was changed to three.
One man with a two caliber semi automatic rifle and
another with a black pistol robbed the bar and its patrons.
Samuel A. Limo six ft three and over two pounds,
wrestled with the gunmen for the gun, but was overpowered
(05:52):
and was shot and killed. Lose ar Cella and Lose
Martinez were injured, but both were covered, and a witness
described chasing after the pleaing assailants who saw them in
a small blue car and supplied police with a partial
license plate number. And again, remember this is Philadelphia in
the nineties, So we'll get to the you know, myriad
(06:14):
problems with the state story, but first let's hear your story.
So it's Memorial Day weekend. You had four kids, right,
including a two week old baby, and at the time, Dennis,
you were just recently engaged to be married and had
also recently been badly injured at work and we're recovering, right,
(06:34):
So you were in absolutely no condition to be engaging
in hand to hand combat wrestling right with a very
large man, right strong man. So can you take us
through that day, that that day that this armed robbery
and murder, this whole tragedy happened. So Lee and his
wife invited me and fiance at the time over to
(06:56):
his house. So of course I went to Lee's house,
had a cook out, with him and his wife and
his kids. And later on that evening we decided we
was going to take a ride. You know, we've been
in the house all day. Stopped by my father's house
see him, and then Lee was gonna stop by just
see a few guys that he knew, and we headed
for North Philadelphia, when my father lived at the time,
(07:17):
and we swung by his house, but his light was
out so he would sleep. So Lee said, okay, let's
stop around Leaf's house. So, you know, we drove around
Leaf's house. He was standing out on the corner with
some other guys and Lee beat the horn and Leif
came over to the car and him and le talked
for a little bit. So rob Leaf was supposed to
come back to leave house. We're just gonna watch the
basketball game. So Leaf said, pull up a block and
(07:40):
I'll be there, and I got to just take care
of something real quick. And we pulled up to the
block and Leif came maybe about ten fifteen minutes later,
got in the car, and then we pulled off, and
about a couple of blocks later, we saw sirens and
we pulled over and the police jumped out of their
vans and cars were gunn drawn and told us to
(08:01):
get out of the car. And we got out of
the car and they handcuffed us and they put us
into the patty wagon and they took us to the
hospital when identification to take place, and all I remember
is that the van doors opened up, and next thing
you know, I've seen I think two ladies point to
rob relief and said, yeah, that's the guy right there.
And then they said, well, what about these other guys
(08:21):
and they said, yeah, them too, they were with them too,
And then they shut the doors back and then that
was it. And next thing you know, we were down
the roundhouse. Where did they charge you for a homicide?
So okay, right away we see problems emerged with what
the witnesses are describing. Right the alleged number of individuals
involved in the robbery went from went up fifty, right
(08:43):
from two to three. And when you're there at the
hospital and the police patty wagon right outside the hospital
with the witnesses saying yeah them too. Also, one of
the witnesses described a blue car and gave a partial
plate number, So did that match your own? Les? The
only witness who claimed to see the car said it
was a blue small car. It was supposed to a
(09:05):
Chevy Svett. He said the name of the car in
his statement. Now Lee's car is a Priest Classic, a
four door large car, two tones, two different colors. But
this witness, for some reason, we could never find him
and never bring him to trial. The person the police
put down giving out this partial plate number. When we
got the witness on the stand, she said, right then there,
(09:28):
I navi gave the police anything. I never saw a car,
So how could I have ever given him Their name
is on this paper though they said you gave it
to him. She said, it's impossible. I didn't see a car.
I didn't give him anything. And the thing about the
officers who did this first thing, you gotta give you
a context who these officers are. The first officer was
somebody who had strangled a guy to death early on,
and then later, right after he was arrested, he shot
(09:50):
a guy unarmed in a car. The second officer, she
was involved in internal fairs investigation about a large quantity
of drugs being found in the police station and them
suspecting it or connect did it to her. As you
start ap peeling the layers away, you start seeing that
it's more to this than just the police picking up
some guys and they were involved. So I have to ask,
(10:10):
do you think that they knew from the beginning that
you guys had nothing to do with us. That's a
really good question, and our heart of hearts, we believe
in the beginning maybe they wasn't sure, but as things
begin to unfold, they had to be clear that we
weren't involved, just didn't care. And the reason why we
know is because the prosecutor them came to us with
a deal. It was like five to ten years, and
(10:33):
we were like, we're innocent, We're not taking any deal.
Why should we take any deal to go to jail
for when we didn't do anything? And now it was
sort of like, okay, you won't take the deal, all right, Well,
the chip's gonna fall what they made, right, And it's
very uncommon that in the crime as serious as this
one armed robbery where someone was killed, right, that they're
gonna offer someone two guys in this case five years. Right.
(10:57):
You know, you don't have to be a legal scholar
to figure this one out. So now we get to
the trial and all three of you, lead Dennis and
Robert Leaf are tried together, and they have three witnesses.
Now I'm gonna put witnesses and quotation marks here. Three
of them came to trial and they eventually identified Dennis
as the shooter. But did they have any physical evidence
(11:19):
at all, any fingerprints, any security footage. There was no
security footage. What they had was they actually had the gun,
they said with the murdered weapon. They never actually could
trace it to any bullets they got out of the body.
They didn't match. But this is the gun that Leaf
had on him. He left the gun in the car.
The cops retrieved it and when they checked it, it it
(11:40):
had fingerprints. But we've been always trying to get these
fingerprints checked because they could never trace him to any
of us, and they took all of our fingerprints. They
didn't fit any of us. Now, the way that my
brother got to become the shooter is a clear case
of mistaken identification. Initially in the case, they all identified
Robert Leaf at shoot her. And this is where the
(12:01):
cold case turns. If this don't never happen, we probably
would have walked. The one witness would identify different person
every hearing. When she identified Robert Leave, Robert Leaves attorney,
he would read in noose testimony of her identifying my
brother and to it got to the point where when
the judge asked her, who are you saying did this?
She said, I'm gonna say it's the one right there,
(12:23):
and she was identified me And we had already told
the court that they was identified as based where we
were sitting there, so we switched seats. So when we
switched seats, she was identified based on who the witness
before her told her to identify, and then she thought
that the person was sitting in that seat, but it
wound up being me Lee Horton. When she heard my name,
she said, hold it, what's the name? And they just said,
(12:46):
why do you want to know the name? Because Dennis
did it. It's Dennis, He said Dennis, and then she said, yeah,
I heard him. They was calling Dennis. And then after
that we were in the case and they knew that
this woman just had made this up out of the sky,
just right then and there. Everybody refused to pull back,
and they could have corrected that right then and there
(13:06):
and said, well, hold up the honor, she's wrong. Mr
Leaf was wearing a red jacket. We know that for sure.
That's a fact. They identified him as a shooter. That's
a fact. They didn't say any of that. They just
let the witnesses go on and order or with these
wrong identifications. And this woman had identified every last one
of us has a shoot at one given time. This
(13:37):
episode is underwritten by A i G, a leading global
insurance company, and by Accenture, a global professional services company
with leading capabilities in digital, cloud and security. Working to
reform the criminal justice system is a key pillar of
the A i G pro Bono Program, which provides free
legal services and other support to many nonprofit organizations and
(13:57):
individuals most in need as part of Accenture's commitment to
racial and civil justice. Accenture's Legal Access Program provides pro
bono legal services in partnership with more than forty organizations,
bringing meaningful change to people and communities worldwide. Three weeks
(14:21):
prior to our arrest, I had injured my leg on
my job in such a fashion that I needed a
c L repair. The holiday was on a Monday. I
was supposed to go talk about the day that week
I was going to have the surgery done. I just
came off the crushes. So when we were arrested, it
was impossible for me to be able to wrestle with
this guy. I think they said he was like six
(14:43):
four or six three, something like that. I was supposed
that overpowered him, wrestled all way to the ground with
this guy, overpowered the gun out of his hand, and
then after I was supposed that shot him. I was
supposed to that ran away as fast as I could.
There was no way I could run on that leg
at all. And my medical records and all that would
have shown that would approve that, and this would have
(15:05):
disqualified me from even remotely possibly being the shooter. And
the thing is they knew this, but nobody cared. So
you both had different lawyers. So two people who were
supposed to be working on your behalf, what were they
doing with all of this information? At trial, he made
(15:25):
the mistake of a friend of my mom's told her
that their son could be a good lawyer force and
we accepted that, but he wasn't a criminal defense attorney.
He had not tried one criminal case, and he wound
up being a person putting our defense together. My lawyer
had been retired, and he was kind of older, and
(15:45):
he was a little out of step. We were just
not prepared for a capital case. Now, the difference is
Robert Leaf was prepared. He knew the system and he
knew how to work the system. We was naive. We
thought that we were innocent and it was gonna be
shown and it never was. Like literally, if you put
this in the movie, you say, well, one guy's represented
by a friend of a friend who never tried a
(16:05):
criminal case before this capital murder we're talking about, and
the other guys tried by a guy that they literally
pulled out a retirement and we ailed them into the courtroom.
You guys didn't even know that you're doomed. You're thinking, hey,
we go in and tell the truth. You were the
only guys in the courtroom telling the truth. That's the
only problem, right, and that doesn't work. And that's the
thing that you know, even now gets to me a
(16:26):
little bit because I spent twenty seven years in prison
when this could have been nipping but early on and
I didn't have to never go to prison. Back to
twenty seven years. You know, sometimes in your mind you think,
well you should have took there, but what would we
just said, we didn't commit the crown, We didn't know
anything about it. Took us twenty eight years to learn
enough about this case to be able to talk about it.
(16:48):
With that we knew some of the facts that happened,
we had to find in the police file. They went
to court knowing that these witnesses was identified my brother,
but they had determined that with the shooter. The prosecutors
new this, the detectives knew this. But this is the
problem with the system. Nobody cared about the truth. It
(17:08):
was about let's get the conviction at all costs. Okay.
So they knew you weren't involved from the jump, but
since you wouldn't please to lesser charges that you knew
and I think they knew were false, they threw you
into this kangaroo court situation, tied to Robert Leaf, who
was the actual culprit here, and then let the chips
(17:29):
fall where they may. That's how they put it, right.
So then you were represented by people who had no
business whatsoever really even being in this courtroom, right, I
mean definitely not as lawyers in a capital murder case,
and you're literally on trial for your lives. So what
was that like? I canna tell you what it was like.
(17:52):
Robert Leaf's attorney communicated with our attorneys, and they sumosely
had a joint defense, and right towards the time the
jury was going out to deliberation, I remember my attorney
looking back and saying, I don't think that his attorney
was with us, And I said, you think like he was.
When everything in its power to get his client the
best possible verdict he could get, he used the defense
(18:17):
two playing a picture so that we would wind up
with the most out of this and his client would,
if not walk free, get the lease. So the jury
goes out, they come back in four or five hours later.
Did you guys have hope that they were going to
actually see the light and that you were going to
be vindicated. I mean, it was just a blurd of
a moment. Of course, you hold out hope that the
(18:40):
system is going to do the right thing. I mean
we were raised like everybody else, watching police shows and
court shows, and from what they show on TV, it
always seemed like the system does the right thing, that
everything would turn out right, even though everything was looking wrong.
We believe the system to the point where I had
put an application to the police force, probably to being arrested,
(19:00):
like round the time when I got convicted. My wife
received the letter saying that I was accepted to go
to the next phase. Jesus Christ. I mean, it's like
you had this was like an alternate reality, the life
that should have been right. But okay, so the jury
(19:21):
comes back in and the verdict is guilty. I mean,
can you tell us about that moment. It's I mean,
it's obviously horrible for anyone who experiences it, but here
it's worse because one brother had to hear the other
brother being declared guilty, followed by being declared guilty himself.
(19:45):
I canna tell you, being oldest, I'll probably with the weakest.
When I heard the verdict, it was like I was
in a state of shock and my legs buckled, and
I remember I felt like I was going down to
the floor, and I remember hearing my grandmom's voice in
the back saying, stand up real loud, don't you fall
on that ground. Stand up that part. I ain't never
(20:07):
going to forgive. When they rented di verdict, I felt
like I was in the twilight zone, like this wasn't happening,
Like somebody's gonna come in and say, we're just kidding.
This is not how it's supposed to end for us.
I mean, we played by the rules. You know, we
were taught to work hard for whatever we get in life,
and that's what we did. We were taught to mind
(20:28):
the people in the neighborhood, the elders, and respect people.
You know that this don't happen to decent people. And
it was crazy because he immediately sent as a life
without the possibility for rule immediately. And you know, when
our family got a chance to speak on our behalfs
each one of our family members got up there, they
said that we didn't commit the crime. And the judge
(20:50):
got bad at some point, but I think he told
my sister that if you want to say that they
didn't commit this crime, then I don't need to get
up here. Haven't heard enough of that. So, I mean,
we were to describe beyond words can describe it. I
became angry, angry at the system, angry at myself for
allowing myself to even be in that situation around a
(21:11):
guy like this. And as time went on, my grandmother
came to see us. My grandmother my mother, and we
would just complain and complain about everything that was going on.
We was talking about how dark prison was you know
how cold it always seems to be in there. You
know how these folks around there they don't care about anything.
And I remember my grandmother said, you know, if it's cold,
(21:32):
they heat it up with love, and if it's dark,
then light it up with hope. And my brother and
I we looked at each other and said, Grandma, how
must have lost her money? We're looking at each other
like this lady for real? Like did she realize that
we in the prison for a crow? We didn't commit
and she telling us to do what? So the thing
is didn't make sense to us at that time. But
as the years would go by and we would begin
(21:55):
in the process like reading you know, self help books,
history books, it psych college you books, and we were
beginning to taking the various programs that was available towards
to educate ourselves. And we would go to the Law
Liberated at least five days a week and we were
just being in four hours reading this law, trying to
decipher this law, these cases and figure out ways how
(22:15):
to argue and plead because at some point we had
to take our own representation because the lawyers they were
assigned and that supposed to up to part and through
that process more we became educated. The anger got directed
in different directions, and that anger all of a sudden
started becoming more about helping men in prison that was
wrongfully convicted as well, men that got more time than
(22:38):
they should have. The revenge was gonna be is to
try to send as many guys home as we could
that would not come back to prison. And he talks
about the law library, and that law library, we had
a couple of tables of men who are all home now,
who have all been exonerated. All of us was at
those tables in nine were all sitting around the table.
(23:00):
And as the years were about, more and more men
came into the institution and they would sit at those tables,
and at the end of the day it was two
of us is left. At the time, nobody was going home.
Years later, everybody started trickling out. So eventually we would
get transferred to another prison, which was a treatment facility
more so get towards programming and things like that. And
(23:21):
so this prison, which was at c I Chester, was
kind of telling maybe for men like Lee and I.
And one of the first things that we do is
become a certified pair support specialists that means we work
with people who struggle with mental health issues, struggle with
all kinds of issues, addiction, struggle with anger issues, people
who just having a hard time adjusting the prison life.
(23:42):
And we went to work and they started seeing how
the assault on officers, rate on staff started to drop.
They started seeing the rate on prisoner on prisoner assaults
to drop right ups started to drop. Everything in the
prison started getting better. As a resulted to certified Pair
Support Specialist program and from there we began to branch
(24:06):
out into other areas. The warden, the superintendent, and the
deputy superintendent allowed Lee and I to be able to
facilitate many programs. You know. We facilitated programs like Thresholds,
which was a six step decisional making program. We taught
men how to make better decisions in their lives so
that they can also get through prison much better, but
(24:27):
not only get through prison, but go home to their
families and do better in society. We facilitated a health
and wellness program and through this program, we founded that
their responsibility in that particular institution. What we did was
we created a play, and the play would have areas
and that we would talk about recentivism, the impact of crime, dysfunction, trauma.
(24:52):
I think it took us like fifty five fifty seven
people to put this play on, and it was like
a full production. We put the roles out, flamented to
sign up, and they had to try out for the parts.
It was so widely successful that the administration said, well, hey, listen,
why you guys didn't do this bigger. So we went
on to do another three more plays within that institution,
(25:14):
and we went from fifty seven people being involved in
the year after that, a hundred of something people was
involved the following year. We put workshops on right after
the play, So not only did we do to play,
but we also put together thy workshops where we would
talk about these various things that were playing in our community.
(25:35):
And then those workshops we would invite people from the community,
organizations from the community that was involved in stopping violence
like ceasefire, and universities to come in, students and professors,
we would invite politicians to come in. So while you're
doing this amazing work, you're also, of course, you know,
(25:56):
simultaneously fighting to overturn your own wrong for convictions. But
so much of the information that you were discovering exculpatory
evidence right. Tons of it was time Bard, which means
it was held back, you know, or Bard from being
introduced because of procedural bullshit. I mean, it was a
lot of things that we came like, you know, the
(26:18):
police officer we found out about the internal fair investigation,
they said that was public information that we should have
known about it, even though we had no idea that
she was going through this, so how would we even
know to look for it? So that was time Bard.
We had a witness individual we ran across who Robert
Leaf had confessed to because he was also incarcerated. When
we met him, they said that wasn't usable because he's
(26:41):
a prisoner, so of course he would help you. They
used confessions against you, but you can't use one from
somebody to get out of prison. But he said clearly
what happened. Robert Leaf made a statement, and in his
statement he identified the person he was with as somebody
named Eddie and in the state, and he said clearly
(27:01):
when they said that this man died, and they believed
he did it at the time because they took his
jacket and they did paraffint tests on it, and they
did nitrate tests on his hands and all this kind
of stuff like this, and he said, if the man
died it was his time to die, then if I
got to do the time for it, then I'll do
the time for it. That's what he said in his statement.
And he said something in the statement referring to us
(27:23):
that took us not even with him, So everything that
we would get would be time barn. So we spent
twenty years pretty much fighting to overcome procedural hurdles. When
(27:58):
we was transferred to see our chester, a staff member
who was watching us at the time, he was a counselor,
and he started talking to us in general conversation and
then Monday he called us and then and he asked
what was we doing to get out of prison, And
we told him about our fight in the courts and
about our innocence and everything like this, and he said,
you know, I believe y'all, and I really believe everything
(28:19):
you've been telling me. And he is the one that
suggested to us that we filed for commutation, and at
the time we told him that we were actually innocent
and that wasn't the venue for commutation. And he spent
months trying to convince us to file for commutation and
just to give in and just to agree with him.
We said okay, And he introduced us to a professor
(28:40):
whose name is Kathleen Brown, who helped a lot of
other guys with commutation applications. And she came to see
us and we told her our story and she said, well,
won't you follow actual innocence application. She said it would
be the first one, but just right, and just tell
him what you told me. And that's what we did.
And the first time we went before the board and
wis we was denied and we were distraught. And around
(29:03):
that time, my mom was sick and she passed away
not too long after that, and she was so supported.
We didn't talk a lot about her, but she was
the person that was fueling our fight for all those years.
You know. My grandma's bird just kept bringing in our
ears that keep fighting. And we had developed the philosophy
of free men have freed themselves. So we went back
(29:23):
to the courts and then we filed for reconsideration and
that was denied. And then we came back and filed
for reconsideration again, and they granted the reconsideration based on
some other stuff. But right before that that, Lieutenant Governor
John Federman started taking up our calls. He looked at
the application, he's seen everything in it, and he just
started doing what it was the right thing to do.
(29:45):
He started fighting for us and the rest of his history.
I am a Lieutenant Governor John Federman of Pennsylvania and
I also chair of the Board of Pardons and Commutations
here and I became acquainted with Dennis and Lee's case
during one of their react like nations for commutation, and
when I read through it, I was blown away that
(30:05):
these men were ever in prison, let alone struggling to
be sent home. It's their background is astonishing. In Pennsylvania,
the Board of Pardons requires a unanimous vote of five members.
It has to be unanimous. If you don't get that threshold,
that person is going to die in prison. And that,
(30:28):
to me triggered campaign to make sure that Lee and
Dennis would be able to return to their families, because
this is a gross miscarriage of justice. Not only are
they profoundly deserving that they have always maintained their innocence.
Everyone believes that these men, including the warden and the
(30:49):
Department of Corrections, that they have no business being in prison,
and I'm so grateful that they're out on so many levels.
In fact, I actually hired them to work on our campaign.
They are far better a person and stronger person than
I could ever be. For what they went through to
have emerged with the kind of humanity that they just
radiate is nothing short of remarkable. So paint a picture
(31:15):
for me. It's February twelve, just two days before Valentine's Day.
Governor Wolf signs of papers and you're about to see
your wife again. I would tell you honestly, it was
extremely amazing and difficult at the same time. It was
like a miracle. It brought a sense of anxiety, but
(31:37):
also it was a great feeling of hope. Prison For
me it was darkness I was in and when I
walked out of seeing like everything was bright, everything was beautiful.
I could see everything, Dennis, how about for you? And
for me? It was bitter sweet at the same time
because my mother was no longer there. She never gave
(31:58):
up with fighting with us, and to come home and
for her not to be here, I mean, it was
just so painful, but it felt good. To be free
was just unbelievable. I felt like I can breathe again.
At the same time, I'm still like bewildered because some
may not even get this chance, and I want to
(32:18):
see others that are deserving of the same opportunity to
get it. We found our sense of purpose while we
were in prison, and that purpose was helping others, helping
others to know that prison, you may be here, but
this is not who you are, and this is not
who you have to be. And we did that by leading,
by showing people we cared about them, and through that
(32:40):
care and through that love, we begin to inspire men
to be more hopeful about and more optimistic about their future.
I mean, it's really just an amazing, amazing story of
perseverance and triumph over struggle and tragedy. And you know
the fact that you, guys, with the inspiration and the
support of your families and other people, were able to
(33:02):
take this unimaginable burden and rise above it and turn
it into something that enabled you to transform the lives
of so many other people, and that you're still doing
it today. It's nothing short. It's magical. Really, it's incredible.
And for the people who are listening right now, who
are inspired and who are going to want to take
(33:25):
action and make a difference because of what you guys
have been able to accomplish. Is there anything you guys
want to suggest? What I just would say my call
action would be to pay attention to what's going on
out in society and to support criminal justice before. Every
innocent man is not going to make it out of prison,
and it's a lot left behind, so we need some
sort of criminal justice before to make a way for
(33:47):
others to be able to come out. Now we've come
to the part of the show that's well, it's the
closing of the show, but it's become my favorite part
of the show. And of course it's called closing arguments.
And I want to say, first of all, I appreciate
you guys tremendously just for being here and and sharing
your story. You know, you guys are heroes to me
and so many other people, and I'm excited to get
(34:11):
this out there and get this story out in a
way in the way that it should have been told
from the very beginning. And so closing arguments what we
do here, how this works is I'm just gonna turn
my microphone off and leave both of yours on and
I'm going to just sit back in my chair and
listen to anything that you feel has been left unsaid.
(34:34):
So Dennis, how about you go first and then Lee
you'll be bad and clean up. So, folks, first of all,
thank you for tuning in, Thank you for listening to
my brother and I. We count our story. The thing
is this, at the end of the day, the people
control the system. The system don't control you. But we've
(34:55):
gotten to a place where we allowed the system to
control us. This is supposed to be our system, and
we're supposed to hold people accountable for the decisions they
make on our behalfs. So the only thing I would
say is please get involved and know with the prosecutors,
know what the district attorney, know what the police are
(35:16):
doing on your dime, because we pay the taxes that
pay their salaries, and if this is how they're doing business,
then we need to make sure we hold them accountable.
My brother not with free, but there are countless others
that are not sure. My grandma once told us that
life gives you what life gives you, and it's up
to you to make something out of it. So when
(35:39):
we went to prison, that wasn't the end of our story.
That was just another leg in our journey. The next
part of our journey, we hope, is the spectacular. We
want to do a lot of things out here in society.
We did a lot of positive working inside, and we'll
do a lot of positive work out here. And so
what I would say is make sure you pay attention
to what's going on, and when somebody say they've been
(36:01):
wrongfully convicted, try to give them the benefit of the doubt.
I think it would be just like us, two individuals
who just took a ride and wind up being arrested
and sent away and spent twenty eight years trying to
come back home. Thank you for listening to Wrongful Conviction.
(36:23):
I'd like to thank our production team Connor Hall, Justin Golden,
Jeff Claver, and Kevin Wardis. With research by Lila Robinson.
The music in this production was supplied by three time
OSCAR nominated composer Jay Ralph. Be sure to follow us
on Instagram at Wrongful Conviction, on Facebook at Wrongful Conviction Podcast,
and on Twitter at wrong Conviction, as well as at
(36:44):
Lava for Good. On all three platforms, you can also
follow me on both TikTok and Instagram at it's Jason
flop Ronvul Conviction is the production of Lava for Good
podcasts and association with Signal Company Number one
On May thirty one, Dennis Horton went to his brother
Lee's home for a Memorial Day weekend cook out. Later
in the day, they visited their father in North Philadelphia,
as well as their childhood friend Robert Leaf. Unbeknownst to
the Hortons, Robert Leaf had committed an armed robbery earlier
that day in which two women were injured and one
(00:23):
man was fatally shot. The Hortons pulled up to their
friend Robert Leaf on the street and made plans to
watch a basketball game back at Lee's. Robert asked the
brothers to meet him one block up, where he got
into their car with a gun. Police had been following
Robert and immediately pulled them over, where all three men
were arrested. The two injured women, who initially had said
(00:46):
that there were only two armed robbers, gave a shaky
idea of all three men, sending them to trial together.
Robert Leaf's attorney used confusion amongst the witnesses over the
identities of the three men to change the narrative from
Robert Leaf as the shooter to Dennis delivering a lighter
sentence to the actual culprit. While the Hortons were sentenced
(01:06):
to life without parole. Years later, a statement by Robert
Leaf admitting his role and excluding the Horton brothers was unearthed,
along with the fact that police had identified Robert Leef
as the shooter from the very start. However, with this
new evidence being ruled inadmissible on purely procedural grounds, it
took the tireless advocacy of Pennsylvania Lieutenant Governor John Fetterman
(01:29):
to win a commutation and release for the brothers after
nearly three long decades in prison. This is wrongful conviction.
(01:53):
Welcome back to wrongful conviction. My best advice to you
right now is fasten your seatbelt because this is going
to be a crazy ride that you're about to go on.
But before I introduced the two brothers who were wrongly
convicted of the same crime together and ended up serving
almost twenty seven years together in the same cell for
the crime didn't commit. I just want to say that
(02:17):
this is Philadelphia in the nineties. You've heard stories on
here before about Philadelphia and in the nineties, and it
was it was the time and place where a black
man had a better chance of getting justice in Philadelphia,
Mississippi than in Philadelphia Pennsylvania and this is another example
of that. So without further ado, let me introduced to you.
(02:38):
I'm so excited to have these guys on the show
today because there's such inspiring people. Lee and Dennis Horton,
the brothers Horton. Welcome to Wrong for Conviction. Alright, good afternoon.
How was everybody doing out there. I'm glad to be here.
Thank you for brightness on. So let's get right into it.
First of all, I want to say to both of
you guys that while I am obviously delighted to have
(02:59):
you on the show, I'm sorry that you're here because
of what you had to go through and it should
have never happened. So let's go back to the beginning.
I'm talking about how was childhood for you guys growing
up together while you moved to Philly and seventy seven, right,
but give us a quick look at what your childhood
was like. So when we was young, growing up, we
(03:20):
lived uneventful but a wonderful life. You know, my mom
and my father was married in the early sixties. Four
of us, four kids. We grew up in some of
the roughest places in the city. But our family, my
mom my grandmother. My father always instilled in us that
you had to work for what you wanted in life,
and so we started working at an early age. My
(03:42):
mom and father. Unfortunately they split up in nineteen seventy two.
My mom, she was trying to take care four kids
on on. We wind up moving to the Projects, which
was at the time East Falls Projects. I was around
twelve years old, My brother was seven at the time.
So the projects was a rough project. You know, you
had to prove the people up there that you was
willing to fight in order for you to be able
(04:03):
to stay, or they chased you out the projects. That's
how it was. And so I had got into a
fight with an individual and I wanted to fight. That
was a blessing to some degree, but it was also
a curse because now I was at I with a
lot of guys my age twelve and thirteen year olds
in the projects, and one day I wound up on
(04:24):
the wrong side of the projects when we was approached
by a group of individuals and it was maybe about
twenty something thirty guys, and they approached this and they
wanted me to fight a guy. And you know that
it was a bunch of guys that was about to
jump us. And then these other guys came out of
nowhere and came to our rescue. And it was only
a few of them, but they were like the neighborhood
(04:45):
tough guys to some degree. One of these guys who
would become a really good friend of mine was an
individual named Robert Leef, And so I fell in with
these guys and we became really good friends. He came
to my house, stayed at my house, slept in my house,
ate at my house. My mom said somebody, we became
his mom. And then we moved out of projects. By
(05:08):
that time, we kind of veered off a little bit,
although I would go see my friends who were still
living in the products and some living in North Philadelphia,
from town to town. And so now we move up
towards the time of the actual crime, and I'm talking
about Memorial Day weekend, May thirty first. So there was
(05:28):
an arm robbery at Poldo's Bar. Now, initial descriptions say
it was two men, but later it was changed to three.
One man with a two caliber semi automatic rifle and
another with a black pistol robbed the bar and its patrons.
Samuel A. Limo six ft three and over two pounds,
wrestled with the gunmen for the gun, but was overpowered
(05:52):
and was shot and killed. Lose ar Cella and Lose
Martinez were injured, but both were covered, and a witness
described chasing after the pleaing assailants who saw them in
a small blue car and supplied police with a partial
license plate number. And again, remember this is Philadelphia in
the nineties, So we'll get to the you know, myriad
(06:14):
problems with the state story, but first let's hear your story.
So it's Memorial Day weekend. You had four kids, right,
including a two week old baby, and at the time, Dennis,
you were just recently engaged to be married and had
also recently been badly injured at work and we're recovering, right,
(06:34):
So you were in absolutely no condition to be engaging
in hand to hand combat wrestling right with a very
large man, right strong man. So can you take us
through that day, that that day that this armed robbery
and murder, this whole tragedy happened. So Lee and his
wife invited me and fiance at the time over to
(06:56):
his house. So of course I went to Lee's house,
had a cook out, with him and his wife and
his kids. And later on that evening we decided we
was going to take a ride. You know, we've been
in the house all day. Stopped by my father's house
see him, and then Lee was gonna stop by just
see a few guys that he knew, and we headed
for North Philadelphia, when my father lived at the time,
(07:17):
and we swung by his house, but his light was
out so he would sleep. So Lee said, okay, let's
stop around Leaf's house. So, you know, we drove around
Leaf's house. He was standing out on the corner with
some other guys and Lee beat the horn and Leif
came over to the car and him and le talked
for a little bit. So rob Leaf was supposed to
come back to leave house. We're just gonna watch the
basketball game. So Leaf said, pull up a block and
(07:40):
I'll be there, and I got to just take care
of something real quick. And we pulled up to the
block and Leif came maybe about ten fifteen minutes later,
got in the car, and then we pulled off, and
about a couple of blocks later, we saw sirens and
we pulled over and the police jumped out of their
vans and cars were gunn drawn and told us to
(08:01):
get out of the car. And we got out of
the car and they handcuffed us and they put us
into the patty wagon and they took us to the
hospital when identification to take place, and all I remember
is that the van doors opened up, and next thing
you know, I've seen I think two ladies point to
rob relief and said, yeah, that's the guy right there.
And then they said, well, what about these other guys
(08:21):
and they said, yeah, them too, they were with them too,
And then they shut the doors back and then that
was it. And next thing you know, we were down
the roundhouse. Where did they charge you for a homicide?
So okay, right away we see problems emerged with what
the witnesses are describing. Right the alleged number of individuals
involved in the robbery went from went up fifty, right
(08:43):
from two to three. And when you're there at the
hospital and the police patty wagon right outside the hospital
with the witnesses saying yeah them too. Also, one of
the witnesses described a blue car and gave a partial
plate number, So did that match your own? Les? The
only witness who claimed to see the car said it
was a blue small car. It was supposed to a
(09:05):
Chevy Svett. He said the name of the car in
his statement. Now Lee's car is a Priest Classic, a
four door large car, two tones, two different colors. But
this witness, for some reason, we could never find him
and never bring him to trial. The person the police
put down giving out this partial plate number. When we
got the witness on the stand, she said, right then there,
(09:28):
I navi gave the police anything. I never saw a car,
So how could I have ever given him Their name
is on this paper though they said you gave it
to him. She said, it's impossible. I didn't see a car.
I didn't give him anything. And the thing about the
officers who did this first thing, you gotta give you
a context who these officers are. The first officer was
somebody who had strangled a guy to death early on,
and then later, right after he was arrested, he shot
(09:50):
a guy unarmed in a car. The second officer, she
was involved in internal fairs investigation about a large quantity
of drugs being found in the police station and them
suspecting it or connect did it to her. As you
start ap peeling the layers away, you start seeing that
it's more to this than just the police picking up
some guys and they were involved. So I have to ask,
(10:10):
do you think that they knew from the beginning that
you guys had nothing to do with us. That's a
really good question, and our heart of hearts, we believe
in the beginning maybe they wasn't sure, but as things
begin to unfold, they had to be clear that we
weren't involved, just didn't care. And the reason why we
know is because the prosecutor them came to us with
a deal. It was like five to ten years, and
(10:33):
we were like, we're innocent, We're not taking any deal.
Why should we take any deal to go to jail
for when we didn't do anything? And now it was
sort of like, okay, you won't take the deal, all right, Well,
the chip's gonna fall what they made, right, And it's
very uncommon that in the crime as serious as this
one armed robbery where someone was killed, right, that they're
gonna offer someone two guys in this case five years. Right.
(10:57):
You know, you don't have to be a legal scholar
to figure this one out. So now we get to
the trial and all three of you, lead Dennis and
Robert Leaf are tried together, and they have three witnesses.
Now I'm gonna put witnesses and quotation marks here. Three
of them came to trial and they eventually identified Dennis
as the shooter. But did they have any physical evidence
(11:19):
at all, any fingerprints, any security footage. There was no
security footage. What they had was they actually had the gun,
they said with the murdered weapon. They never actually could
trace it to any bullets they got out of the body.
They didn't match. But this is the gun that Leaf
had on him. He left the gun in the car.
The cops retrieved it and when they checked it, it it
(11:40):
had fingerprints. But we've been always trying to get these
fingerprints checked because they could never trace him to any
of us, and they took all of our fingerprints. They
didn't fit any of us. Now, the way that my
brother got to become the shooter is a clear case
of mistaken identification. Initially in the case, they all identified
Robert Leaf at shoot her. And this is where the
(12:01):
cold case turns. If this don't never happen, we probably
would have walked. The one witness would identify different person
every hearing. When she identified Robert Leave, Robert Leaves attorney,
he would read in noose testimony of her identifying my
brother and to it got to the point where when
the judge asked her, who are you saying did this?
She said, I'm gonna say it's the one right there,
(12:23):
and she was identified me And we had already told
the court that they was identified as based where we
were sitting there, so we switched seats. So when we
switched seats, she was identified based on who the witness
before her told her to identify, and then she thought
that the person was sitting in that seat, but it
wound up being me Lee Horton. When she heard my name,
she said, hold it, what's the name? And they just said,
(12:46):
why do you want to know the name? Because Dennis
did it. It's Dennis, He said Dennis, and then she said, yeah,
I heard him. They was calling Dennis. And then after
that we were in the case and they knew that
this woman just had made this up out of the sky,
just right then and there. Everybody refused to pull back,
and they could have corrected that right then and there
(13:06):
and said, well, hold up the honor, she's wrong. Mr
Leaf was wearing a red jacket. We know that for sure.
That's a fact. They identified him as a shooter. That's
a fact. They didn't say any of that. They just
let the witnesses go on and order or with these
wrong identifications. And this woman had identified every last one
of us has a shoot at one given time. This
(13:37):
episode is underwritten by A i G, a leading global
insurance company, and by Accenture, a global professional services company
with leading capabilities in digital, cloud and security. Working to
reform the criminal justice system is a key pillar of
the A i G pro Bono Program, which provides free
legal services and other support to many nonprofit organizations and
(13:57):
individuals most in need as part of Accenture's commitment to
racial and civil justice. Accenture's Legal Access Program provides pro
bono legal services in partnership with more than forty organizations,
bringing meaningful change to people and communities worldwide. Three weeks
(14:21):
prior to our arrest, I had injured my leg on
my job in such a fashion that I needed a
c L repair. The holiday was on a Monday. I
was supposed to go talk about the day that week
I was going to have the surgery done. I just
came off the crushes. So when we were arrested, it
was impossible for me to be able to wrestle with
this guy. I think they said he was like six
(14:43):
four or six three, something like that. I was supposed
that overpowered him, wrestled all way to the ground with
this guy, overpowered the gun out of his hand, and
then after I was supposed that shot him. I was
supposed to that ran away as fast as I could.
There was no way I could run on that leg
at all. And my medical records and all that would
have shown that would approve that, and this would have
(15:05):
disqualified me from even remotely possibly being the shooter. And
the thing is they knew this, but nobody cared. So
you both had different lawyers. So two people who were
supposed to be working on your behalf, what were they
doing with all of this information? At trial, he made
(15:25):
the mistake of a friend of my mom's told her
that their son could be a good lawyer force and
we accepted that, but he wasn't a criminal defense attorney.
He had not tried one criminal case, and he wound
up being a person putting our defense together. My lawyer
had been retired, and he was kind of older, and
(15:45):
he was a little out of step. We were just
not prepared for a capital case. Now, the difference is
Robert Leaf was prepared. He knew the system and he
knew how to work the system. We was naive. We
thought that we were innocent and it was gonna be
shown and it never was. Like literally, if you put
this in the movie, you say, well, one guy's represented
by a friend of a friend who never tried a
(16:05):
criminal case before this capital murder we're talking about, and
the other guys tried by a guy that they literally
pulled out a retirement and we ailed them into the courtroom.
You guys didn't even know that you're doomed. You're thinking, hey,
we go in and tell the truth. You were the
only guys in the courtroom telling the truth. That's the
only problem, right, and that doesn't work. And that's the
thing that you know, even now gets to me a
(16:26):
little bit because I spent twenty seven years in prison
when this could have been nipping but early on and
I didn't have to never go to prison. Back to
twenty seven years. You know, sometimes in your mind you think,
well you should have took there, but what would we
just said, we didn't commit the crown, We didn't know
anything about it. Took us twenty eight years to learn
enough about this case to be able to talk about it.
(16:48):
With that we knew some of the facts that happened,
we had to find in the police file. They went
to court knowing that these witnesses was identified my brother,
but they had determined that with the shooter. The prosecutors
new this, the detectives knew this. But this is the
problem with the system. Nobody cared about the truth. It
(17:08):
was about let's get the conviction at all costs. Okay.
So they knew you weren't involved from the jump, but
since you wouldn't please to lesser charges that you knew
and I think they knew were false, they threw you
into this kangaroo court situation, tied to Robert Leaf, who
was the actual culprit here, and then let the chips
(17:29):
fall where they may. That's how they put it, right.
So then you were represented by people who had no
business whatsoever really even being in this courtroom, right, I
mean definitely not as lawyers in a capital murder case,
and you're literally on trial for your lives. So what
was that like? I canna tell you what it was like.
(17:52):
Robert Leaf's attorney communicated with our attorneys, and they sumosely
had a joint defense, and right towards the time the
jury was going out to deliberation, I remember my attorney
looking back and saying, I don't think that his attorney
was with us, And I said, you think like he was.
When everything in its power to get his client the
best possible verdict he could get, he used the defense
(18:17):
two playing a picture so that we would wind up
with the most out of this and his client would,
if not walk free, get the lease. So the jury
goes out, they come back in four or five hours later.
Did you guys have hope that they were going to
actually see the light and that you were going to
be vindicated. I mean, it was just a blurd of
a moment. Of course, you hold out hope that the
(18:40):
system is going to do the right thing. I mean
we were raised like everybody else, watching police shows and
court shows, and from what they show on TV, it
always seemed like the system does the right thing, that
everything would turn out right, even though everything was looking wrong.
We believe the system to the point where I had
put an application to the police force, probably to being arrested,
(19:00):
like round the time when I got convicted. My wife
received the letter saying that I was accepted to go
to the next phase. Jesus Christ. I mean, it's like
you had this was like an alternate reality, the life
that should have been right. But okay, so the jury
(19:21):
comes back in and the verdict is guilty. I mean,
can you tell us about that moment. It's I mean,
it's obviously horrible for anyone who experiences it, but here
it's worse because one brother had to hear the other
brother being declared guilty, followed by being declared guilty himself.
(19:45):
I canna tell you, being oldest, I'll probably with the weakest.
When I heard the verdict, it was like I was
in a state of shock and my legs buckled, and
I remember I felt like I was going down to
the floor, and I remember hearing my grandmom's voice in
the back saying, stand up real loud, don't you fall
on that ground. Stand up that part. I ain't never
(20:07):
going to forgive. When they rented di verdict, I felt
like I was in the twilight zone, like this wasn't happening,
Like somebody's gonna come in and say, we're just kidding.
This is not how it's supposed to end for us.
I mean, we played by the rules. You know, we
were taught to work hard for whatever we get in life,
and that's what we did. We were taught to mind
(20:28):
the people in the neighborhood, the elders, and respect people.
You know that this don't happen to decent people. And
it was crazy because he immediately sent as a life
without the possibility for rule immediately. And you know, when
our family got a chance to speak on our behalfs
each one of our family members got up there, they
said that we didn't commit the crime. And the judge
(20:50):
got bad at some point, but I think he told
my sister that if you want to say that they
didn't commit this crime, then I don't need to get
up here. Haven't heard enough of that. So, I mean,
we were to describe beyond words can describe it. I
became angry, angry at the system, angry at myself for
allowing myself to even be in that situation around a
(21:11):
guy like this. And as time went on, my grandmother
came to see us. My grandmother my mother, and we
would just complain and complain about everything that was going on.
We was talking about how dark prison was you know
how cold it always seems to be in there. You
know how these folks around there they don't care about anything.
And I remember my grandmother said, you know, if it's cold,
(21:32):
they heat it up with love, and if it's dark,
then light it up with hope. And my brother and
I we looked at each other and said, Grandma, how
must have lost her money? We're looking at each other
like this lady for real? Like did she realize that
we in the prison for a crow? We didn't commit
and she telling us to do what? So the thing
is didn't make sense to us at that time. But
as the years would go by and we would begin
(21:55):
in the process like reading you know, self help books,
history books, it psych college you books, and we were
beginning to taking the various programs that was available towards
to educate ourselves. And we would go to the Law
Liberated at least five days a week and we were
just being in four hours reading this law, trying to
decipher this law, these cases and figure out ways how
(22:15):
to argue and plead because at some point we had
to take our own representation because the lawyers they were
assigned and that supposed to up to part and through
that process more we became educated. The anger got directed
in different directions, and that anger all of a sudden
started becoming more about helping men in prison that was
wrongfully convicted as well, men that got more time than
(22:38):
they should have. The revenge was gonna be is to
try to send as many guys home as we could
that would not come back to prison. And he talks
about the law library, and that law library, we had
a couple of tables of men who are all home now,
who have all been exonerated. All of us was at
those tables in nine were all sitting around the table.
(23:00):
And as the years were about, more and more men
came into the institution and they would sit at those tables,
and at the end of the day it was two
of us is left. At the time, nobody was going home.
Years later, everybody started trickling out. So eventually we would
get transferred to another prison, which was a treatment facility
more so get towards programming and things like that. And
(23:21):
so this prison, which was at c I Chester, was
kind of telling maybe for men like Lee and I.
And one of the first things that we do is
become a certified pair support specialists that means we work
with people who struggle with mental health issues, struggle with
all kinds of issues, addiction, struggle with anger issues, people
who just having a hard time adjusting the prison life.
(23:42):
And we went to work and they started seeing how
the assault on officers, rate on staff started to drop.
They started seeing the rate on prisoner on prisoner assaults
to drop right ups started to drop. Everything in the
prison started getting better. As a resulted to certified Pair
Support Specialist program and from there we began to branch
(24:06):
out into other areas. The warden, the superintendent, and the
deputy superintendent allowed Lee and I to be able to
facilitate many programs. You know. We facilitated programs like Thresholds,
which was a six step decisional making program. We taught
men how to make better decisions in their lives so
that they can also get through prison much better, but
(24:27):
not only get through prison, but go home to their
families and do better in society. We facilitated a health
and wellness program and through this program, we founded that
their responsibility in that particular institution. What we did was
we created a play, and the play would have areas
and that we would talk about recentivism, the impact of crime, dysfunction, trauma.
(24:52):
I think it took us like fifty five fifty seven
people to put this play on, and it was like
a full production. We put the roles out, flamented to
sign up, and they had to try out for the parts.
It was so widely successful that the administration said, well, hey, listen,
why you guys didn't do this bigger. So we went
on to do another three more plays within that institution,
(25:14):
and we went from fifty seven people being involved in
the year after that, a hundred of something people was
involved the following year. We put workshops on right after
the play, So not only did we do to play,
but we also put together thy workshops where we would
talk about these various things that were playing in our community.
(25:35):
And then those workshops we would invite people from the community,
organizations from the community that was involved in stopping violence
like ceasefire, and universities to come in, students and professors,
we would invite politicians to come in. So while you're
doing this amazing work, you're also, of course, you know,
(25:56):
simultaneously fighting to overturn your own wrong for convictions. But
so much of the information that you were discovering exculpatory
evidence right. Tons of it was time Bard, which means
it was held back, you know, or Bard from being
introduced because of procedural bullshit. I mean, it was a
lot of things that we came like, you know, the
(26:18):
police officer we found out about the internal fair investigation,
they said that was public information that we should have
known about it, even though we had no idea that
she was going through this, so how would we even
know to look for it? So that was time Bard.
We had a witness individual we ran across who Robert
Leaf had confessed to because he was also incarcerated. When
we met him, they said that wasn't usable because he's
(26:41):
a prisoner, so of course he would help you. They
used confessions against you, but you can't use one from
somebody to get out of prison. But he said clearly
what happened. Robert Leaf made a statement, and in his
statement he identified the person he was with as somebody
named Eddie and in the state, and he said clearly
(27:01):
when they said that this man died, and they believed
he did it at the time because they took his
jacket and they did paraffint tests on it, and they
did nitrate tests on his hands and all this kind
of stuff like this, and he said, if the man
died it was his time to die, then if I
got to do the time for it, then I'll do
the time for it. That's what he said in his statement.
And he said something in the statement referring to us
(27:23):
that took us not even with him, So everything that
we would get would be time barn. So we spent
twenty years pretty much fighting to overcome procedural hurdles. When
(27:58):
we was transferred to see our chester, a staff member
who was watching us at the time, he was a counselor,
and he started talking to us in general conversation and
then Monday he called us and then and he asked
what was we doing to get out of prison, And
we told him about our fight in the courts and
about our innocence and everything like this, and he said,
you know, I believe y'all, and I really believe everything
(28:19):
you've been telling me. And he is the one that
suggested to us that we filed for commutation, and at
the time we told him that we were actually innocent
and that wasn't the venue for commutation. And he spent
months trying to convince us to file for commutation and
just to give in and just to agree with him.
We said okay, And he introduced us to a professor
(28:40):
whose name is Kathleen Brown, who helped a lot of
other guys with commutation applications. And she came to see
us and we told her our story and she said, well,
won't you follow actual innocence application. She said it would
be the first one, but just right, and just tell
him what you told me. And that's what we did.
And the first time we went before the board and
wis we was denied and we were distraught. And around
(29:03):
that time, my mom was sick and she passed away
not too long after that, and she was so supported.
We didn't talk a lot about her, but she was
the person that was fueling our fight for all those years.
You know. My grandma's bird just kept bringing in our
ears that keep fighting. And we had developed the philosophy
of free men have freed themselves. So we went back
(29:23):
to the courts and then we filed for reconsideration and
that was denied. And then we came back and filed
for reconsideration again, and they granted the reconsideration based on
some other stuff. But right before that that, Lieutenant Governor
John Federman started taking up our calls. He looked at
the application, he's seen everything in it, and he just
started doing what it was the right thing to do.
(29:45):
He started fighting for us and the rest of his history.
I am a Lieutenant Governor John Federman of Pennsylvania and
I also chair of the Board of Pardons and Commutations
here and I became acquainted with Dennis and Lee's case
during one of their react like nations for commutation, and
when I read through it, I was blown away that
(30:05):
these men were ever in prison, let alone struggling to
be sent home. It's their background is astonishing. In Pennsylvania,
the Board of Pardons requires a unanimous vote of five members.
It has to be unanimous. If you don't get that threshold,
that person is going to die in prison. And that,
(30:28):
to me triggered campaign to make sure that Lee and
Dennis would be able to return to their families, because
this is a gross miscarriage of justice. Not only are
they profoundly deserving that they have always maintained their innocence.
Everyone believes that these men, including the warden and the
(30:49):
Department of Corrections, that they have no business being in prison,
and I'm so grateful that they're out on so many levels.
In fact, I actually hired them to work on our campaign.
They are far better a person and stronger person than
I could ever be. For what they went through to
have emerged with the kind of humanity that they just
radiate is nothing short of remarkable. So paint a picture
(31:15):
for me. It's February twelve, just two days before Valentine's Day.
Governor Wolf signs of papers and you're about to see
your wife again. I would tell you honestly, it was
extremely amazing and difficult at the same time. It was
like a miracle. It brought a sense of anxiety, but
(31:37):
also it was a great feeling of hope. Prison For
me it was darkness I was in and when I
walked out of seeing like everything was bright, everything was beautiful.
I could see everything, Dennis, how about for you? And
for me? It was bitter sweet at the same time
because my mother was no longer there. She never gave
(31:58):
up with fighting with us, and to come home and
for her not to be here, I mean, it was
just so painful, but it felt good. To be free
was just unbelievable. I felt like I can breathe again.
At the same time, I'm still like bewildered because some
may not even get this chance, and I want to
(32:18):
see others that are deserving of the same opportunity to
get it. We found our sense of purpose while we
were in prison, and that purpose was helping others, helping
others to know that prison, you may be here, but
this is not who you are, and this is not
who you have to be. And we did that by leading,
by showing people we cared about them, and through that
(32:40):
care and through that love, we begin to inspire men
to be more hopeful about and more optimistic about their future.
I mean, it's really just an amazing, amazing story of
perseverance and triumph over struggle and tragedy. And you know
the fact that you, guys, with the inspiration and the
support of your families and other people, were able to
(33:02):
take this unimaginable burden and rise above it and turn
it into something that enabled you to transform the lives
of so many other people, and that you're still doing
it today. It's nothing short. It's magical. Really, it's incredible.
And for the people who are listening right now, who
are inspired and who are going to want to take
(33:25):
action and make a difference because of what you guys
have been able to accomplish. Is there anything you guys
want to suggest? What I just would say my call
action would be to pay attention to what's going on
out in society and to support criminal justice before. Every
innocent man is not going to make it out of prison,
and it's a lot left behind, so we need some
sort of criminal justice before to make a way for
(33:47):
others to be able to come out. Now we've come
to the part of the show that's well, it's the
closing of the show, but it's become my favorite part
of the show. And of course it's called closing arguments.
And I want to say, first of all, I appreciate
you guys tremendously just for being here and and sharing
your story. You know, you guys are heroes to me
and so many other people, and I'm excited to get
(34:11):
this out there and get this story out in a
way in the way that it should have been told
from the very beginning. And so closing arguments what we
do here, how this works is I'm just gonna turn
my microphone off and leave both of yours on and
I'm going to just sit back in my chair and
listen to anything that you feel has been left unsaid.
(34:34):
So Dennis, how about you go first and then Lee
you'll be bad and clean up. So, folks, first of all,
thank you for tuning in, Thank you for listening to
my brother and I. We count our story. The thing
is this, at the end of the day, the people
control the system. The system don't control you. But we've
(34:55):
gotten to a place where we allowed the system to
control us. This is supposed to be our system, and
we're supposed to hold people accountable for the decisions they
make on our behalfs. So the only thing I would
say is please get involved and know with the prosecutors,
know what the district attorney, know what the police are
(35:16):
doing on your dime, because we pay the taxes that
pay their salaries, and if this is how they're doing business,
then we need to make sure we hold them accountable.
My brother not with free, but there are countless others
that are not sure. My grandma once told us that
life gives you what life gives you, and it's up
to you to make something out of it. So when
(35:39):
we went to prison, that wasn't the end of our story.
That was just another leg in our journey. The next
part of our journey, we hope, is the spectacular. We
want to do a lot of things out here in society.
We did a lot of positive working inside, and we'll
do a lot of positive work out here. And so
what I would say is make sure you pay attention
to what's going on, and when somebody say they've been
(36:01):
wrongfully convicted, try to give them the benefit of the doubt.
I think it would be just like us, two individuals
who just took a ride and wind up being arrested
and sent away and spent twenty eight years trying to
come back home. Thank you for listening to Wrongful Conviction.
(36:23):
I'd like to thank our production team Connor Hall, Justin Golden,
Jeff Claver, and Kevin Wardis. With research by Lila Robinson.
The music in this production was supplied by three time
OSCAR nominated composer Jay Ralph. Be sure to follow us
on Instagram at Wrongful Conviction, on Facebook at Wrongful Conviction Podcast,
and on Twitter at wrong Conviction, as well as at
(36:44):
Lava for Good. On all three platforms, you can also
follow me on both TikTok and Instagram at it's Jason
flop Ronvul Conviction is the production of Lava for Good
podcasts and association with Signal Company Number one
Hosts And Creators
Lauren Bright Pacheco
Maggie Freleng
Jason Flom
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