November 24, 2022 • 38 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 (00:04):
When we first recorded our interview with Dennis and Lee Horton,
they had just gotten out of prison on a sentence
commutation less than a year prior, and that happened in
large part because of the incredible efforts of John Fetterman.
After losing the Democratic Senate primary, John set his sights
on winning Lieutenant governorship, which put him on the Pardons
(00:26):
and Parole Board. He then campaigned his fellow board members
for the Hortons climency and despite a denial in John
never gave up on the Hortons. By the time we
recorded this episode, Dennis and Lee were already hard at
work campaigning for John on his center race. It was
truly surreal to see Dennis and Lee reacting to the
(00:48):
win on social media. What a turn of faith from
wrongfully convicted to having a true friend in the United
States Senate. We're rereleasing this episode to congratulate our great
friends Dennis, Lee and John. On May thirty one, Dennis
(01:10):
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 man was fatally shot. The
Hortons pulled up to their friend Robert Leaf on the
(01:32):
street and made plans to watch a basketball game back
at Leeds. 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 that there were only two armed robbers,
gave a shaky idea of all three men, sending them
(01:55):
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 Leef as the shooter to Dennis,
delivering a lighter sentence to the actual culprit, while the
Hortons were sentenced to life without parole. Years later, a
statement by Robert Leaf admitting his role and excluding the
(02:16):
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 to win a commutation and release for the brothers
(02:37):
after nearly three long decades in prison. This is wrongful conviction.
(02:57):
Welcome back to wrongful conviction. My best advice tea right
now is fasten your seatbelt because this is gonna 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 this
(03:21):
is Philadelphia in the nineties. You've heard stories on here
before about Philadelphia 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 introduce to you. I'm so
(03:42):
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. Good afternoon. How's everybody doing
out there. I'm glad to be here. Thank you for
in brighting us on. So let's get right into it.
First of all, I want to say the both of
you guys that while I am obviously delighted to have
(04:03):
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
(04:24):
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 mom
(04:46):
and father, unfortunately they split up in nineteen seventy two.
My mom, she was trying to take care four kids
on home. 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
(05:07):
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
accursed because now I was at eyes with a lot
of guys my age twelve and thirteen year olds in
the projects. And one day I wound up on the
(05:28):
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
(05:48):
of them, but they were like the neighborhood tough guys
to some degree. One of these guys who would become
a really good friend of mine was an individual named
Robert Leaf. And so I fell in with these guys
and we became good friends. He came to my house,
stayed at my house, slept in my house, ate at
my house. My mom to somebody, we became his mom.
And then we moved out of projects. By that time,
(06:12):
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 an arm
(06:33):
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
(06:56):
and was shot and killed. Lose our Cella and Lose
Martinez were injured, but both recovered, 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 problems with
(07:19):
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,
so you were in absolutely no condition to be engaging
(07:42):
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 had it's over to his house.
So of course I went to Lee's house, had a
(08:03):
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 to see
a few guys that he knew, and we headed for
North Philadelphia, when my father lived at the time, and
we swung by his house, but his light was out
(08:23):
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 Robert Leaf was supposed to come back
to Leave's house. We're just gonna watch the basketball game.
So Leif said, pull up a block and I'll be there,
(08:45):
and I gotta 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 bands and cars with
guns drawn and told us to get out of the car.
(09:05):
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 and they said, yeah, them too, they
(09:26):
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 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,
(09:47):
right 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 are and gave a
partial plate number. So did that match your own vehicles?
The only witness who claimed to see the car said
it was a blue small car. It was supposed been
(10:09):
a Chevy Svette. 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 is giving out this partial plate number.
When we got the witness on the stand, she said,
(10:31):
right then there, 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 got to 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
(10:53):
was arrested, he shot a guy unarmed in a car.
The second officer, she was involved in internal fears investigation
about a law as quantity of drugs being found in
the police station and them suspecting it or connected 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.
(11:13):
So I have to ask, 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 prosecuted
them came to us with a deal. It was like
(11:35):
five to ten years, and 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 for
what they meant, 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
(11:59):
guys and this case five years. Right. 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, Lee, 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.
(12:20):
But did they have any physical evidence 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 Leif had on him.
(12:41):
He left the gun in the car. The cops retrieved
it and when they checked it, it it 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 identific cation.
Initially in the case, they all identified Robert Leave at
(13:04):
the shooter. And this is where the cold case turns.
If this don't ever happen, we probably would have walked
The one witness would identify different person every hearing when
she identified Robert Leave. Robert Leave's attorney he would read
in those testimony of her identifying my brother and to
it got to the point where when the judge asked her, well,
who are you saying did this? She said, I'm gonna
(13:25):
say it's the one right there, 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,
(13:47):
what's the name? And they just said, why do you
want to know the name? Because, uh, 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,
(14:08):
and they could have corrected that right then and there
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 as a shoot at one given time. This
(14:41):
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 men, nonprofit organizations, and
(15:01):
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
(15:26):
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
(15:47):
four six three something like that. I was supposed that
overpowered him. Wrestled allway to the ground with this guy
overpowered the gun out of his hand. And then after
I was supposed that I I shot him, I was supposed
to that ran away at as I could. There was
no way I could run on that lade at all,
and my medical records and all that would have shown
that would approve that, and this would have disqualified me
(16:10):
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 the mistake
of a friend of my mom's told her that their
(16:34):
son could be a good lawyer force that. 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 he was a
little out of step. We were just not prepared for
a capital case. Now, the difference is Robert Leath was prepared.
(16:56):
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 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
(17:17):
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 little bit because I spent
twenty seven years in prison when this could have been
nipping it early on and I didn't have to never
(17:37):
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 crime. 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. With that we
knew some of the facts that happened. We had to
find in the police file. They went to court knowing
(17:59):
that these witnesses was identifying my brother, but they had
determined that Leaf was the shooter. The prosecutors new this,
the detectives new this. But this is the problem with
the system. Nobody cared about the truth. It was about
let's get the conviction at all costs. Okay. So they
knew you weren't involved from the jump, but since you
(18:19):
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 Leif who was the
actual culprit here, and then let the chips fall where
they may. That's how they put it, right. So then
you were represented by people who had no business whatsoever
(18:42):
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. Robert Leaf's
attorney communicated with our attorneys and they smothy at a
joint defense, and right towards the time the jury was
(19:04):
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 the one
everything in its power to get his client the best
possible verdict he could get. He used the defense two
paying a picture so that we would wind up with
(19:25):
the most out of this and his client would, if
not walk free, get the least. 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 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 system is
(19:45):
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, proud to being arrested.
Like round the time when I got convicted, my wife
(20:08):
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
comes back in and the verdict is guilty. I mean,
(20:30):
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.
I canna tell you. Being oldest, I'll probably with the weakest.
(20:53):
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 on
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 going to forgive. When they rented di verdict, I
(21:14):
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 I was 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 the people in the neighborhood, the
elders respect people. You know that this don't happen to
(21:37):
decent people. And it was crazy because he immediately says
as a life without the possibility for rule immediately, And
you know, when our family got a chance to speak
on our behalves, each one of our family members got
up there. They said that we didn't commit the crime.
And the judge got bad at some point, but I
think he told my sister that if you want to
(21:58):
say that they didn't commit this crime, then I don't
need to get up here. Hadn't hurt enough of that,
So I mean, we were described 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 die like this. And as time went on, my
(22:18):
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 here they don't care
about anything. And I remember my grandmother said, you know,
if it's cold, then heat it up. With love and
(22:38):
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 mind? He was looking at
each other like if this lady for real? Like did
she realize that we in the prison for a crown?
We didn't commit she telling us to do what so
the thing is didn't makes sense to us at that time.
But as the years would go by and we would
(22:59):
begetting the process us like reading you know, self help books,
history books, psychology books, and we were beginning to taking
the various programs that was available towards to educate ourselves.
And we would go to the Law Liberate 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 to argue and
(23:20):
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 they should have.
(23:44):
The revenge was gonna be 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 we've all been exonary.
All of us was at those tables in nineteen We're
all sitting around a table. And as the years were about,
(24:05):
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 as 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 so this prison, which
(24:26):
was a 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. And we went to work
(24:49):
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 drop, write ups started to drop.
Everything in the prison started getting better as a result
of the Certified Pair Support Specialist program. And from there
we began to branch out into other areas. The warden,
(25:12):
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 not only get through prison, but
go home to their families and do better in society.
(25:35):
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 recidivism,
the impact of crime, dysfunction, trauma. I think it took
(25:57):
us like fifty five fifty seven people to at this
play on and it was like a full production. We
put the roles out for men 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,
(26:19):
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 the 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.
(26:39):
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, simultaneously fighting
(27:01):
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 police officer
(27:23):
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 a prisoner, so
(27:46):
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 Ay. And in
the statement he said, clearly when they said that this
man died and they believed he did it at the
(28:08):
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 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 that put us not even
(28:28):
with him. So everything that we would get would be
time barner. So we spent twenty years pretty much fighting
to overcome procedural hurdles. When we was transferred to sci Chester,
(29:05):
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 be 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 you've been telling me. And he is
(29:25):
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, just to agree with him.
We said okay, and he introduced us to a professor
whose name is Kathleen Brown, who helped a lot of
(29:46):
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 of
Parts and we was denied and we were distraught. And
(30:07):
around 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
(30:28):
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.
(30:49):
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 Commutation
here and I became acquainted with Dennis and Lee's case
during one of their reapplications for commutation, and when I
read through it, I was blown away that these men
(31:10):
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, to
(31:32):
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 Department
(31:54):
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
(32:19):
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
(32:41):
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 a bitter sweet at the same
time because my mother was no longer there. She never
(33:01):
gave up. Were 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.
It 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
(33:23):
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
(33:44):
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 it, you guys, with the inspiration and the
support of your families and other people, were able to
(34:06):
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
(34:29):
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
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
(34:52):
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
(35:15):
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.
(35:38):
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
(35:59):
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
(36:20):
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
(36:43):
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 spectacular. We want
to do a lot of things out here in society.
We did a lot of positive working inside and we
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
(37:05):
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.
(37:27):
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
(37:48):
Lava for Good. On all three platforms. You can also
follow me on both TikTok and Instagram at It's Jason
flop ravul Conviction is the production of Lava for Good
Podcasts and Association, a Signal Company number one
When we first recorded our interview with Dennis and Lee Horton,
they had just gotten out of prison on a sentence
commutation less than a year prior, and that happened in
large part because of the incredible efforts of John Fetterman.
After losing the Democratic Senate primary, John set his sights
on winning Lieutenant governorship, which put him on the Pardons
(00:26):
and Parole Board. He then campaigned his fellow board members
for the Hortons climency and despite a denial in John
never gave up on the Hortons. By the time we
recorded this episode, Dennis and Lee were already hard at
work campaigning for John on his center race. It was
truly surreal to see Dennis and Lee reacting to the
(00:48):
win on social media. What a turn of faith from
wrongfully convicted to having a true friend in the United
States Senate. We're rereleasing this episode to congratulate our great
friends Dennis, Lee and John. On May thirty one, Dennis
(01:10):
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 man was fatally shot. The
Hortons pulled up to their friend Robert Leaf on the
(01:32):
street and made plans to watch a basketball game back
at Leeds. 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 that there were only two armed robbers,
gave a shaky idea of all three men, sending them
(01:55):
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 Leef as the shooter to Dennis,
delivering a lighter sentence to the actual culprit, while the
Hortons were sentenced to life without parole. Years later, a
statement by Robert Leaf admitting his role and excluding the
(02:16):
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 to win a commutation and release for the brothers
(02:37):
after nearly three long decades in prison. This is wrongful conviction.
(02:57):
Welcome back to wrongful conviction. My best advice tea right
now is fasten your seatbelt because this is gonna 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 this
(03:21):
is Philadelphia in the nineties. You've heard stories on here
before about Philadelphia 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 introduce to you. I'm so
(03:42):
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. Good afternoon. How's everybody doing
out there. I'm glad to be here. Thank you for
in brighting us on. So let's get right into it.
First of all, I want to say the both of
you guys that while I am obviously delighted to have
(04:03):
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
(04:24):
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 mom
(04:46):
and father, unfortunately they split up in nineteen seventy two.
My mom, she was trying to take care four kids
on home. 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
(05:07):
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
accursed because now I was at eyes with a lot
of guys my age twelve and thirteen year olds in
the projects. And one day I wound up on the
(05:28):
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
(05:48):
of them, but they were like the neighborhood tough guys
to some degree. One of these guys who would become
a really good friend of mine was an individual named
Robert Leaf. And so I fell in with these guys
and we became good friends. He came to my house,
stayed at my house, slept in my house, ate at
my house. My mom to somebody, we became his mom.
And then we moved out of projects. By that time,
(06:12):
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 an arm
(06:33):
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
(06:56):
and was shot and killed. Lose our Cella and Lose
Martinez were injured, but both recovered, 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 problems with
(07:19):
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,
so you were in absolutely no condition to be engaging
(07:42):
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 had it's over to his house.
So of course I went to Lee's house, had a
(08:03):
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 to see
a few guys that he knew, and we headed for
North Philadelphia, when my father lived at the time, and
we swung by his house, but his light was out
(08:23):
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 Robert Leaf was supposed to come back
to Leave's house. We're just gonna watch the basketball game.
So Leif said, pull up a block and I'll be there,
(08:45):
and I gotta 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 bands and cars with
guns drawn and told us to get out of the car.
(09:05):
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 and they said, yeah, them too, they
(09:26):
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 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,
(09:47):
right 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 are and gave a
partial plate number. So did that match your own vehicles?
The only witness who claimed to see the car said
it was a blue small car. It was supposed been
(10:09):
a Chevy Svette. 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 is giving out this partial plate number.
When we got the witness on the stand, she said,
(10:31):
right then there, 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 got to 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
(10:53):
was arrested, he shot a guy unarmed in a car.
The second officer, she was involved in internal fears investigation
about a law as quantity of drugs being found in
the police station and them suspecting it or connected 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.
(11:13):
So I have to ask, 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 prosecuted
them came to us with a deal. It was like
(11:35):
five to ten years, and 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 for
what they meant, 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
(11:59):
guys and this case five years. Right. 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, Lee, 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.
(12:20):
But did they have any physical evidence 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 Leif had on him.
(12:41):
He left the gun in the car. The cops retrieved
it and when they checked it, it it 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 identific cation.
Initially in the case, they all identified Robert Leave at
(13:04):
the shooter. And this is where the cold case turns.
If this don't ever happen, we probably would have walked
The one witness would identify different person every hearing when
she identified Robert Leave. Robert Leave's attorney he would read
in those testimony of her identifying my brother and to
it got to the point where when the judge asked her, well,
who are you saying did this? She said, I'm gonna
(13:25):
say it's the one right there, 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,
(13:47):
what's the name? And they just said, why do you
want to know the name? Because, uh, 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,
(14:08):
and they could have corrected that right then and there
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 as a shoot at one given time. This
(14:41):
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 men, nonprofit organizations, and
(15:01):
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
(15:26):
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
(15:47):
four six three something like that. I was supposed that
overpowered him. Wrestled allway to the ground with this guy
overpowered the gun out of his hand. And then after
I was supposed that I I shot him, I was supposed
to that ran away at as I could. There was
no way I could run on that lade at all,
and my medical records and all that would have shown
that would approve that, and this would have disqualified me
(16:10):
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 the mistake
of a friend of my mom's told her that their
(16:34):
son could be a good lawyer force that. 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 he was a
little out of step. We were just not prepared for
a capital case. Now, the difference is Robert Leath was prepared.
(16:56):
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 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
(17:17):
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 little bit because I spent
twenty seven years in prison when this could have been
nipping it early on and I didn't have to never
(17:37):
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 crime. 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. With that we
knew some of the facts that happened. We had to
find in the police file. They went to court knowing
(17:59):
that these witnesses was identifying my brother, but they had
determined that Leaf was the shooter. The prosecutors new this,
the detectives new this. But this is the problem with
the system. Nobody cared about the truth. It was about
let's get the conviction at all costs. Okay. So they
knew you weren't involved from the jump, but since you
(18:19):
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 Leif who was the
actual culprit here, and then let the chips fall where
they may. That's how they put it, right. So then
you were represented by people who had no business whatsoever
(18:42):
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. Robert Leaf's
attorney communicated with our attorneys and they smothy at a
joint defense, and right towards the time the jury was
(19:04):
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 the one
everything in its power to get his client the best
possible verdict he could get. He used the defense two
paying a picture so that we would wind up with
(19:25):
the most out of this and his client would, if
not walk free, get the least. 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 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 system is
(19:45):
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, proud to being arrested.
Like round the time when I got convicted, my wife
(20:08):
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
comes back in and the verdict is guilty. I mean,
(20:30):
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.
I canna tell you. Being oldest, I'll probably with the weakest.
(20:53):
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 on
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 going to forgive. When they rented di verdict, I
(21:14):
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 I was 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 the people in the neighborhood, the
elders respect people. You know that this don't happen to
(21:37):
decent people. And it was crazy because he immediately says
as a life without the possibility for rule immediately, And
you know, when our family got a chance to speak
on our behalves, each one of our family members got
up there. They said that we didn't commit the crime.
And the judge got bad at some point, but I
think he told my sister that if you want to
(21:58):
say that they didn't commit this crime, then I don't
need to get up here. Hadn't hurt enough of that,
So I mean, we were described 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 die like this. And as time went on, my
(22:18):
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 here they don't care
about anything. And I remember my grandmother said, you know,
if it's cold, then heat it up. With love and
(22:38):
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 mind? He was looking at
each other like if this lady for real? Like did
she realize that we in the prison for a crown?
We didn't commit she telling us to do what so
the thing is didn't makes sense to us at that time.
But as the years would go by and we would
(22:59):
begetting the process us like reading you know, self help books,
history books, psychology books, and we were beginning to taking
the various programs that was available towards to educate ourselves.
And we would go to the Law Liberate 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 to argue and
(23:20):
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 they should have.
(23:44):
The revenge was gonna be 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 we've all been exonary.
All of us was at those tables in nineteen We're
all sitting around a table. And as the years were about,
(24:05):
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 as 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 so this prison, which
(24:26):
was a 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. And we went to work
(24:49):
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 drop, write ups started to drop.
Everything in the prison started getting better as a result
of the Certified Pair Support Specialist program. And from there
we began to branch out into other areas. The warden,
(25:12):
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 not only get through prison, but
go home to their families and do better in society.
(25:35):
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 recidivism,
the impact of crime, dysfunction, trauma. I think it took
(25:57):
us like fifty five fifty seven people to at this
play on and it was like a full production. We
put the roles out for men 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,
(26:19):
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 the 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.
(26:39):
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, simultaneously fighting
(27:01):
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 police officer
(27:23):
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 a prisoner, so
(27:46):
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 Ay. And in
the statement he said, clearly when they said that this
man died and they believed he did it at the
(28:08):
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 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 that put us not even
(28:28):
with him. So everything that we would get would be
time barner. So we spent twenty years pretty much fighting
to overcome procedural hurdles. When we was transferred to sci Chester,
(29:05):
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 be 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 you've been telling me. And he is
(29:25):
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, just to agree with him.
We said okay, and he introduced us to a professor
whose name is Kathleen Brown, who helped a lot of
(29:46):
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 of
Parts and we was denied and we were distraught. And
(30:07):
around 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
(30:28):
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.
(30:49):
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 Commutation
here and I became acquainted with Dennis and Lee's case
during one of their reapplications for commutation, and when I
read through it, I was blown away that these men
(31:10):
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, to
(31:32):
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 Department
(31:54):
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
(32:19):
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
(32:41):
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 a bitter sweet at the same
time because my mother was no longer there. She never
(33:01):
gave up. Were 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.
It 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
(33:23):
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
(33:44):
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 it, you guys, with the inspiration and the
support of your families and other people, were able to
(34:06):
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
(34:29):
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
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
(34:52):
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
(35:15):
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.
(35:38):
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
(35:59):
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
(36:20):
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
(36:43):
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 spectacular. We want
to do a lot of things out here in society.
We did a lot of positive working inside and we
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
(37:05):
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.
(37:27):
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
(37:48):
Lava for Good. On all three platforms. You can also
follow me on both TikTok and Instagram at It's Jason
flop ravul Conviction is the production of Lava for Good
Podcasts and Association, a Signal Company number one
Hosts And Creators
Lauren Bright Pacheco
Maggie Freleng
Jason Flom
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