March 21, 2024 • 37 mins
In the early morning hours of March 24,1984, a fire erupted on the first floor of an apartment building in Chicago, IL. The fire destroyed the building and killed six people, including young children. Four years later, James Kluppelberg was taken into police custody after he had reported an unrelated arson case. Police began intensely interrogating James about the apartment building fire until he falsely confessed to the crime. Despite the fact that the only evidence against James was the testimony of a single incentivized witness, he was sentenced to life in prison for the fire.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:02):
On March twenty fourth, nineteen eighty four, five children and
their mother, twenty eight year old Elva Lupercio, were killed
in an apartment building fire. It was originally ruled accidental,
but a fire captain who was unseen unofficially may have
had some reservations about that finding. Then, in November nineteen
eighty seven, a man named Dwayne Glasgow, who lived nearby
(00:24):
the nineteen eighty four fire, was arrested for burglary and
offered some information that back in nineteen eighty four, looking
out an attic window, he had seen his old roommate
James Kluppelberg walking back and forth to the building before
the fire and later admitting to setting it. And then,
in December nineteen eighty seven, while coincidentally reporting an unrelated arson,
(00:44):
James Kloppelberg was questioned about the nineteen eighty four fire
and allegedly gave an oral confession in January nineteen eighty eight.
Even though allegations of coercion shed doubt on the statement,
testimony from Glasgow and the fire captain were enough to
send James away for six natural life sentences plus fourteen years.
But this is wrongful conviction Welcome back to wrongful Conviction.
(01:17):
This is an arson case. I hate arson cases. I
think it's one of the worst of all the junk sciences.
It's also a torture case because the man we're going
to be speaking to is just another victim of the
torture crew in the Chicago PD under Lieutenant John Burge.
And before I even introduce James Kloppelberg, I'm going to
(01:40):
first reintroduce somebody who our listeners will probably recognize, Carl Leonard.
Carl is an attorney at the Exoneration Project in Illinois.
So Carl, welcome back to Wrongful Conviction.
Speaker 2 (01:51):
Thank you. It's great to be here.
Speaker 1 (01:53):
So James, I'm sorry. I think, like the city of Chicago, Illinois,
the country, everybody owes you in a post and more.
But I'm so glad you're here and I appreciate you
being here with us today.
Speaker 3 (02:04):
My pleasure and thank you for having me. It's a
true honor, James.
Speaker 1 (02:07):
Before we get into the awful occurrence that happened in
Chicago that led to the deaths for which you were
years later wrongfully convicted, your life wasn't easy from the beginning.
Is that fair to say?
Speaker 3 (02:20):
Yes, that would be a fair representation. I had a
low income childhood, so to speak, with three sisters and
a brother and my mother. We moved around a lot.
I think at one point, probably about once a year
for like a decade ish or so. Growing up. I
remember going to a lot of different schools, almost a
different one every year, and things were tough, you know,
(02:40):
as far as finances and everything. But for the most part,
my mother always made sure there was food on the
table and we were loved and taken care of.
Speaker 1 (02:49):
By the time James was eighteen years old, he had
been married, and during a rough patch, he was temporarily
staying with his friends Don Graymont and Dwayne Glasgow, who
lived about four doors down from where this far I occurred.
A few weeks later, the couple had their own troubles,
along with two kids and another one on the way.
Speaker 3 (03:05):
On February sixteenth of eighty four, she gave birth to
her third child and Dwayne took her to the hospital
and I was staying over so I watched the other
two children. I got a phone call from her that evening.
He had not returned yet, and she asked if I
was still looking for a place to stay. I said yeah.
(03:26):
She said, well you can move into the bedroom up
in the attic. You want to help me out with
the bills, fine, whatever. I said, Well, what's he going
to say about this? She said, I don't care. That's
the catch. I want you to pack his stuff. I
want him out. Apparently, while she was giving birth to
his third child, he was in the waiting room with
his girlfriend and a gym bag with some beer, kicking back,
(03:47):
having a good time. The nurses told her what was
going on, obviously, and so when he came home that evening,
his stuff was packed and I told him there's the door.
She basically dumped Dwayne because of things that weren't working
out between the two of them. Me and down ended
up starting a relationship.
Speaker 1 (04:08):
Somehow, this didn't cramp your friendship or theirs?
Speaker 3 (04:12):
Right, Well, that was the thing. A couple days before
the fire, he had came back, knocking at the door,
asked to talk to her. She came into the kitchen.
She's like, he's got nowhere to go. Can he stay upstairs?
I'm like, this is your house because by that time,
obviously I'd moved downstairs. I said, this is your house
if that's what you want. Fine, and so he was
actually staying there in the upstairs where I was originally staying,
(04:36):
and I was gone all day that day the fire occurred.
I was at my ex wife's house taking care of
things over there. Came home that night. They were him,
his girlfriend and Dawn. They were fairly intoxicated, and several
hours into the night, you know, me and Don had
had some arguments, and I entered and left a few
times to cool off, and came back in and we
(04:58):
were sitting around the kitchen table talking and next thing
we know, we see this fire. We got the kids
out of the house, put them in my car. The
fire went on for several hours.
Speaker 1 (05:09):
Carl, if you could take us back and explain what
happened on that awful, awful night. This was back in
nineteen eighty four, March twenty fourth. I mean, whether whether
it was arson or not, we know that James had
nothing to do with it. But this was a tragedy.
Speaker 2 (05:23):
It was a tragedy. It's an incredibly sad case. It
happened early in the morning. There was an apartment building
on the south side of Chicago. The first floor was vacant,
and a fire started on that first floor and there
was a family that lived upstairs. Seven people in the family,
a husband and wife, five kids, and the fire unfortunately
(05:47):
killed the mom and the children.
Speaker 1 (05:49):
Twenty eight year old Elva Lupercio and her five children Santos, Sonya, Cristo, Bell, Gadira,
and Annabel, all of whom were living on the second floor,
died and her husband managed to escape. His name was Santos,
but he suffered a frash, furt skull, and severe burns.
Speaker 2 (06:06):
So just a terrible, terrible tragedy. At that time in Chicago,
fires were investigated by the Chicago Police Department. It had
a bomb and Arson unit which was in charge of
investigating suspicious fires, and they did an investigation and concluded
that the fire was most likely an accident.
Speaker 1 (06:26):
Testing for the presence of accelerants came up negative, closing
the case as a tragic accident not a crime. Until
November nineteen eighty seven when Dwayne Glasgow was arrested for burglary,
theft and violating probation, and he brought up to nineteen
eighty four fire. According to Glasgow, he had watched through
an attic window as James went back and forth to
the building right before the fire, and that James later
(06:49):
admitted to setting the blaze. Meanwhile, back in nineteen eighty seven,
now twenty two years old, James was a plumber and
electrician while moonlighting as a security guard. He and his
girlfriend Bonnie had plans to get married when in December
nineteen eighty seven, coincidentally, a month after Glasgow's statement, James
reported an actual arson. While working at his security job.
Speaker 3 (07:12):
One of the apartment complexes that I was assigned to,
an automobile caught fire. I saw somebody running from the
parking lot that night and a couple police detectives came
to see me. I was at a job site and
they said they needed me to look at mugshots. I said, sure,
no problem, but it'll have to wait till I'm done.
I'm in the middle of one of the worst winners
Chicago had had and like forever, and I was thawing
(07:33):
frozen pipes at this building. They informed me I was
going with them one way or another. They took me
to a leventh and State informed me that there was
a witness that claims to have saw me start the
automobile fires, but that he couldn't get down there for
several hours because he was at work. If I wanted
to go home, now, all I had to do was
take a polygraph test proved that I didn't do it,
(07:56):
and they'd let me go. I said, sure, no problem,
let's go. They take me to another floor inside a
dimly lit room. It soundproofed. A gentleman says he needs
me to sign a waiver, and I was barely able
to make out that it said that I was about
to be questioned for a fire concerning six deaths in
(08:16):
nineteen eighty four. I told the examiner that this is
the wrong form, that this is not what I was
here for. I said, I'm not signing that, and he
stepped out of the room. The detective that brought me
down burst into the room, threw me up against the wall,
put a pair of handcuffs on me, drug me upstairs,
and him and his partner then proceeded to beat me
(08:37):
for next several hours.
Speaker 1 (08:39):
So you were one of the countless victims suspects, as
well as some witnesses who were brutally tortured inside these
Chicago ped torture chambers disguised as interrogations.
Speaker 3 (08:53):
Yes, they laid me face down on the ground while
one of them pulled my cuffs my arms towards my shoulders.
The other one proceeded to kidney shot me or continued
to beat me in my lower back area until I
started hemorrhaging blood through my urin. I was a urinated myself.
There was a lot of blood in the urine at
(09:14):
the time, and I uttered the words I did it,
and they stopped the beating.
Speaker 1 (09:18):
I mean, you probably would have confessed a Kennedy assassination, truthfully.
Speaker 2 (09:22):
Yes.
Speaker 3 (09:23):
At one point they wanted me to sign a confession
and also removed his weapon from his holster and said
I was going to sign it or else, And I said,
at that point he might as well just go ahead
and pull the trigger, because signing it would be the
same thing.
Speaker 1 (09:51):
Wrongful. Conviction has always given voice to innocent people in prison.
Now we're expanding that voice to you. Call us at
eight three three T seven for six sixty six and
leave us a message. Tell us how these powerful, often
tragic stories make you feel outraged, inspired, motivated. We want
(10:11):
to know. We may even include your story in a
future episode. Call us A three three two O seven
for six six six.
Speaker 2 (10:24):
The way it works is after the police have gotten
the soon to be defendant to the place where he
or she is saying what they want them to say.
They'll oftentimes rehearse it, and then they bring in the
Felony Review States attorney who take a statement from them,
and at the end they ask the person to sign,
and then that's often the last time the soon to
(10:47):
be defendant ever sees the outside of a jail cell.
Speaker 3 (10:49):
The state's attorney wanted to take my statement. I started
to give him a statement basically saying I did it.
I told him that I needed to talk to my
then girlfriend. He allowed me to make a phone call
to her. She made a three way phone call to
my then attorney. I told him what was going on.
(11:10):
He told me to put the state's attorney on the phone.
They had a brief conversation. State's attorney slammed the phone down,
went out to the hall, told the officers to process me,
not to speak to me, not to touch me, and
to get me out of there. A couple days after
the beating on my intake, I was so badly beaten
that the Cook County officers wouldn't turn a blind eye
(11:31):
to it, and they actually documented all of my injuries.
Speaker 1 (11:35):
The state's attorney. I mean, he had to know that
you had been tortured. There was no question, right, Carl,
What do you think he was thinking at that point
in time.
Speaker 2 (11:43):
I you know, I have no idea, but I think
that the mechanism they used in Chicago in Cook County,
I think is very unique, where we bring in an
assistant state's attorney a prosecutor to take the actual statement,
and I think the entire felony of view system is
designed to sort of inoculate against allegations of torture and
(12:05):
abuse by the time you get into court. Because there
were so many people claiming a lot of them truthfully
that their statement had been beaten out of them. You
put a lawyer in the room who has a law
license on the line, who can then come to court
and say, look, I'm just a lawyer. I didn't see
anything wrong, and I don't know what was going through
this particular states attorney's mind, but it may have been
(12:27):
there's no way I can go to court and say
that nothing bad happened here, so I need to protect myself.
Speaker 1 (12:33):
Nevertheless, Cook County sought the indictment in January nineteen eighty eight.
Speaker 3 (12:38):
The officer that presented the case for the state at
the grand jury outright committed perjury. One of the jurors
had asked him why I had done this at the
completion of the state's presentation, and he replied that it
was my pattern that when I got mad at my girlfriend,
I went out and set fires. Another juror then asked,
so he had been caught for this before, and he
(13:00):
replied yes. The only problem is I had never so
much as been questioned for an Argiston fire in my
entire life, let alone caught or convicted.
Speaker 1 (13:09):
So on January twenty seventh, nineteen eighty eight, James, you
had dieted on charges of arson and six counts of.
Speaker 3 (13:16):
Murder, actually eighteen counts of murder. Eighteen counts they charged
me three times on each victim, along with seven counts
of attempted murder. My entire indictment, I believe was around
thirty one counts.
Speaker 1 (13:29):
But the well documented evidence of torture shed doubt on
James's statement to officers and the state's attorney.
Speaker 3 (13:35):
When my lawyer put on a motion to suppress my
statement due to the abuse, and the judge granted it
because of the abuse was so blatant the state's attorney
stood up and said, your honor, are you also suppressing
what he told the state's attorney that night. The state's
(13:56):
attorney didn't beat him, and I just sat there and
I was just stunned into amazement that he swore up
onside and down the other I wasn't beaten, And now
he was basically conceding I was beaten, but that what
I told the state's attorneys should be allowed in because
he didn't beat me.
Speaker 1 (14:12):
Pretty freaking devious.
Speaker 3 (14:14):
Well, you have to keep in mind the judge that
suppressed my confession got removed from my case after suppressing
my confession because he went against the system.
Speaker 1 (14:23):
Wow.
Speaker 3 (14:23):
Within two weeks of that, Judge Loretta Hall Morgan was
assigned my case. And it didn't register really at the time,
but the judge who was going to be sitting at
this bench trial already knew about my confession because it
was part of the record that it was suppressed.
Speaker 1 (14:39):
And this doomed bench trial finally began in July nineteen
eighty nine.
Speaker 3 (14:43):
The state put on six witnesses, two people that they
call life or death witnesses that said that we survived
the fire and the family was alive when we went
to sleep woke up to smoking fire. They didn't implicate
me at all. They put on a medical examiner who
said that in his opinion, the cause of death was
smoking fire carbon monoxide poisoning, and that the manner of
(15:05):
debt was homicide. When asked why he originally said there
were accidents, he said that's because that's what he was
told by the police, and that four years later the
police told him that they wanted to charge somebody and
he had to change his death certificates to homicide. They
then brought a gentleman in from the Chicago Fire Department
who was there that night as an observer who was
training a class for a future fire investigating team that
(15:28):
was going to take over fire investigations in Chicago, called Ofi.
He testified that due to burn patterns, he was positive
that this was an arson fire, but yet he told
nobody for four years, and the reason that the state
used him as a witness, in my opinion, is because
he filed no reports, so there was nothing to impeach
him with. Whereas the original officers who investigated the fire
(15:51):
that said it was an accident, they would had to
have went back on their original report, and then they
put on don Graymont, who was my girlfriend at the time,
who told the truth that I had nothing to do
with it. They then proceeded to impeach her with a
grand jury statement that she made that after making it,
she went to the Office of Maternal Affairs and said
(16:11):
I was just forced to commit perjury in front of
the grand jury. And then they brought Dwayne glasgow In,
who gave the testimony that he gave in exchange for
going home. The next day, my attorney presented no defense whatsoever.
At the end of the state's case, he stood up.
He asked for a directed verdict of not guilty. The
judge said motion denied. He said, oh, well, the defense rests,
(16:32):
and he sat down, and the judge said she was
going to take a ten minute break to have closing arguments.
She took a ten minute break, came out and found
me guilty. My lawyer just sat there.
Speaker 1 (16:41):
No closing arguments.
Speaker 3 (16:42):
There were no closing arguments.
Speaker 1 (16:44):
Carl, help is he talking about no closing argument?
Speaker 2 (16:48):
It doesn't make any sense. So many things about James
trial don't make any sense.
Speaker 3 (16:53):
Right. Well, what happened was, like I said, she took
the break we came back and I was expecting closing arguments,
and she sat down and started reading her findings. And
I'm looking at my attorney, like what's going on here?
And he's like, don't worry about It'll be okay. And
she said, as to counts like twenty five through thirty
one or whatever it was, or twenty four through thirty one,
(17:15):
those are the attempt counts, there's going to be a
finding of not guilty because there's no evidence to indicate
that the defendant intended to harm those individuals. As to
the remaining counts in the indictment, there's a finding of guilty.
I was, for want of a better word, I was
just in shock. I mean, I couldn't believe that she
had found me guilty. I was just dumbfounded at the
(17:39):
fact that if a person was guilty of this crime,
how could they have been not guilty of attempting to
kill the people that jumped out the windows and lived,
but guilty of killing the people that perished. It wasn't
like this was a crime with a gun or a knife.
Fire is indiscriminate. If I had set the fire, I
would have intended harm on everybody. Apartment building not just
(18:02):
certain people. Her verdict held no sense to me whatsoever.
And then she so nonchalantly after finding me guilty, she
literally said the words, gentlemen, what's your pleasure? And it
was at that point that the state's attorney stood up
and said, your honor, at this time, we'll be asking
for the death penalty.
Speaker 1 (18:20):
Gentlemen, what's your pleasure? That's what she said, what's your pleasure?
As if this is some sort of sick game. I
don't even have the right words for this. So they
asked for the death penalty.
Speaker 3 (18:31):
The next step, you have to have a hearing. When
it took me a couple of days to process what
had happened, and somebody else who was incarcerated awaiting trial
at the time, told me that I needed to get
down to the jail's library, the law library, and speak
to somebody down there because what was happening wasn't right.
And that's when I found out a lot of things,
(18:53):
you know. I found out that I was actually able
to demand a jury for the death penalty phase because
I didn't want her to make that decision.
Speaker 1 (19:00):
In case the story isn't crazy enough, there's a crazy
footnote to this whole thing, which is that on October seventh,
nineteen eighty nine, while you were waiting sentencing, you had
walked out of the Cook County jail after bond records
were altered to lower your bond from no bond to
twenty five thousand dollars, and your mom posted twenty five
hundred in cash, and then the jail officials discovered that
(19:23):
a jail employee had been bribed with three thousand dollars
to alter the record, and then you were arrested days
later and brought back. What in the world again, I've
never heard anything like this before.
Speaker 3 (19:34):
What you're speaking of hold some truth to it. I
don't recall as to what my ex wife actually did
for the jail official that altered the record, but nobody
was listening to me. I was going to be put
to death for something I did not do, and so yes,
I bonded out. I was hoping that while out I
(19:56):
could probably get enough notoriety to the case to where
people might look into it and see the errors that
were committed. Technically, I was arrested, but I actually called
them and told them where I was. They were making
threats against my family that if I did not come back.
They were going to take it out on them, so
(20:19):
I called the state's attorney and told him where I was.
It was not my proudest moment in all of this,
but again, when somebody's talking about taking your life, and
after what I had already been through with the beatings
and everything and what I had seen happened to this point,
I didn't know what else to do.
Speaker 1 (20:36):
James was back in Cook County Jail in November nineteen
eighty nine, where he began all kinds of proceedings trying
to save his own life, including demanding a new attorney
and a new judge.
Speaker 3 (20:47):
When it came time for my sentencing, I had requested
to remove my attorney because I did not feel that
I was being represented in a manner to save my life.
The judge denied the request, so I went to the
Attorney Disciplinary Commission and said that I'd given my attorney
a large amount of money to hire investigators and things
(21:07):
like that, and he did nothing. He never came to
see me, he never spoke to me, at which point
my attorney notified the judge that he was under investigation
by the commission and that she had to let him
out of the case. She wasn't happy about it. At
that point, I also moved to remove her as a
judge because she was not giving me what I felt
(21:28):
was a fair shake, so to speak. One of the
things that I had alleged as to why my judge
needed to be removed was because she had made a
statement after the first day of trial. She had said
something like, I start my vacation the day after tomorrow.
This case is going to be done tomorrow regardless, or
something like that. And I was just trying to build
(21:49):
some type of a record for appeal of what was
actually happening to me. And she finally, after that motion
was denied, she finally appointed public defender. And that's when
they found the evidence that Duayne committed perjury by saying
he said he saw the back door of the building,
that he saw me enter and leave the building. They
obtained evidence that photographically shows it was impossible that he
(22:13):
could not have seen the building. They tracked down people
who used to live in the buildings from years ago
that before that had said, now, there's no way you
could see from point A to point B. And even
faced with all of this, the judge refused to correct
her mistake and emotion for a new trial.
Speaker 1 (22:30):
And here it was March twenty second, nineteen ninety, when
somehow James had escaped to death penalty.
Speaker 3 (22:36):
Yeah. The reason she rejected the whole premise of the
death penalty was she wanted me out of her courtroom.
Here we were almost eight months from my conviction and
she still had been unable to sentence me because of
court filings and things that I was trying to do
to save my life. And she literally asked me what
was it going to take to get me out of
her courtroom? And I said I did not want to
(22:58):
fight this from death row. She said, well, the only
other sentence I can give you is natural life. The
sad reality of it is, had I known then the
things that I know now, I probably would have accepted
the death penalty due to the fact that I think
I would have been out sooner.
Speaker 1 (23:15):
Well, you would have been entitled to an attorney for
post conviction, which you're only entitled too if you are
sentenced to death. The judge rejected the death penalis and
sentence you to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
Speaker 3 (23:29):
Six natural life sentences and three fourteen year sentences. I
went to Joliet. I was there maybe four weeks at most,
(23:49):
and then I was sent to Minard, where I spent
the next ten years of my life. They called it
pit for a reason because it was literally built into
the side of of what was an old rock quarry.
Finally winning a transfer out of that hell hole, I
then did another four years, almost in jolliev before they
(24:12):
closed it down. I was then transferred to State Blle.
I did almost ten years there and was transferred back
to Minard for my last eleven months, where I met
Carl for the first time.
Speaker 1 (24:24):
Over the course of two long decades, James's direct appeals
and his first post conviction petition were denied, and then
when he was about to file a federal habeas the
Exoneration Project got involved, filing a second post conviction petition
in two thousand and nine, including expert testimony from a
doctor Ogel disputing the fire captain's trial testimony that was
based on an ancient and now debunked Arson investigation method.
(24:48):
For clarity, listen to our coverage of Arson investigation on
wrongful conviction junk Science. We're going to have it linked
in the episode description. The Exoneration Project was also able
to bolster their expert with previously hidden exculpatory evidence.
Speaker 2 (25:03):
We haven't talked about that there is an alternate suspect
that there's somebody else who was setting fires in that
neighborhood at that time. Doing some research into media coverage
of fires in the neighborhood at the time, law students
Ashley Schumacher and Cadence Mertz uncovered a small neighborhood newspaper
that had run an article with the headline something like,
(25:23):
Who's starting these fires?
Speaker 1 (25:24):
Are amazing?
Speaker 2 (25:25):
The night before, if I remember correctly, that the fire
at issue here, there was another fire that had happened,
which the police. The same police investigated and determined that
the fire was set by a woman who lived in
that building, Isabel Ramos, because she was mad at her
landlord about something, so she decided to burn the place down.
(25:47):
And in the course of questioning her about that fire,
they said, hey, what about that fire down the street?
Did you start that one? And she said something. I
don't know what her exact words were, but basically, I
was really I set a lot of fires? How can
I remember?
Speaker 3 (26:03):
They pulled the court file and her original confession from
her trial was still sitting there in the court.
Speaker 2 (26:10):
File, and none of this is disclosed to the defense
before James trial, and we filed this petition. There was
also a habeas petition which was in front of Judge
Saint Eve here in Chicago, and she was not able
to advance it because we had the pending state court matter.
But there was an opinion entered by her agreeing to
stay the habeas petition because she felt that there was
(26:31):
potential merit to it. So in the state court we
proceeded towards an evidentiary hearing to present the new evidence.
Speaker 3 (26:40):
In one of the little side note. After my evidentiary
hearing was granted on April fifteenth of twenty ten, the
state said they needed time to obtain an expert of
their own to review the fire science evidence that Carl
and Gale and everybody had put together with doctor Ogle.
(27:03):
It wasn't until a few years after I was released
that a document accidentally got turned over to my legal
team that said that the state's attorney had, for a
full year in their possession a report that basically said
what doctor Ogle had said in his report for me,
(27:23):
and they were steadily going to court telling the judge
they needed more time because they couldn't find an expert
to look at the evidence. So for an entire year
they held me knowing that what was said by doctor
Ogle was true, that this wasn't an arson fire.
Speaker 2 (27:39):
And right before we were supposed to have this hearing,
the state determined that they would no longer oppose postconviction relief.
Speaker 3 (27:47):
They chose to act two weeks after Don Graymont died,
she was in hospice. They went to her room. My
ex wife was there that day that they showed up
and tried to get her to give a deathbed statement
that I was actually guilty of this. Within two weeks
of her passing is when my court date was that.
(28:10):
Carl and Terror went into court that day and the
state just said, nah, you can let him go now.
But that's how unwilling they are to admit when they
make a mistake.
Speaker 1 (28:19):
They went to her in the hospice.
Speaker 3 (28:23):
Yes, I don't let to say.
Speaker 1 (28:25):
Anymore, but I do know that finally, Circuit Court Judge
Ricky Jones vacated all your convictions and the charges were dismissed.
And on May thirty first of twenty twelve, after a
quarter century in prison, you left prison.
Speaker 3 (28:42):
I met Carl for the first time on the day
he came to pick me up, and it was one
of the most surreal parts of my entire life because
we walked out and Carl had told me how it
was raining the whole way down there, and we walked
out of prison and it stopped. It was the weirdest thing.
Speaker 2 (29:00):
I will never forget that day. James was the first
person I was with when he walked out of prison
after being exonerated, and it was really exciting to be
part of that with James.
Speaker 3 (29:09):
Because of him handsome, extremely dedicated people. I have a
new lease on life.
Speaker 1 (29:15):
And as I understand it, not that this dampened your
mood as the rain was lifting, but you walked out
with fourteen dollars and seventeen cents right.
Speaker 3 (29:26):
Well, it's all I had on my prison account at
the time, and because I was no longer a convicted felon,
I was not entitled to all the benefits that he
convicted felon would be given upon their release. Had Carl
not come pick me up, I had no way to
get back to Chicago because I wasn't even going to
be afforded in a bus ticket. The opportunity for housing assistance.
(29:49):
I mean, it was the exoneration project that put me
up in a hotel. All the things that he convicted
felon receives. I was afforded none of it.
Speaker 1 (29:57):
Yeah, they literally kicked you out the door. But the
good news is that in May twenty and thirteen you
filed the federal wrongful conviction lawsuit against the City of
Chicago and the Chicago PD, and even in the case
as egregious as yours, it took what almost five years
to get compensated, right, Yeah, it.
Speaker 3 (30:14):
Was almost six years. But what was filed first was
a stifficate of innocence request, because in Illinois you have
to have one of those before you can move forward
really doing anything, which meant not only did I have
to prove that I wasn't guilty, but Carl and his
team had to prove that I was actually innocent. So
they obtained that for me. On August fifth of twenty
(30:37):
and thirteen.
Speaker 2 (30:38):
After I contested hearing, the very same state that agreed
that James was innocent enough to come home fought us
on the certificate of innocence.
Speaker 1 (30:47):
Finally, you know, some daylight in this now almost thirty
years by the time you were compensated. This long, long,
dark chapter. So that is a happy ending. How's your
life now? Understand when you came home, you were living
nearby your son and daughter in law.
Speaker 3 (31:03):
It took me almost a year to find my first job.
One of the worst moments of employment seeking came the
now defunct Kmart Corporation. They were going to hire me
to do maintenance in one of their warehouses in Illinois.
When I got in there to fill out my paperwork,
in the middle of it, the human resources woman asked me,
what happened to all this gap in my work history?
(31:25):
I said, didn't you read my resume? Because my resume
stated from the onset, after being wrongfully convicted for twenty
five years, I'm now re entering the workforce. She started
reading it. She made some gasps and some oh mis.
She got up, she left. She came back and she said,
I'm really sorry to have wasted your time, but we
don't hire convicted murderers. I said, but I was exonerated.
(31:49):
I'm innocent. Yeah, but you were convicted. I'm like, but
I didn't do it. She's like, but you were still convicted,
so we can't hire you. And I just I mean,
I was just stunned at that point. I was like, well,
you know, I didn't know if this was ever going
to end. To this day, I have no Social Security
because I will there's no way for me to be
out long enough to work long enough because of my
(32:10):
age to qualify for Social Security. So when I can
no longer work, I'm pretty well screwed because even though
I did receive compensation, the money that I did walk
away with, which was about two million dollars at the
end of it, you know, is long gone. I do
have my house thankfully that that's paid for in my vehicles,
(32:31):
but when I get too old to work, I'm really
not sure what's going to happen. If I'm being totally honest,
if somebody wants to hear me speak, somebody wants to
hear about my story, I'll go wherever, whenever to try
to enlighten people and open their eyes to what has
happened in the system. I am part of the program
for the Police Training Institute that has been initiated in Illinois,
(32:54):
where there is now a mandatory four hour class in
Illinois for every police Academy class that goes through where
an attorney and a couple xeneries and the project director
go to each class and spend about four hours with
the cadets. The class is on wrongful conviction, avoidance and Awareness,
(33:17):
where we get to speak to these future police officers
and hopefully open their minds to what can go wrong.
Speaker 1 (33:26):
Well, we'll have some way to contact you linked in
the episode description for speaking engagements. And additionally, maybe what
you were talking about earlier should be the call to
action this week. We need to be building ramps, not walls,
for folks like James to re enter society. We need
legislation to provide exouneries with the same things that are
available to paroleees. I mean, it's a no brainer, and
(33:48):
I'm glad that we're bringing awareness to that once again.
And with that, we're going to move on to closing arguments.
First of all, I want to thank you both for
being here today and sharing this insane story. And with that,
I'm going to turn my microphone off, kick back in
my chair, and leave your microphones on for anything else
you guys want to say, Let's start with you, Carl,
(34:08):
because we always save our honored guest for last. You're
an honored guests, Well, don't get me wrong, but our
featured guest of course is James. So Carl over to
you and then just hand the mic off to James
and he'll take us off into the sunset.
Speaker 2 (34:21):
Well, first, just thank you for this show and all
the work that you do to give people like James
a voice, a voice that was taken from them for
a very long time, and I think it's important that
we get to hear their voices now. I think James
has obviously not had an easy life before or after
(34:41):
getting out of prison, but he's done an amazing amount
of work to help himself and help those around him.
He's advocated on behalf of initiatives to change laws in
Illinois to avoid wrongful convictions in the first place, and
not just in Illinois, He's worked on this in many states.
So I'm glad that this episode will air so people
(35:03):
can hear about James' story and not just the part
of the story that's tragic about the fire and what
happened to that family and what happened to James, but
about who he is now. So I'm honored to have
gotten to work with James. I'm honored that he's still
someone that is in my life, who I see from
time to time, who I text. He's a great guy,
(35:25):
and I'm just I'm glad that he has this opportunity
to tell his story.
Speaker 3 (35:29):
Thank you, Carl for that. I mean, you constantly downplay
how important you are and the things that you do.
That's enough but true to begin with. And you know,
a lot of people talk about good people in this world.
And when you start thinking of people like Carl Leonard
and Tara Thompson and Gail Horn and John Lovy, the
(35:52):
reasons that they do what they do, I like to
call the right reasons because they save people. They save
people in ways that we as average citizens don't think of.
When we think of people saving people, we think of
firemen and police officers and things like that. And who
step in in the instant. You do it for the
right reasons, and you do it selflessly, I mean with
(36:17):
your family and the sacrifices that they make, because at
the time that you're not spending with them, they're just
as important and just as special. I have no idea
how many hours of his life he gave to give
me my life back, but it's a debt that no
matter how many times he tells me, I don't owe
him anything. I'll never be able to repay because I
wouldn't be here talking to you guys if it was
(36:39):
not for people like him and Tara and Gail, and
I don't think that anybody realizes just how special these
people are.
Speaker 1 (36:55):
Thank you for listening to Wrongful Conviction. You can listen
to this and all the Lava for podcast one week
early by subscribing to Lava for Good plus on Apple Podcasts.
I want to thank our production team, Connor Hall and
Kathleen Fink, as well as my fellow executive producers Jeff Kempler,
Kevin Wartis, and Jeff Cliburn. The music in this production
was supplied by three time OSCAR nominated composer Jay Ralph.
(37:18):
Be sure to follow us across all social media platforms
at Lava for Good and at Wrongful Conviction. You can
also follow me on Instagram at It's Jason Flamm. Wrongful
Conviction is the production of Lava for Good Podcasts and
association with Signal Company Number one
On March twenty fourth, nineteen eighty four, five children and
their mother, twenty eight year old Elva Lupercio, were killed
in an apartment building fire. It was originally ruled accidental,
but a fire captain who was unseen unofficially may have
had some reservations about that finding. Then, in November nineteen
eighty seven, a man named Dwayne Glasgow, who lived nearby
(00:24):
the nineteen eighty four fire, was arrested for burglary and
offered some information that back in nineteen eighty four, looking
out an attic window, he had seen his old roommate
James Kluppelberg walking back and forth to the building before
the fire and later admitting to setting it. And then,
in December nineteen eighty seven, while coincidentally reporting an unrelated arson,
(00:44):
James Kloppelberg was questioned about the nineteen eighty four fire
and allegedly gave an oral confession in January nineteen eighty eight.
Even though allegations of coercion shed doubt on the statement,
testimony from Glasgow and the fire captain were enough to
send James away for six natural life sentences plus fourteen years.
But this is wrongful conviction Welcome back to wrongful Conviction.
(01:17):
This is an arson case. I hate arson cases. I
think it's one of the worst of all the junk sciences.
It's also a torture case because the man we're going
to be speaking to is just another victim of the
torture crew in the Chicago PD under Lieutenant John Burge.
And before I even introduce James Kloppelberg, I'm going to
(01:40):
first reintroduce somebody who our listeners will probably recognize, Carl Leonard.
Carl is an attorney at the Exoneration Project in Illinois.
So Carl, welcome back to Wrongful Conviction.
Speaker 2 (01:51):
Thank you. It's great to be here.
Speaker 1 (01:53):
So James, I'm sorry. I think, like the city of Chicago, Illinois,
the country, everybody owes you in a post and more.
But I'm so glad you're here and I appreciate you
being here with us today.
Speaker 3 (02:04):
My pleasure and thank you for having me. It's a
true honor, James.
Speaker 1 (02:07):
Before we get into the awful occurrence that happened in
Chicago that led to the deaths for which you were
years later wrongfully convicted, your life wasn't easy from the beginning.
Is that fair to say?
Speaker 3 (02:20):
Yes, that would be a fair representation. I had a
low income childhood, so to speak, with three sisters and
a brother and my mother. We moved around a lot.
I think at one point, probably about once a year
for like a decade ish or so. Growing up. I
remember going to a lot of different schools, almost a
different one every year, and things were tough, you know,
(02:40):
as far as finances and everything. But for the most part,
my mother always made sure there was food on the
table and we were loved and taken care of.
Speaker 1 (02:49):
By the time James was eighteen years old, he had
been married, and during a rough patch, he was temporarily
staying with his friends Don Graymont and Dwayne Glasgow, who
lived about four doors down from where this far I occurred.
A few weeks later, the couple had their own troubles,
along with two kids and another one on the way.
Speaker 3 (03:05):
On February sixteenth of eighty four, she gave birth to
her third child and Dwayne took her to the hospital
and I was staying over so I watched the other
two children. I got a phone call from her that evening.
He had not returned yet, and she asked if I
was still looking for a place to stay. I said yeah.
(03:26):
She said, well you can move into the bedroom up
in the attic. You want to help me out with
the bills, fine, whatever. I said, Well, what's he going
to say about this? She said, I don't care. That's
the catch. I want you to pack his stuff. I
want him out. Apparently, while she was giving birth to
his third child, he was in the waiting room with
his girlfriend and a gym bag with some beer, kicking back,
(03:47):
having a good time. The nurses told her what was
going on, obviously, and so when he came home that evening,
his stuff was packed and I told him there's the door.
She basically dumped Dwayne because of things that weren't working
out between the two of them. Me and down ended
up starting a relationship.
Speaker 1 (04:08):
Somehow, this didn't cramp your friendship or theirs?
Speaker 3 (04:12):
Right, Well, that was the thing. A couple days before
the fire, he had came back, knocking at the door,
asked to talk to her. She came into the kitchen.
She's like, he's got nowhere to go. Can he stay upstairs?
I'm like, this is your house because by that time,
obviously I'd moved downstairs. I said, this is your house
if that's what you want. Fine, and so he was
actually staying there in the upstairs where I was originally staying,
(04:36):
and I was gone all day that day the fire occurred.
I was at my ex wife's house taking care of
things over there. Came home that night. They were him,
his girlfriend and Dawn. They were fairly intoxicated, and several
hours into the night, you know, me and Don had
had some arguments, and I entered and left a few
times to cool off, and came back in and we
(04:58):
were sitting around the kitchen table talking and next thing
we know, we see this fire. We got the kids
out of the house, put them in my car. The
fire went on for several hours.
Speaker 1 (05:09):
Carl, if you could take us back and explain what
happened on that awful, awful night. This was back in
nineteen eighty four, March twenty fourth. I mean, whether whether
it was arson or not, we know that James had
nothing to do with it. But this was a tragedy.
Speaker 2 (05:23):
It was a tragedy. It's an incredibly sad case. It
happened early in the morning. There was an apartment building
on the south side of Chicago. The first floor was vacant,
and a fire started on that first floor and there
was a family that lived upstairs. Seven people in the family,
a husband and wife, five kids, and the fire unfortunately
(05:47):
killed the mom and the children.
Speaker 1 (05:49):
Twenty eight year old Elva Lupercio and her five children Santos, Sonya, Cristo, Bell, Gadira,
and Annabel, all of whom were living on the second floor,
died and her husband managed to escape. His name was Santos,
but he suffered a frash, furt skull, and severe burns.
Speaker 2 (06:06):
So just a terrible, terrible tragedy. At that time in Chicago,
fires were investigated by the Chicago Police Department. It had
a bomb and Arson unit which was in charge of
investigating suspicious fires, and they did an investigation and concluded
that the fire was most likely an accident.
Speaker 1 (06:26):
Testing for the presence of accelerants came up negative, closing
the case as a tragic accident not a crime. Until
November nineteen eighty seven when Dwayne Glasgow was arrested for burglary,
theft and violating probation, and he brought up to nineteen
eighty four fire. According to Glasgow, he had watched through
an attic window as James went back and forth to
the building right before the fire, and that James later
(06:49):
admitted to setting the blaze. Meanwhile, back in nineteen eighty seven,
now twenty two years old, James was a plumber and
electrician while moonlighting as a security guard. He and his
girlfriend Bonnie had plans to get married when in December
nineteen eighty seven, coincidentally, a month after Glasgow's statement, James
reported an actual arson. While working at his security job.
Speaker 3 (07:12):
One of the apartment complexes that I was assigned to,
an automobile caught fire. I saw somebody running from the
parking lot that night and a couple police detectives came
to see me. I was at a job site and
they said they needed me to look at mugshots. I said, sure,
no problem, but it'll have to wait till I'm done.
I'm in the middle of one of the worst winners
Chicago had had and like forever, and I was thawing
(07:33):
frozen pipes at this building. They informed me I was
going with them one way or another. They took me
to a leventh and State informed me that there was
a witness that claims to have saw me start the
automobile fires, but that he couldn't get down there for
several hours because he was at work. If I wanted
to go home, now, all I had to do was
take a polygraph test proved that I didn't do it,
(07:56):
and they'd let me go. I said, sure, no problem,
let's go. They take me to another floor inside a
dimly lit room. It soundproofed. A gentleman says he needs
me to sign a waiver, and I was barely able
to make out that it said that I was about
to be questioned for a fire concerning six deaths in
(08:16):
nineteen eighty four. I told the examiner that this is
the wrong form, that this is not what I was
here for. I said, I'm not signing that, and he
stepped out of the room. The detective that brought me
down burst into the room, threw me up against the wall,
put a pair of handcuffs on me, drug me upstairs,
and him and his partner then proceeded to beat me
(08:37):
for next several hours.
Speaker 1 (08:39):
So you were one of the countless victims suspects, as
well as some witnesses who were brutally tortured inside these
Chicago ped torture chambers disguised as interrogations.
Speaker 3 (08:53):
Yes, they laid me face down on the ground while
one of them pulled my cuffs my arms towards my shoulders.
The other one proceeded to kidney shot me or continued
to beat me in my lower back area until I
started hemorrhaging blood through my urin. I was a urinated myself.
There was a lot of blood in the urine at
(09:14):
the time, and I uttered the words I did it,
and they stopped the beating.
Speaker 1 (09:18):
I mean, you probably would have confessed a Kennedy assassination, truthfully.
Speaker 2 (09:22):
Yes.
Speaker 3 (09:23):
At one point they wanted me to sign a confession
and also removed his weapon from his holster and said
I was going to sign it or else, And I said,
at that point he might as well just go ahead
and pull the trigger, because signing it would be the
same thing.
Speaker 1 (09:51):
Wrongful. Conviction has always given voice to innocent people in prison.
Now we're expanding that voice to you. Call us at
eight three three T seven for six sixty six and
leave us a message. Tell us how these powerful, often
tragic stories make you feel outraged, inspired, motivated. We want
(10:11):
to know. We may even include your story in a
future episode. Call us A three three two O seven
for six six six.
Speaker 2 (10:24):
The way it works is after the police have gotten
the soon to be defendant to the place where he
or she is saying what they want them to say.
They'll oftentimes rehearse it, and then they bring in the
Felony Review States attorney who take a statement from them,
and at the end they ask the person to sign,
and then that's often the last time the soon to
(10:47):
be defendant ever sees the outside of a jail cell.
Speaker 3 (10:49):
The state's attorney wanted to take my statement. I started
to give him a statement basically saying I did it.
I told him that I needed to talk to my
then girlfriend. He allowed me to make a phone call
to her. She made a three way phone call to
my then attorney. I told him what was going on.
(11:10):
He told me to put the state's attorney on the phone.
They had a brief conversation. State's attorney slammed the phone down,
went out to the hall, told the officers to process me,
not to speak to me, not to touch me, and
to get me out of there. A couple days after
the beating on my intake, I was so badly beaten
that the Cook County officers wouldn't turn a blind eye
(11:31):
to it, and they actually documented all of my injuries.
Speaker 1 (11:35):
The state's attorney. I mean, he had to know that
you had been tortured. There was no question, right, Carl,
What do you think he was thinking at that point
in time.
Speaker 2 (11:43):
I you know, I have no idea, but I think
that the mechanism they used in Chicago in Cook County,
I think is very unique, where we bring in an
assistant state's attorney a prosecutor to take the actual statement,
and I think the entire felony of view system is
designed to sort of inoculate against allegations of torture and
(12:05):
abuse by the time you get into court. Because there
were so many people claiming a lot of them truthfully
that their statement had been beaten out of them. You
put a lawyer in the room who has a law
license on the line, who can then come to court
and say, look, I'm just a lawyer. I didn't see
anything wrong, and I don't know what was going through
this particular states attorney's mind, but it may have been
(12:27):
there's no way I can go to court and say
that nothing bad happened here, so I need to protect myself.
Speaker 1 (12:33):
Nevertheless, Cook County sought the indictment in January nineteen eighty eight.
Speaker 3 (12:38):
The officer that presented the case for the state at
the grand jury outright committed perjury. One of the jurors
had asked him why I had done this at the
completion of the state's presentation, and he replied that it
was my pattern that when I got mad at my girlfriend,
I went out and set fires. Another juror then asked,
so he had been caught for this before, and he
(13:00):
replied yes. The only problem is I had never so
much as been questioned for an Argiston fire in my
entire life, let alone caught or convicted.
Speaker 1 (13:09):
So on January twenty seventh, nineteen eighty eight, James, you
had dieted on charges of arson and six counts of.
Speaker 3 (13:16):
Murder, actually eighteen counts of murder. Eighteen counts they charged
me three times on each victim, along with seven counts
of attempted murder. My entire indictment, I believe was around
thirty one counts.
Speaker 1 (13:29):
But the well documented evidence of torture shed doubt on
James's statement to officers and the state's attorney.
Speaker 3 (13:35):
When my lawyer put on a motion to suppress my
statement due to the abuse, and the judge granted it
because of the abuse was so blatant the state's attorney
stood up and said, your honor, are you also suppressing
what he told the state's attorney that night. The state's
(13:56):
attorney didn't beat him, and I just sat there and
I was just stunned into amazement that he swore up
onside and down the other I wasn't beaten, And now
he was basically conceding I was beaten, but that what
I told the state's attorneys should be allowed in because
he didn't beat me.
Speaker 1 (14:12):
Pretty freaking devious.
Speaker 3 (14:14):
Well, you have to keep in mind the judge that
suppressed my confession got removed from my case after suppressing
my confession because he went against the system.
Speaker 1 (14:23):
Wow.
Speaker 3 (14:23):
Within two weeks of that, Judge Loretta Hall Morgan was
assigned my case. And it didn't register really at the time,
but the judge who was going to be sitting at
this bench trial already knew about my confession because it
was part of the record that it was suppressed.
Speaker 1 (14:39):
And this doomed bench trial finally began in July nineteen
eighty nine.
Speaker 3 (14:43):
The state put on six witnesses, two people that they
call life or death witnesses that said that we survived
the fire and the family was alive when we went
to sleep woke up to smoking fire. They didn't implicate
me at all. They put on a medical examiner who
said that in his opinion, the cause of death was
smoking fire carbon monoxide poisoning, and that the manner of
(15:05):
debt was homicide. When asked why he originally said there
were accidents, he said that's because that's what he was
told by the police, and that four years later the
police told him that they wanted to charge somebody and
he had to change his death certificates to homicide. They
then brought a gentleman in from the Chicago Fire Department
who was there that night as an observer who was
training a class for a future fire investigating team that
(15:28):
was going to take over fire investigations in Chicago, called Ofi.
He testified that due to burn patterns, he was positive
that this was an arson fire, but yet he told
nobody for four years, and the reason that the state
used him as a witness, in my opinion, is because
he filed no reports, so there was nothing to impeach
him with. Whereas the original officers who investigated the fire
(15:51):
that said it was an accident, they would had to
have went back on their original report, and then they
put on don Graymont, who was my girlfriend at the time,
who told the truth that I had nothing to do
with it. They then proceeded to impeach her with a
grand jury statement that she made that after making it,
she went to the Office of Maternal Affairs and said
(16:11):
I was just forced to commit perjury in front of
the grand jury. And then they brought Dwayne glasgow In,
who gave the testimony that he gave in exchange for
going home. The next day, my attorney presented no defense whatsoever.
At the end of the state's case, he stood up.
He asked for a directed verdict of not guilty. The
judge said motion denied. He said, oh, well, the defense rests,
(16:32):
and he sat down, and the judge said she was
going to take a ten minute break to have closing arguments.
She took a ten minute break, came out and found
me guilty. My lawyer just sat there.
Speaker 1 (16:41):
No closing arguments.
Speaker 3 (16:42):
There were no closing arguments.
Speaker 1 (16:44):
Carl, help is he talking about no closing argument?
Speaker 2 (16:48):
It doesn't make any sense. So many things about James
trial don't make any sense.
Speaker 3 (16:53):
Right. Well, what happened was, like I said, she took
the break we came back and I was expecting closing arguments,
and she sat down and started reading her findings. And
I'm looking at my attorney, like what's going on here?
And he's like, don't worry about It'll be okay. And
she said, as to counts like twenty five through thirty
one or whatever it was, or twenty four through thirty one,
(17:15):
those are the attempt counts, there's going to be a
finding of not guilty because there's no evidence to indicate
that the defendant intended to harm those individuals. As to
the remaining counts in the indictment, there's a finding of guilty.
I was, for want of a better word, I was
just in shock. I mean, I couldn't believe that she
had found me guilty. I was just dumbfounded at the
(17:39):
fact that if a person was guilty of this crime,
how could they have been not guilty of attempting to
kill the people that jumped out the windows and lived,
but guilty of killing the people that perished. It wasn't
like this was a crime with a gun or a knife.
Fire is indiscriminate. If I had set the fire, I
would have intended harm on everybody. Apartment building not just
(18:02):
certain people. Her verdict held no sense to me whatsoever.
And then she so nonchalantly after finding me guilty, she
literally said the words, gentlemen, what's your pleasure? And it
was at that point that the state's attorney stood up
and said, your honor, at this time, we'll be asking
for the death penalty.
Speaker 1 (18:20):
Gentlemen, what's your pleasure? That's what she said, what's your pleasure?
As if this is some sort of sick game. I
don't even have the right words for this. So they
asked for the death penalty.
Speaker 3 (18:31):
The next step, you have to have a hearing. When
it took me a couple of days to process what
had happened, and somebody else who was incarcerated awaiting trial
at the time, told me that I needed to get
down to the jail's library, the law library, and speak
to somebody down there because what was happening wasn't right.
And that's when I found out a lot of things,
(18:53):
you know. I found out that I was actually able
to demand a jury for the death penalty phase because
I didn't want her to make that decision.
Speaker 1 (19:00):
In case the story isn't crazy enough, there's a crazy
footnote to this whole thing, which is that on October seventh,
nineteen eighty nine, while you were waiting sentencing, you had
walked out of the Cook County jail after bond records
were altered to lower your bond from no bond to
twenty five thousand dollars, and your mom posted twenty five
hundred in cash, and then the jail officials discovered that
(19:23):
a jail employee had been bribed with three thousand dollars
to alter the record, and then you were arrested days
later and brought back. What in the world again, I've
never heard anything like this before.
Speaker 3 (19:34):
What you're speaking of hold some truth to it. I
don't recall as to what my ex wife actually did
for the jail official that altered the record, but nobody
was listening to me. I was going to be put
to death for something I did not do, and so yes,
I bonded out. I was hoping that while out I
(19:56):
could probably get enough notoriety to the case to where
people might look into it and see the errors that
were committed. Technically, I was arrested, but I actually called
them and told them where I was. They were making
threats against my family that if I did not come back.
They were going to take it out on them, so
(20:19):
I called the state's attorney and told him where I was.
It was not my proudest moment in all of this,
but again, when somebody's talking about taking your life, and
after what I had already been through with the beatings
and everything and what I had seen happened to this point,
I didn't know what else to do.
Speaker 1 (20:36):
James was back in Cook County Jail in November nineteen
eighty nine, where he began all kinds of proceedings trying
to save his own life, including demanding a new attorney
and a new judge.
Speaker 3 (20:47):
When it came time for my sentencing, I had requested
to remove my attorney because I did not feel that
I was being represented in a manner to save my life.
The judge denied the request, so I went to the
Attorney Disciplinary Commission and said that I'd given my attorney
a large amount of money to hire investigators and things
(21:07):
like that, and he did nothing. He never came to
see me, he never spoke to me, at which point
my attorney notified the judge that he was under investigation
by the commission and that she had to let him
out of the case. She wasn't happy about it. At
that point, I also moved to remove her as a
judge because she was not giving me what I felt
(21:28):
was a fair shake, so to speak. One of the
things that I had alleged as to why my judge
needed to be removed was because she had made a
statement after the first day of trial. She had said
something like, I start my vacation the day after tomorrow.
This case is going to be done tomorrow regardless, or
something like that. And I was just trying to build
(21:49):
some type of a record for appeal of what was
actually happening to me. And she finally, after that motion
was denied, she finally appointed public defender. And that's when
they found the evidence that Duayne committed perjury by saying
he said he saw the back door of the building,
that he saw me enter and leave the building. They
obtained evidence that photographically shows it was impossible that he
(22:13):
could not have seen the building. They tracked down people
who used to live in the buildings from years ago
that before that had said, now, there's no way you
could see from point A to point B. And even
faced with all of this, the judge refused to correct
her mistake and emotion for a new trial.
Speaker 1 (22:30):
And here it was March twenty second, nineteen ninety, when
somehow James had escaped to death penalty.
Speaker 3 (22:36):
Yeah. The reason she rejected the whole premise of the
death penalty was she wanted me out of her courtroom.
Here we were almost eight months from my conviction and
she still had been unable to sentence me because of
court filings and things that I was trying to do
to save my life. And she literally asked me what
was it going to take to get me out of
her courtroom? And I said I did not want to
(22:58):
fight this from death row. She said, well, the only
other sentence I can give you is natural life. The
sad reality of it is, had I known then the
things that I know now, I probably would have accepted
the death penalty due to the fact that I think
I would have been out sooner.
Speaker 1 (23:15):
Well, you would have been entitled to an attorney for
post conviction, which you're only entitled too if you are
sentenced to death. The judge rejected the death penalis and
sentence you to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
Speaker 3 (23:29):
Six natural life sentences and three fourteen year sentences. I
went to Joliet. I was there maybe four weeks at most,
(23:49):
and then I was sent to Minard, where I spent
the next ten years of my life. They called it
pit for a reason because it was literally built into
the side of of what was an old rock quarry.
Finally winning a transfer out of that hell hole, I
then did another four years, almost in jolliev before they
(24:12):
closed it down. I was then transferred to State Blle.
I did almost ten years there and was transferred back
to Minard for my last eleven months, where I met
Carl for the first time.
Speaker 1 (24:24):
Over the course of two long decades, James's direct appeals
and his first post conviction petition were denied, and then
when he was about to file a federal habeas the
Exoneration Project got involved, filing a second post conviction petition
in two thousand and nine, including expert testimony from a
doctor Ogel disputing the fire captain's trial testimony that was
based on an ancient and now debunked Arson investigation method.
(24:48):
For clarity, listen to our coverage of Arson investigation on
wrongful conviction junk Science. We're going to have it linked
in the episode description. The Exoneration Project was also able
to bolster their expert with previously hidden exculpatory evidence.
Speaker 2 (25:03):
We haven't talked about that there is an alternate suspect
that there's somebody else who was setting fires in that
neighborhood at that time. Doing some research into media coverage
of fires in the neighborhood at the time, law students
Ashley Schumacher and Cadence Mertz uncovered a small neighborhood newspaper
that had run an article with the headline something like,
(25:23):
Who's starting these fires?
Speaker 1 (25:24):
Are amazing?
Speaker 2 (25:25):
The night before, if I remember correctly, that the fire
at issue here, there was another fire that had happened,
which the police. The same police investigated and determined that
the fire was set by a woman who lived in
that building, Isabel Ramos, because she was mad at her
landlord about something, so she decided to burn the place down.
(25:47):
And in the course of questioning her about that fire,
they said, hey, what about that fire down the street?
Did you start that one? And she said something. I
don't know what her exact words were, but basically, I
was really I set a lot of fires? How can
I remember?
Speaker 3 (26:03):
They pulled the court file and her original confession from
her trial was still sitting there in the court.
Speaker 2 (26:10):
File, and none of this is disclosed to the defense
before James trial, and we filed this petition. There was
also a habeas petition which was in front of Judge
Saint Eve here in Chicago, and she was not able
to advance it because we had the pending state court matter.
But there was an opinion entered by her agreeing to
stay the habeas petition because she felt that there was
(26:31):
potential merit to it. So in the state court we
proceeded towards an evidentiary hearing to present the new evidence.
Speaker 3 (26:40):
In one of the little side note. After my evidentiary
hearing was granted on April fifteenth of twenty ten, the
state said they needed time to obtain an expert of
their own to review the fire science evidence that Carl
and Gale and everybody had put together with doctor Ogle.
(27:03):
It wasn't until a few years after I was released
that a document accidentally got turned over to my legal
team that said that the state's attorney had, for a
full year in their possession a report that basically said
what doctor Ogle had said in his report for me,
(27:23):
and they were steadily going to court telling the judge
they needed more time because they couldn't find an expert
to look at the evidence. So for an entire year
they held me knowing that what was said by doctor
Ogle was true, that this wasn't an arson fire.
Speaker 2 (27:39):
And right before we were supposed to have this hearing,
the state determined that they would no longer oppose postconviction relief.
Speaker 3 (27:47):
They chose to act two weeks after Don Graymont died,
she was in hospice. They went to her room. My
ex wife was there that day that they showed up
and tried to get her to give a deathbed statement
that I was actually guilty of this. Within two weeks
of her passing is when my court date was that.
(28:10):
Carl and Terror went into court that day and the
state just said, nah, you can let him go now.
But that's how unwilling they are to admit when they
make a mistake.
Speaker 1 (28:19):
They went to her in the hospice.
Speaker 3 (28:23):
Yes, I don't let to say.
Speaker 1 (28:25):
Anymore, but I do know that finally, Circuit Court Judge
Ricky Jones vacated all your convictions and the charges were dismissed.
And on May thirty first of twenty twelve, after a
quarter century in prison, you left prison.
Speaker 3 (28:42):
I met Carl for the first time on the day
he came to pick me up, and it was one
of the most surreal parts of my entire life because
we walked out and Carl had told me how it
was raining the whole way down there, and we walked
out of prison and it stopped. It was the weirdest thing.
Speaker 2 (29:00):
I will never forget that day. James was the first
person I was with when he walked out of prison
after being exonerated, and it was really exciting to be
part of that with James.
Speaker 3 (29:09):
Because of him handsome, extremely dedicated people. I have a
new lease on life.
Speaker 1 (29:15):
And as I understand it, not that this dampened your
mood as the rain was lifting, but you walked out
with fourteen dollars and seventeen cents right.
Speaker 3 (29:26):
Well, it's all I had on my prison account at
the time, and because I was no longer a convicted felon,
I was not entitled to all the benefits that he
convicted felon would be given upon their release. Had Carl
not come pick me up, I had no way to
get back to Chicago because I wasn't even going to
be afforded in a bus ticket. The opportunity for housing assistance.
(29:49):
I mean, it was the exoneration project that put me
up in a hotel. All the things that he convicted
felon receives. I was afforded none of it.
Speaker 1 (29:57):
Yeah, they literally kicked you out the door. But the
good news is that in May twenty and thirteen you
filed the federal wrongful conviction lawsuit against the City of
Chicago and the Chicago PD, and even in the case
as egregious as yours, it took what almost five years
to get compensated, right, Yeah, it.
Speaker 3 (30:14):
Was almost six years. But what was filed first was
a stifficate of innocence request, because in Illinois you have
to have one of those before you can move forward
really doing anything, which meant not only did I have
to prove that I wasn't guilty, but Carl and his
team had to prove that I was actually innocent. So
they obtained that for me. On August fifth of twenty
(30:37):
and thirteen.
Speaker 2 (30:38):
After I contested hearing, the very same state that agreed
that James was innocent enough to come home fought us
on the certificate of innocence.
Speaker 1 (30:47):
Finally, you know, some daylight in this now almost thirty
years by the time you were compensated. This long, long,
dark chapter. So that is a happy ending. How's your
life now? Understand when you came home, you were living
nearby your son and daughter in law.
Speaker 3 (31:03):
It took me almost a year to find my first job.
One of the worst moments of employment seeking came the
now defunct Kmart Corporation. They were going to hire me
to do maintenance in one of their warehouses in Illinois.
When I got in there to fill out my paperwork,
in the middle of it, the human resources woman asked me,
what happened to all this gap in my work history?
(31:25):
I said, didn't you read my resume? Because my resume
stated from the onset, after being wrongfully convicted for twenty
five years, I'm now re entering the workforce. She started
reading it. She made some gasps and some oh mis.
She got up, she left. She came back and she said,
I'm really sorry to have wasted your time, but we
don't hire convicted murderers. I said, but I was exonerated.
(31:49):
I'm innocent. Yeah, but you were convicted. I'm like, but
I didn't do it. She's like, but you were still convicted,
so we can't hire you. And I just I mean,
I was just stunned at that point. I was like, well,
you know, I didn't know if this was ever going
to end. To this day, I have no Social Security
because I will there's no way for me to be
out long enough to work long enough because of my
(32:10):
age to qualify for Social Security. So when I can
no longer work, I'm pretty well screwed because even though
I did receive compensation, the money that I did walk
away with, which was about two million dollars at the
end of it, you know, is long gone. I do
have my house thankfully that that's paid for in my vehicles,
(32:31):
but when I get too old to work, I'm really
not sure what's going to happen. If I'm being totally honest,
if somebody wants to hear me speak, somebody wants to
hear about my story, I'll go wherever, whenever to try
to enlighten people and open their eyes to what has
happened in the system. I am part of the program
for the Police Training Institute that has been initiated in Illinois,
(32:54):
where there is now a mandatory four hour class in
Illinois for every police Academy class that goes through where
an attorney and a couple xeneries and the project director
go to each class and spend about four hours with
the cadets. The class is on wrongful conviction, avoidance and Awareness,
(33:17):
where we get to speak to these future police officers
and hopefully open their minds to what can go wrong.
Speaker 1 (33:26):
Well, we'll have some way to contact you linked in
the episode description for speaking engagements. And additionally, maybe what
you were talking about earlier should be the call to
action this week. We need to be building ramps, not walls,
for folks like James to re enter society. We need
legislation to provide exouneries with the same things that are
available to paroleees. I mean, it's a no brainer, and
(33:48):
I'm glad that we're bringing awareness to that once again.
And with that, we're going to move on to closing arguments.
First of all, I want to thank you both for
being here today and sharing this insane story. And with that,
I'm going to turn my microphone off, kick back in
my chair, and leave your microphones on for anything else
you guys want to say, Let's start with you, Carl,
(34:08):
because we always save our honored guest for last. You're
an honored guests, Well, don't get me wrong, but our
featured guest of course is James. So Carl over to
you and then just hand the mic off to James
and he'll take us off into the sunset.
Speaker 2 (34:21):
Well, first, just thank you for this show and all
the work that you do to give people like James
a voice, a voice that was taken from them for
a very long time, and I think it's important that
we get to hear their voices now. I think James
has obviously not had an easy life before or after
(34:41):
getting out of prison, but he's done an amazing amount
of work to help himself and help those around him.
He's advocated on behalf of initiatives to change laws in
Illinois to avoid wrongful convictions in the first place, and
not just in Illinois, He's worked on this in many states.
So I'm glad that this episode will air so people
(35:03):
can hear about James' story and not just the part
of the story that's tragic about the fire and what
happened to that family and what happened to James, but
about who he is now. So I'm honored to have
gotten to work with James. I'm honored that he's still
someone that is in my life, who I see from
time to time, who I text. He's a great guy,
(35:25):
and I'm just I'm glad that he has this opportunity
to tell his story.
Speaker 3 (35:29):
Thank you, Carl for that. I mean, you constantly downplay
how important you are and the things that you do.
That's enough but true to begin with. And you know,
a lot of people talk about good people in this world.
And when you start thinking of people like Carl Leonard
and Tara Thompson and Gail Horn and John Lovy, the
(35:52):
reasons that they do what they do, I like to
call the right reasons because they save people. They save
people in ways that we as average citizens don't think of.
When we think of people saving people, we think of
firemen and police officers and things like that. And who
step in in the instant. You do it for the
right reasons, and you do it selflessly, I mean with
(36:17):
your family and the sacrifices that they make, because at
the time that you're not spending with them, they're just
as important and just as special. I have no idea
how many hours of his life he gave to give
me my life back, but it's a debt that no
matter how many times he tells me, I don't owe
him anything. I'll never be able to repay because I
wouldn't be here talking to you guys if it was
(36:39):
not for people like him and Tara and Gail, and
I don't think that anybody realizes just how special these
people are.
Speaker 1 (36:55):
Thank you for listening to Wrongful Conviction. You can listen
to this and all the Lava for podcast one week
early by subscribing to Lava for Good plus on Apple Podcasts.
I want to thank our production team, Connor Hall and
Kathleen Fink, as well as my fellow executive producers Jeff Kempler,
Kevin Wartis, and Jeff Cliburn. The music in this production
was supplied by three time OSCAR nominated composer Jay Ralph.
(37:18):
Be sure to follow us across all social media platforms
at Lava for Good and at Wrongful Conviction. You can
also follow me on Instagram at It's Jason Flamm. Wrongful
Conviction is the production of Lava for Good Podcasts and
association with Signal Company Number one
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