January 8, 2024 • 39 mins
This special edition of Wrongful Conviction was recorded on December 1, 2023 live from the United Justice Coalition (UJC) Summit in New York City. This annual gathering brings together activists from all over the world with the expressed purpose of raising awareness of and devising ways to address some of the key social issues of our time.
In this episode, Jason and Maggie sit down with Andre Brown at the UJC Summit 2023. Andre was charged with attempted murder for chasing down and shooting two teenage boys in the Bronx, NY in 1999. Even though Andre had a medical condition that made running nearly impossible and several witnesses saw someone else commit the crime, Andre was convicted and sentenced to two 20-year prison terms.
To learn more and get involved, visit:
https://www.gofundme.com/f/SupportAndreBrown
https://www.unjustandunsolved.com/post/episode-19-andre-brown
https://www.deskovicfoundation.org/cases
Wrongful Conviction is a production of Lava for Good™ Podcasts in association with Signal Co. No1.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:03):
On the evening of January fifteenth, nineteen ninety nine, a
masked man approached two teenage boys in front of a
bodega in the Bronx on a corner known for drug activity.
The assailant drew a gun and shot one of the
young men several times while the other ran off. The
gunman chased the other young man down the block and
around the corner before paralyzing him with one shot to
(00:26):
the back. While both victims survived, only one was conscious,
but he couldn't or wouldn't provide a lead. An eyewitness
said that she recognized the shooter as a guy from
the neighborhood named Drey. The police remembered Andre Brown, a
neighborhood kid who was shot in the leg one year
prior in a drug dispute. The specter of his injured
(00:48):
leg and alternate suspects were ignored when both the witness
and the victim agreed that Andre was the assailant. But
this is wrongful conviction. Welcome back to wrongful Conviction. Recently,
(01:16):
Jason Flamm and I were asked to record an interview
in front of a live audience at the annual United
Justice Coalition Summit. The UJC aims to raise awareness around
social justice issues and the need for criminal legal system reform.
So for our live interview, we thought of a mutual friend,
someone whose case I covered on my podcast Unjustin Unsolved
(01:36):
while he was still wrongfully incarcerated, Andre Brown. Andre agreed
to join us at the summit along with his attorney
Oscar Michelin.
Speaker 2 (01:49):
Thanks everybody for being here.
Speaker 3 (01:50):
I'm gonna ask, first of all, how many people in
this room were wrongfully convicted and sentenced? Oh my god,
see that? And how many people here know somebody who
was wrongfully convicted? Oh my god, that's a lot of hands. Yeah,
this shit is everywhere. It's horrible, and I'm really really
thrilled to be here with these amazing, amazing people. Maggie Feeling, Oscar,
and of course Andre Brown. And I'm so glad that
(02:13):
Andrea is here. I mean, I'm so glad you're here,
because I'm so glad you're here with your amazing, beautiful
family and everything.
Speaker 2 (02:18):
But his case start with this, Okay.
Speaker 3 (02:22):
It features a witness who didn't testify, but her testimony
was allowed in any way, which meant that no one.
Speaker 2 (02:29):
Was allowed to cross examine her.
Speaker 3 (02:31):
Second of all, the shooter shot one guy execution style,
then chased his friend caught up to him on the street. Now,
this is an eighteen year old kid running for his life,
and somehow this guy was fast enough to catch up
with him and shoot him and paralyze him too. Andre
had a bullet wound in his leg and had a
syndrome that meant that he could barely walk, much less run.
(02:54):
And it also features a lawyer who, while he was
representing Andrea A. Try Well, had a side hustle which
was committing so many crimes for the Banano crime family
that he ended up being the only attorney in American
history to enter the Witness Protection program.
Speaker 2 (03:11):
So it's a shit show.
Speaker 3 (03:13):
So get ready to hear what we're about to hear,
because this is just different and Andre is just a
different kind of guy.
Speaker 2 (03:19):
I mean to no one is to love him.
Speaker 4 (03:21):
So with that, Maggie all right, So hello everyone, thanks
for coming. So we're just gonna start from the top
with Andre. Why don't you tell us a little bit
about yourself.
Speaker 5 (03:31):
I was raised in a two parent household. It was
the Uptime area, the Northeast Bronx. The crack epidemic was
going on a lot of gun shots being fired continuously.
The trains were littered homeless people, and it was just
a real, just tragic time in the Bronx. My life
was a fair life. My mother was a stewardess for
(03:53):
the airlines, and she raised us and groomed us to
be good individuals.
Speaker 6 (03:58):
And then my mother and my father separated.
Speaker 5 (04:01):
At that time, I was in high school, and now
I was taken on the onus of raising my brothers.
So I said, how can I now change the course
of their lives and allow myself to continue in an
upward manner. First I took on a job at creating barrel,
(04:24):
trying to think that it would be able to fit
the bill, and it didn't. It couldn't feed my little
sister or my other two brothers. So at that time
I said, you know what, I have to do something else.
And my friend introduced me to selling drugs. And when
I started to sell drugs, literally I thought I was
a genius at it. And this is how your mind
(04:46):
gets cultivated poorly in the streets. You start to really
engage and think that you know better than law enforcement,
you know better than society, and you also know better
than that old adage car tune the turtle and the rabbit,
thinking that, oh, I know what I'm doing. I'm running
past this little working man, this turtle. So in selling
(05:10):
drugs and thinking I was a genius, I got shot,
a simple leg shot, mind you, It hit my major
artery and I almost led to death. And that was
the turning point in my life.
Speaker 4 (05:23):
So you almost died, So you got on a better
path in life.
Speaker 5 (05:26):
Yes, First of all, you have to be an enforcer
on a block in order to hold it down. I
was injured, critically injured. I was at the point where
I couldn't walk, I could no longer hold down a block.
So I said, what am I going to do now
with my life? And I started going back to college.
At that point I enrolled in BMCC. And that's when
(05:47):
you know.
Speaker 4 (05:48):
Tragedy occurred, right, And I want to bring that to Oscar.
January fifteenth, nineteen ninety nine. What happened that day?
Speaker 7 (05:56):
So, on that day there was a shooting on a
street corner in the Bronx Allerton Avenue, White Planes Road.
Speaker 8 (06:02):
That area.
Speaker 7 (06:03):
The corner there was Little Bodeig, a little corner store
had been a spot where young Jamaican gang had started
selling marijuana out of for the past about year or so,
and the cops were aware of that, and so there
became a little bit of a rival turf war for
that location from the earlier crews that had been working
there selling marijuana. And so the first incident that happened
(06:26):
was on January eleventh, there was a shootout on that corner,
two exchanges of gunfire. Nobody got shot, some cars were
shot up, so the police responded. On January thirteenth, two
days later, one of the guys that hustles on that corner,
guy named O'Neil virgo, got arrested, and sure enough the
gun he had on him was connected to the shooting
(06:47):
on the eleventh, so he gets the rest of for
a gun charge. And then on the fifteenth, O'Neil Virgo
and another man, Sewann Nicholson or out on that corner
selling drugs. Somebody comes up right down White Planes Road,
sees them on the corner, They see the gun, got
a mask on. The shooter literally stands over O'Neil virgo
and shoots him several times and then runs down the
(07:08):
street to try to get the other guy, Sewan Nicholson
they were in a full city block.
Speaker 8 (07:13):
He makes a left turn onto the.
Speaker 7 (07:15):
Next block, which is Alinville, and the shooter shoots him
there one time, hits him in the spine and paralyzes him.
Somehow they both survived, so his attempted murder, there was
lots of discrepancies as to what the shooter was wearing.
Was it a face mask, was it a handkerchief of bandana,
et cetera. So they asked the victim at that time,
Sean Nicholson, mister Virgo could not speak. He was the
(07:37):
one who shot five or six times. And that initial
police report Sewan Nicholson, he says, I can't identify the shooter,
and so the police start scouring the area looking for witnesses.
Speaker 3 (07:47):
So how did it end up with them settling on
a guy who, it should have been painfully obvious from
the very beginning not only didn't do it, but couldn't
have done it.
Speaker 7 (07:59):
They started listening to rumors in the in the street
and one of the women who later recanted said, you know,
the shooter looked a little bit like this guy I
know from the neighborhood dre. So the next thing they
do with that is go to the hospital and get
Sean Nicholson, who had repeatedly said I didn't see the
guy he had a mask to pick Andre allegedly out
(08:20):
of a photo array. So what Nicholson actually said, or
what the police got him to say, was, as he
was falling to the ground, he looked over his shoulder
and saw the shooter pulled the mask off his face
and he could recognize Andre from the neighborhood.
Speaker 8 (08:33):
Sounds totally legit exactly happens all the time.
Speaker 7 (08:36):
Two days later, a witness comes forward who claims she
was in her car when the shooting occurred. And this
is about five point thirty six o'clock at night on
a winter night, so it was just starting to get
dark in January. And then she says she saw the
shooter run past her and pull up his mask just
as he passed her car window. She also said that
(08:57):
the shots were fired by her car, but the shots
that shot mister Nicholson as a described around the corner,
so she would not have been able to see what
she said she saw. And she said that she was
so upset that night she reported to the police because
she almost had a heart attack and she was treated
for angina. That night, so she didn't come forward until
two days later. After there was already the rumors in
(09:19):
the neighborhood and they were already looking for Andre.
Speaker 4 (09:22):
So, Andre, when you found out they were looking for you,
you turned yourself in with a lawyer.
Speaker 6 (09:26):
Yes.
Speaker 5 (09:27):
They came to my girlfriend's house early in the morning.
They missed me. I had just went out to get
breakfast really quick and came back. She was trembling and
she said, listen, the police were here. They left the
card that they searched the home. I immediately reached out
to my mom and she said, Andre, they were just
here also, I was just about to call you. And
I went to the Bar Association to meet Martin Fisher.
(09:49):
Martin Fisher was a family attorney, and I said, Marty,
they're looking for me. I don't know what they're looking
for me for. They were contacted by Martin and they said,
we want to ask him a few questions. He said, no,
he's represented by me. You cannot ask him any questions.
I said, okay, Well, if we need him, we'll contact you.
Two days later, on the Wednesday morning, they contacted him.
Speaker 6 (10:10):
Which was the twentieth of January.
Speaker 5 (10:12):
And I went down there with my mom and my
girlfriend at the time, and walked right into the prison.
I didn't have a worry in the world because I
knew that I didn't have anything to do with this case.
So at that time I was not a prisoner yet.
I was actually seated outside of the push door. And
it's ironic because one of the detectives there, he said, Andre,
(10:32):
don't you remember me?
Speaker 6 (10:33):
And I'm like, no, I don't. Who are you?
Speaker 5 (10:35):
He said, when you were shot? I came to the hospital,
so they knew that I was shot already before even
any questions were occurring. And then my attorney went inside
spoke to them, and he came back out, and at
that point they arrested me. And I became enraged. You know,
I was yelling at my attorney. I was yelling at them.
(10:57):
I said, listen, I could have never committed this crime.
I showed them my injury. They noted it. It was
on the police reports. And then I went to a lineup,
and when I went to the lineup, I was picked
out of the lineup as the suspect.
Speaker 3 (11:23):
It's a perfect time to highlight the fact that I
witness identification has been proven in experiments to be less
accurate than guessing when you're in a hyper tense situation,
like your own life is on the line, when there's
gunshots being fired, when it's a running gun situation. Literally
in this case, your adrenalinees going. And most people think
their minds work like a camera, but in fact we're
(11:45):
so easily influenced that in this case, it seems like
the police may have influenced these witnesses, and I'm being
very kind.
Speaker 2 (11:51):
They may have, and.
Speaker 7 (11:52):
We believe that she did witness it, that she was there,
that we do believe, but we believe that she was
guided into picking the wrong person.
Speaker 1 (12:00):
In addition to any guidance the victim and the witness
may have received from law enforcement, Andre's case features a
very unfortunate coincidence. It became clear many years later when
the true assailant was discovered that he and Andre could
easily be mistaken for one another, especially given the alleged
quick glances that the witness and victim were relying on
(12:21):
to make their identifications.
Speaker 2 (12:24):
What were the.
Speaker 6 (12:24):
Charges to attempted murders?
Speaker 5 (12:27):
Two assaults, breakless endangerment, and the list just goes on and.
Speaker 7 (12:31):
On and everything under a gun possession, gun possession. The
family hired a well known criminal defense attorney named Ira Brown,
and the first appearance, Ira says to the judge, but
the family retained me, but they don't have enough money
to pay for an expert. Can the court pay for
an expert? You see, Judge, my client just recently started
being able to walk without a cane. He's still undergoing
(12:52):
physical therapy, and at the time of this shooting, he
couldn't possibly have ran the two city blocks that the
shooter did. So I want to get the medical records,
and I want to hire an expert orthopedist. And the
judge said, well, that sounds like a pretty strong defense.
So let me start with five hundred dollars get the
medical records, and then when you hired the expert, let
me know, you know what else you need, because yes,
(13:13):
we'll pay for that. What happened was Ira was on
trial two or three times in a row when Andrea's
case was on and the family decided we have to
get somebody else. At that time, there were a lot
of mafia trials going on, you know, the Gotti cases,
and mafia lawyers were kind of considered the cream of
the crop, and they hired a guy named Thomas Lee
(13:34):
to take over the case, and that's where everything fell apart.
So even though the judge had approved this money, Thomas
never pursued the medical evidence after that. And there were
two witnesses that he told the court he was trying
to locate who would name another shooter, a witness named
Graham and a witness named Cleveland. And he gave subpoenas
(13:54):
to the judge and he didn't have the addresses on
the subpoenas, so the judge said, I can't sign a
blank subpoena. Get me the addresses and I'll sign them.
And he never did anything else after that. The last straw,
and what Jason was referring to, was that the one
eyewitness was going to testify. The woman in the car
ran into Andre's mother and a family friend at a
laundromat and they pleaded with her, you know, you made
(14:16):
a mistake.
Speaker 8 (14:17):
My son didn't do this.
Speaker 7 (14:18):
She reports that to the DA, who reports it to
the judge, and the judge said, well, that's perfectly normal.
They didn't threaten her. They just told her they think
her son is innocent. But what the DA was saying
was that she didn't want to come forward and testify.
We believe she didn't want to come forward and testify
because she knew that she probably did not identify the
right person. But what happened after that is the day
before she's supposed to testify, a bullet in an envelope
(14:40):
ends up under her windshield wiper and it says, this
is what happens to rats, you fat bitch.
Speaker 5 (14:47):
And it was written in reading and ready with two
bullets in a left on her windshield.
Speaker 7 (14:53):
Right, so of course Andre's incarcerated, so so he didn't
do it.
Speaker 2 (14:57):
Right.
Speaker 7 (14:58):
The point about Lee being involved, what the judge said
was it had to have been someone connected to the defendant.
What she didn't consider it was the lawyer was a
fully made member of the Banano crime family and one
of the crimes he got arrested for and turned informant
was that he would go to the jail and speak
to the dawn who was arrested because he could go
(15:18):
see him without anybody listening. He's a lawyer, and he
would go back and give instructions including who to give
a garbage contract to in Staten Island, who to give
a garbage contract to in the Bronx and who to
kill and who to promote within the family, who's more
likely to intimidate it Like that's their game, that's what
they do.
Speaker 8 (15:36):
This sounds like a mob guy.
Speaker 7 (15:38):
And it would also explain why he wouldn't do the
rest of the work because he says, there's one witness.
If she doesn't show up, the case is over, and
I can't you know, many times they would tell clients,
you know, they would say, don't worry, she's not going
to show up. And I would say them, you know,
the third floor in Attica is called a she showed
up wing. Okay, you know, don't count on someone not
(15:58):
showing up. She's going to show she hates you, okay.
But so he was probably counting on that he was
going to be able to intimidate her and I don't
need to worry about it.
Speaker 1 (16:08):
Even though it's believed that this witness refused to testify
due to her doubts over her identification, the appearance of
witness intimidation probably did not reflect well on Andre. Meanwhile,
his attorney's trial strategy hinged on both her absence and
being able to cross examine the victim, who had initially
said that he could not identify the shooter. Well, both
(16:29):
of those things came to pass. The witness's absence at
trial had an unforeseen and unfortunate result.
Speaker 7 (16:36):
They let the DA read her testimony from the grand jury.
It was a total of six questions. Where were you
on that night in my car?
Speaker 8 (16:45):
What happened?
Speaker 7 (16:46):
Somebody ran behind me? What happened after that? I saw
a second person would have gone ran after him? What
happened after that? I heard shots? What happened after that?
He pulled his mask off. Were he able to see
his face?
Speaker 8 (16:56):
Yes? Did you recognize him? Yes?
Speaker 2 (16:58):
Who?
Speaker 8 (16:59):
Andre Bran?
Speaker 7 (17:00):
Now she didn't know the name Andre Brown. She only
knew was Dre. But by the time the grand jury
she had learned the name, and he said, how do
you know him from around the neighborhood?
Speaker 8 (17:09):
That's it?
Speaker 7 (17:09):
Okay, those eight questions, whatever I just went through. That
was her testimony. That's what convicted Andre essentially was those
eight questions. But she wasn't cross examined about being in
the car at night, being scared. The jury never heard
she almost had a heart attack. The jury never saw
how similar Andrea looked to the real shooter. Obviously, Now,
Nicholson testified, you know also that he saw him as
(17:30):
he fell, and he was pretty well cross examined by Lee.
I will say that that's what he was good at
to say how incredible it could be that you could
be falling down looking over your shoulder and catch a
glimpse of a guy, you know. So that was the
whole evidence.
Speaker 4 (17:43):
Right there, right So to just summarize the entire evidence
against you, Andre, was not cross testimony from this witness.
That's it.
Speaker 8 (17:51):
That's it. No motive, no physical evidence.
Speaker 4 (17:54):
Those eight questions convicted Andre.
Speaker 3 (17:57):
So Andre, that moment when the jury came back in,
can you take us inside your heart, your soul, your
experience of being in that courtroom jury comes back and
says guilty.
Speaker 5 (18:10):
At that very moment, I was shaking the pinnacle of
either I'm going home or I received this forty years.
And I sat there and the judge came in and
we all rose, and there was one guy I'll never
forget in the jury and he kept looking at me
and he was shaking his head like, yo, Yo, it's
not good, man, it's not good. And I looked at him.
I said what happened? He said, Yo, they found you guilty.
(18:33):
And I told Lee I hit him. I said, Yo,
they're gonna find me guilty. He said, what are you
talking about. I put on a great defense and he
put on no defense. Didn't bring my medical records anything
like that to the jury's attention. And I was trembling
knowing that I was about to be convicted. I just
felt like an entire cold go over my body. It's
(18:55):
almost as if your soul leaves you, because you know
this is the trend information of life itself. After I
was convicted, I was taken back upstairs. I was crying continuously,
taking back to records island. So the judge waited. I
think it was like three months before sentencing, and I
thought that the judge would have saw the lies and
(19:18):
would have changed her mind and sent me home. I
can remember it clearly. I said, she's going to see it.
She'll see the lies, she'll see that Thomas Lee didn't
put on the defense. She'll be able to see medical
records something. But when I come back, I'm going to
be freed. And when I was sentenced, I snapped again
(19:41):
and I said, do you see what you're doing to
an innocent man? Do you see what you're taking me
away from? Do you see that you're taking me from
my college, from my family, from my potential girlfriend, everything
that I've worked so hard for. Do you see what
you're taking away from me? And she said, mister Brown,
I'll understand, but you have an appeal. And she sentenced me.
She said, for the first count, I'm going to sentence
(20:03):
you to twenty years, and then she said for the
second count, I'm going to sentence you to twenty years.
And both of these sentences will run consecutive to one another.
And I didn't understand what that meant at the time.
And then when I got back and they gave me
my sentence and commitment papers, it said forty years. I
(20:36):
want our audience to really understand going through a bullpen
therapy in the three stages of prison because it changes
the cognition of your mind.
Speaker 4 (20:45):
Well, so you were a child, so your brain is
still developing when you went into prison.
Speaker 5 (20:49):
Absolutely, so you know I'm arrested, kicking, screaming, being dragged
into prison saying you did something that you didn't do.
I go through the central booking is the first stage
of prison. Straight madness and chaos. People sleeping on the floor,
You're trying to get to the phone system. You're trying
to lay on a bench where individuals is fighting and
(21:10):
pulling and tugging and saying if you're not built like that,
you're not sleeping on the bench. You're going to sleep
under the bench. You're going to sleep on the floor.
You may sleep near the toilet whereas all urine filled.
So this is the first stage of being thrown inside
the madness. And then the second stage is going through
reyk As Island. And now you're fighting to get on
(21:31):
the phones again, you're fighting in the yard. You're making
sure now you're exercising so that you can stay you know,
built for anything that's going to come at you. So
it's a war zone from Central Book and two reyk
As Island. And now you're getting thrown inside the Department
of Corrections where they're supposed to rehabilitate you. But now
(21:52):
it's more gangs, it's more violence, it's more police assault,
it's more just the pitfalls of the criminal justice system.
So immediately my mind started to trigger Andre. Now you're
going to be like them. You have to now engage
into the brutality to make it to take phone, to
(22:17):
carry raisers, to carry sharp objects, to protect yourself. You
have to battle in order to have your core beliefs
and your freedom's met in the minds of these men
who understand that we're criminals.
Speaker 4 (22:33):
When you put an innocent child in prison with people
that are actually dangerous, there are dangerous people in prison.
You have to survive, absolutely, and that could also be
a huge hindrance to him getting out if he got
in a fight or someone attacked him and something happened.
I mean, we don't even think about that when we
put someone like you in prison that's innocent, you could
(22:55):
come out an actual criminal.
Speaker 6 (22:57):
At that point, it came up.
Speaker 7 (22:58):
But as strong as you got into a fight, and
the DA brought it to the attention that he got
into a violent altercation at prison because they made a
bail application. So even though you didn't know that, that's
exactly what happened.
Speaker 4 (23:09):
I didn't know that, but yeah, that could have hurt
your chances of getting out absolutely. So, Oscar, how did
you get this man out of prison?
Speaker 6 (23:16):
Yeah, let's get to the good stuff here.
Speaker 7 (23:19):
Well, So, one of the reasons I got involved in
Andrea's case is this is my neighborhood. We went to
the same high school, Christopher Columbus and the bronx for Columbus.
Speaker 2 (23:26):
He wrongly identified a whole country.
Speaker 7 (23:28):
Exactly wasn't even on the same continent. But in any event,
the case right, I said, it spoke to me, but
also showed how weak it was. We just found out
a lot during freedom information laws, which is everybody's good friend.
We first found a report at DD five that was
not given to either mister Ira Brown or to Lee
(23:50):
that showed that the police had actually tested the bullets
and found that the bullets on the fifteenth matched the
gun that was used on the eleventh, So we already
knew that Virgo had one of the guns, so this
had to be the gun that was shooting at Virgo
on the eleventh. So frankly, I felt that was almost
enough because now we had a motive for the jury
(24:12):
that the same person who shot at these two young
men also shot them on the fifteenth. And O'Neil Virgo
had told the police he got a look at the
person who shot him on the eleventh and he didn't
think it was Andre. So if Andre didn't shoot him
on the eleventh, and how could Andre have had the
gun on the fifteenth, And the judge at his hearing
had a lot of questions about that. That was the
first thing. We then found another DD five of a witness,
(24:33):
Courtney Weezy, who said that the shooter was wearing a TAM.
A tam is what Jamaica men were to hold the dreads.
It's a big woolf cat. Courtney Weezy said the shooter
had a TAM and he was showing a photo array
with Andrea's picture in it and said he couldn't recognize
anybody in the photo ray or we only got the
first page and I noticed there was a check mark
(24:54):
on the front page as witness can I d yes?
And then no one ever got the second page, said
makes I.
Speaker 4 (25:00):
Know, so that's a Brady violation.
Speaker 7 (25:02):
That would be a Brady violation. But they argued that
the shooter had a mask on, so you know, it
wasn't a big deal and he couldn't see it. But
the point is he had a right to know that,
and so I said, well, there'd be no reason for
Andre to be wearing a tan. So this shooter was
likely Jamaican, and I knew that back then there was
a lot of battle between Jamaicans and American blacks over
(25:23):
turf as the Jamaicans are moving into the Bronx. So
didn't make sense to me that both of the victims
were Jamaican. Why would a Jamaican shoot these victims. But
we found out when we located the witnesses was that
the real shooter was a Jamaican guy who happened to
have gotten into the neighborhood little bit earlier and was
working with American blacks to sell weed at that location,
and even though they were Jamaican, he didn't like that
(25:44):
they were working his corner, and that's what the shooting
was all about. The guy who we discovered was the
real shooter, we did some research and tried to get
his yearbook picture, and we got his middle school yearbook picture.
By sheer coincidence. The principal of the middle school that
he went to ended up being my teacher from back
in seventh grade. So there's a lot of connections for
me in the case. If you put these pictures side
(26:05):
by side, Andre and the real shooter look extremely similar.
And that's a key factor is that the person who
might have seen the real shooter when his mass was
off could have easily picked him as Andre. They were
the exact same height and the exact same weight, okay,
and a very similar face. When we found the motion,
(26:25):
we showed, hey, look what TAM means. The real shooter
we found out was Jamaican. He would wear that the
victims were selling weed. Andre never sold weed. This guy
only sold weed. Seven months after this shooting, guess what happened.
Real shooter gets gunned down.
Speaker 5 (26:38):
Just finding the funeral picture where he actually had dreads, right,
we were able to actually put together the two pieces
of the TAM and now the dreads with the funeral pictures.
Speaker 7 (26:47):
Right, we found his funeral program, which is great because
it said his real name, but in the middle of
it said Bonkers. Okay, his nickname was Bonkers. And the
witness said, this guy was crazy. This guy would shoot
you up for no reason. So it's like, let's put
this together here, okay. And then we actually found a
surgeon who did the surgery on Andre's leg. He had
(27:10):
a very serious condition called compartment syndrome. And what happens
there is you get shot and your leg swells up
so much that they have to expose all four quadrants
of your calf. They cut it open, and they leave
you lying in bed with open wounds until the pressure
goes down. He had skin grasps. We're talking about a
scar from his thigh down to his ankle, proven atrophy.
(27:32):
And the doctor actually remembered the case, which is unbelievable.
He's the head of trauma at Jacobi in the Bronx,
which is a trauma one center, so this is not
some quack. And now he was head of medicine and
surgery at Mymodny's in Brooklyn.
Speaker 5 (27:48):
And listen, I just want to say that when you're
wrongfully convicted, you better know God. All right, We're not
going to allow that not to be set on this
forum right now.
Speaker 8 (28:00):
It really must.
Speaker 5 (28:01):
Be stated because a lot of this is sheer luck
and God's umbrella had to be on me because my
surgeon was alive.
Speaker 7 (28:11):
And he said, there's no way someone with this injury
could have ran. He said, maybe he could pull his
leg along, he said, but he would have a noticeable
limp at best. And the judge at Andrea's hearings said,
could he jog? He said no, he could not jog.
He could not jog. He could not run this quickly.
The problem was because the case was so old, there
(28:32):
were no physical therapy records, to show how far along.
Speaker 6 (28:37):
To when it got those medical.
Speaker 9 (28:39):
Records, to make us his amazing wife, and not to
mention my brother Devon who's not here, also where we
were on the phone like illegally at that point making
three week calls to Jacobe Hospital to locate these records.
Speaker 7 (28:53):
This surgeon he actually called over there to try to
get him himself. I mean, he really knew that something
wrong was going on. Ronald Simon, he said, there's got
to be pt records there, maybe Ifi Coal, you know,
we'll find them. And no one could find those therapy
recordscause they don't preserve them. It's talking about the nineteen
ninety we'll looking for them in twenty twenty, you know.
But we did have Ira Brown telling the judge at
(29:14):
his first court appearance, my client is still undergoing physical
therapy and only recently was able to walk without a cane,
and so that formed the basis.
Speaker 3 (29:25):
You know, there are a series of sort of miracles
right that led to.
Speaker 2 (29:28):
You being here.
Speaker 3 (29:28):
But it points out, you know, my estimate is that
there's probably around two hundred thousand innocent people in prison
while we're sitting here right now in this country and
that's probably conservative. And those people, many of them, don't
have a way out. They don't have an Oscar Michelin, right,
they don't have a Maggie Feeling to do a podcast
about the case.
Speaker 2 (29:49):
In fact, this goes back to very early when we first.
Speaker 3 (29:51):
Started the Wrongful Conviction podcast and our producer back then
was a woman named Sabine Jas and she alerted me
to your case. I brought it to our fantastic PR
person named Don Cameron.
Speaker 2 (30:01):
Amazed to generate some interest.
Speaker 6 (30:05):
We brought Jeffrey Deskovic in.
Speaker 3 (30:06):
I was about to go there and let me brag
on Jeffrey for a second. So Jeffrey Deskovic right there,
sitting in the front row, standing in the front row,
standing now wrongfully convicted, served sixteen years in New York
State and is now a member of the bar.
Speaker 2 (30:22):
And he turned out to be Listen.
Speaker 5 (30:25):
As a joke, and as a joke, you know, we
say that Jeffrey is the media whore.
Speaker 6 (30:32):
Okay, Now they.
Speaker 4 (30:34):
Love your case because the jeff you brought the case.
Speaker 5 (30:37):
Listen, they love jeff the media so immediately, and it's
not a.
Speaker 6 (30:42):
Joke, guys.
Speaker 5 (30:43):
Its a lot of attention to this, Yes, because Jeff
is my brother. Jeff is the guy who went hard,
extremely hard in the media for my case him and
then Sabine will never forget Sabine because she contacted Jason
and Jason said, who's Andre Brown, and so being explained
it and he said, listen, we got to put Dawn
(31:05):
on this because the only thing that Governor Cuomo does
in the morning is he reads and not bad. So
at that point he put Dawn right in the fray
of everything, and the campaign began.
Speaker 7 (31:21):
First, we went to the Conviction Review Unit. They rejected
the case and so we filed a four to forty.
Speaker 5 (31:27):
At that time, it was COVID and they were not
trying to bring me down on a hearing.
Speaker 7 (31:32):
We had asked for a virtual hearing because the courts
were closed to in person hearings, and the DA opposed that,
and then Jeff organized a rally in front of her
office to try to get her to agree to a
virtual hearing, and we had a hearing and the judge
agreed that at the very least Lee was ineffective for
(31:52):
not presenting the medical evidence, and just to put the
icing on it. I've known Jeff for a long time.
We kind of mentored him through with his law school experience,
and he became an admitted attorney right before we had
got a hearing granted, so I asked him to second seat. Mean,
Andre was just first client. So and he's back in
a hundred.
Speaker 4 (32:13):
So actually, Oscar, I do want to point out not
exactly a hundred Andre.
Speaker 8 (32:18):
No, I shouldn't say that's right.
Speaker 4 (32:19):
Andrea is not exonerated yet, which is why we're here
telling his story because the bronx DA is actually still
fighting his conviction, wanting to put Andre back in prison.
So not only do we need to exonerate him, we
need to make sure that he doesn't go back to prison.
Speaker 7 (32:36):
Yeah, they're they're filed an appeal of the vacature of
the conviction, and I got to tell you, you know,
the odds of its success are are not high, the low.
But this room speaks to what happens when you caught
up in the criminal justice system. Right if you if
you're counting on the criminal justicism to work out for you,
you know you're going to get very sorely disappointed. So
(32:59):
it really, you know, is a case that should not
be appealed. Never mind the fact that he served well
over twenty years for a crime that we established, you know,
he didn't commit, but to just drag it on, have
this over his head. They fought bail. Now after the
judge vacated his conviction, they asked for five hundred thousand
dollars bail. Okay, the judge released him, but to supervise release,
(33:22):
just like it wouldn't give us the measure that he
was actually innocent. Took the safe path and said he
was ineffective. You know, as I said to Jason before
we came out here, I've been involved in a lot
of cases. I've never had a case with this much
evidence of innocence. And the judge just couldn't get there.
And then he couldn't just do roar. He had to
send him to supervised release. So it's just constant. The
(33:43):
justice system loves finality. They want to, you know, keep
that hold on you. To the point where when he
first started going to the supervised release place, which is
now run by the Fortune Society, they called us and said,
why are we supervising this person. He went to another
program to be interviewed and they ended up hiring them
instead of supervising.
Speaker 6 (34:03):
He works there.
Speaker 7 (34:04):
Now, Yes, I mean, it's really daunting and it's very
discomforting to believe that.
Speaker 8 (34:10):
You know, we now have to wait.
Speaker 7 (34:11):
It'll take about two years to decide this appeal.
Speaker 3 (34:14):
And I want to get to what people here can do,
if they can write letters, or if there's anything else
they could do to make their voices heard for Andre.
Speaker 4 (34:20):
Well, I do know there's a go fundme for Andre.
It's GoFundMe such support Andre Brown, So that exists, so
please donate.
Speaker 2 (34:29):
To that if you can, and we'll link to it
in the episode. Yeah description as well.
Speaker 4 (34:32):
And you guys have the power to vote for the DA.
I mean, we can vote in progressive district attorneys. So
just so you guys know that you have the power
to make sure that there are conviction review units, that
there are progressive das that don't fight these convictions that
are so obvious, so obvious.
Speaker 3 (34:50):
And before we go to we have a tradition on
the show, we call it closing arguments. But before we
do that, there's one other very special person in this
room I want to acknowledge, and this is a young
man named right, your.
Speaker 2 (35:01):
Son's daf Aj.
Speaker 3 (35:03):
I heard somewhere that he scored thirty points in a
basketball game this week, So if there's any agents in
the room, might want to get in now because he's
only twelve.
Speaker 4 (35:12):
Actually, I did want to talk about Aja Tamika and Andre.
You knew each other from high school, yes, and now
you're married. You did over twenty years in prison, and
actually we talked about how you're lucky that you're alive,
because if you're a leg you're lucky now that you're
out a lot of people get out and don't have family,
and you have a wonderful wife and a son, yes,
(35:32):
that you're coming home to right.
Speaker 2 (35:34):
There, right there, right look for.
Speaker 5 (35:39):
Not only do people not have family, they don't have hope,
they don't have faith. They lose their souls inside of
prison because they don't have friends. I've seen individuals walk
in the yard until they turn mad because they're innocent
and now everybody has shunned them. So what does that
really mean when society itself make you the treads and
(36:03):
then inside of the prison you're a nobody.
Speaker 7 (36:09):
Well, it's just a dangerous place. Where we were waiting
for Andrea's hearing because of COVID. One of the reasons
we filed for the virtual hearing was Andre was actually
on the phone with Tamika on Thanksgiving Day and some
other guy in the prison thought he was on the
phone too long and nearly took Andre's eyes, stabbed him
in the face with a pen. Yeah, while he was
on the phone with Tamika, right, Yes, And you know
(36:32):
I wrote to the judge and said, look, we got
to get this guy hearing like he's in the Honors prison.
By way, this is the place in the Eastern those
are here know they call it Happy Nap because it's
like the place where you're supposed to be the safest.
And he got attacked just on the phone. So you know,
sending someone to prison is you know, it could potentially
be a death sentence.
Speaker 3 (36:50):
It is for too many people. And we know that
right here in Manhattan and right here in New York
Rikers Island. Since may Or Adams took office, twenty nine
people at last count, have been murdered and Riker's Island,
and most of them, overwhelming the jar of them had
even been convicted of anything.
Speaker 8 (37:03):
Yet most of them were presumed innocent.
Speaker 2 (37:04):
Yeah, just waiting for trials.
Speaker 6 (37:06):
Detainees.
Speaker 2 (37:07):
Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 3 (37:07):
That could have been you, or could have been so
many other people in this room. So anyone who's just
listened to the Wrongful Conviction podcast knows this is my
favorite part of the show. We call it closing Arguments.
It's where we thank each of you, Maggie and I
for being here with us today, everybody in the audience,
everybody listening at home, and then turn it over to
Oscar first to say anything else is left to be said,
(37:29):
and then you take us off into the sunset anything
you want to say.
Speaker 7 (37:32):
First of all, thank you for being involved in the
issue and spread the word. Tell people that there are
folks in there who don't belong there. There are many
people who serve their time in a route that will
never get the justice that they deserve and that time
has been lost. Will let people know that this is
an issue that should be addressed at every time that
there's a DA running for office.
Speaker 5 (37:51):
And for me, I got to mention some of my
great colleagues, Michael Cobb, who we all know is shot,
do Raphael Martine, as Pedro Rodriguez, Noachia Rose, Ronaldo Morgan.
These men are still fighting for their freedom today and
I mentioned them because I want everybody here in the
(38:15):
live audience at home to take a second look. I
give you the analogy that I give to some of
the students when I did my last speech with Jeff,
and it is like when you guys are driving home
and you just see something as simple as a pedestrian
(38:36):
pulled over on the side of the road, and you're
just like, oh, it must be a lawful stop, so
you just keep moving. Take a second look, take a
second look when you see somebody in trouble, because you
never will know when it's your time to give that
help in hand.
Speaker 2 (38:56):
Thank you, Thank you for listening to Wrongful Conviction.
Speaker 3 (39:07):
You can listen to this and all the Lava for
Good podcasts 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 Clyburn.
The music in this production was supplied by three time
OSCAR nominated composer Jay Ralph. Be sure to follow us
(39:28):
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 a production of
Lava for Good podcasts and association with Signal Company Number
one
On the evening of January fifteenth, nineteen ninety nine, a
masked man approached two teenage boys in front of a
bodega in the Bronx on a corner known for drug activity.
The assailant drew a gun and shot one of the
young men several times while the other ran off. The
gunman chased the other young man down the block and
around the corner before paralyzing him with one shot to
(00:26):
the back. While both victims survived, only one was conscious,
but he couldn't or wouldn't provide a lead. An eyewitness
said that she recognized the shooter as a guy from
the neighborhood named Drey. The police remembered Andre Brown, a
neighborhood kid who was shot in the leg one year
prior in a drug dispute. The specter of his injured
(00:48):
leg and alternate suspects were ignored when both the witness
and the victim agreed that Andre was the assailant. But
this is wrongful conviction. Welcome back to wrongful Conviction. Recently,
(01:16):
Jason Flamm and I were asked to record an interview
in front of a live audience at the annual United
Justice Coalition Summit. The UJC aims to raise awareness around
social justice issues and the need for criminal legal system reform.
So for our live interview, we thought of a mutual friend,
someone whose case I covered on my podcast Unjustin Unsolved
(01:36):
while he was still wrongfully incarcerated, Andre Brown. Andre agreed
to join us at the summit along with his attorney
Oscar Michelin.
Speaker 2 (01:49):
Thanks everybody for being here.
Speaker 3 (01:50):
I'm gonna ask, first of all, how many people in
this room were wrongfully convicted and sentenced? Oh my god,
see that? And how many people here know somebody who
was wrongfully convicted? Oh my god, that's a lot of hands. Yeah,
this shit is everywhere. It's horrible, and I'm really really
thrilled to be here with these amazing, amazing people. Maggie Feeling, Oscar,
and of course Andre Brown. And I'm so glad that
(02:13):
Andrea is here. I mean, I'm so glad you're here,
because I'm so glad you're here with your amazing, beautiful
family and everything.
Speaker 2 (02:18):
But his case start with this, Okay.
Speaker 3 (02:22):
It features a witness who didn't testify, but her testimony
was allowed in any way, which meant that no one.
Speaker 2 (02:29):
Was allowed to cross examine her.
Speaker 3 (02:31):
Second of all, the shooter shot one guy execution style,
then chased his friend caught up to him on the street. Now,
this is an eighteen year old kid running for his life,
and somehow this guy was fast enough to catch up
with him and shoot him and paralyze him too. Andre
had a bullet wound in his leg and had a
syndrome that meant that he could barely walk, much less run.
(02:54):
And it also features a lawyer who, while he was
representing Andrea A. Try Well, had a side hustle which
was committing so many crimes for the Banano crime family
that he ended up being the only attorney in American
history to enter the Witness Protection program.
Speaker 2 (03:11):
So it's a shit show.
Speaker 3 (03:13):
So get ready to hear what we're about to hear,
because this is just different and Andre is just a
different kind of guy.
Speaker 2 (03:19):
I mean to no one is to love him.
Speaker 4 (03:21):
So with that, Maggie all right, So hello everyone, thanks
for coming. So we're just gonna start from the top
with Andre. Why don't you tell us a little bit
about yourself.
Speaker 5 (03:31):
I was raised in a two parent household. It was
the Uptime area, the Northeast Bronx. The crack epidemic was
going on a lot of gun shots being fired continuously.
The trains were littered homeless people, and it was just
a real, just tragic time in the Bronx. My life
was a fair life. My mother was a stewardess for
(03:53):
the airlines, and she raised us and groomed us to
be good individuals.
Speaker 6 (03:58):
And then my mother and my father separated.
Speaker 5 (04:01):
At that time, I was in high school, and now
I was taken on the onus of raising my brothers.
So I said, how can I now change the course
of their lives and allow myself to continue in an
upward manner. First I took on a job at creating barrel,
(04:24):
trying to think that it would be able to fit
the bill, and it didn't. It couldn't feed my little
sister or my other two brothers. So at that time
I said, you know what, I have to do something else.
And my friend introduced me to selling drugs. And when
I started to sell drugs, literally I thought I was
a genius at it. And this is how your mind
(04:46):
gets cultivated poorly in the streets. You start to really
engage and think that you know better than law enforcement,
you know better than society, and you also know better
than that old adage car tune the turtle and the rabbit,
thinking that, oh, I know what I'm doing. I'm running
past this little working man, this turtle. So in selling
(05:10):
drugs and thinking I was a genius, I got shot,
a simple leg shot, mind you, It hit my major
artery and I almost led to death. And that was
the turning point in my life.
Speaker 4 (05:23):
So you almost died, So you got on a better
path in life.
Speaker 5 (05:26):
Yes, First of all, you have to be an enforcer
on a block in order to hold it down. I
was injured, critically injured. I was at the point where
I couldn't walk, I could no longer hold down a block.
So I said, what am I going to do now
with my life? And I started going back to college.
At that point I enrolled in BMCC. And that's when
(05:47):
you know.
Speaker 4 (05:48):
Tragedy occurred, right, And I want to bring that to Oscar.
January fifteenth, nineteen ninety nine. What happened that day?
Speaker 7 (05:56):
So, on that day there was a shooting on a
street corner in the Bronx Allerton Avenue, White Planes Road.
Speaker 8 (06:02):
That area.
Speaker 7 (06:03):
The corner there was Little Bodeig, a little corner store
had been a spot where young Jamaican gang had started
selling marijuana out of for the past about year or so,
and the cops were aware of that, and so there
became a little bit of a rival turf war for
that location from the earlier crews that had been working
there selling marijuana. And so the first incident that happened
(06:26):
was on January eleventh, there was a shootout on that corner,
two exchanges of gunfire. Nobody got shot, some cars were
shot up, so the police responded. On January thirteenth, two
days later, one of the guys that hustles on that corner,
guy named O'Neil virgo, got arrested, and sure enough the
gun he had on him was connected to the shooting
(06:47):
on the eleventh, so he gets the rest of for
a gun charge. And then on the fifteenth, O'Neil Virgo
and another man, Sewann Nicholson or out on that corner
selling drugs. Somebody comes up right down White Planes Road,
sees them on the corner, They see the gun, got
a mask on. The shooter literally stands over O'Neil virgo
and shoots him several times and then runs down the
(07:08):
street to try to get the other guy, Sewan Nicholson
they were in a full city block.
Speaker 8 (07:13):
He makes a left turn onto the.
Speaker 7 (07:15):
Next block, which is Alinville, and the shooter shoots him
there one time, hits him in the spine and paralyzes him.
Somehow they both survived, so his attempted murder, there was
lots of discrepancies as to what the shooter was wearing.
Was it a face mask, was it a handkerchief of bandana,
et cetera. So they asked the victim at that time,
Sean Nicholson, mister Virgo could not speak. He was the
(07:37):
one who shot five or six times. And that initial
police report Sewan Nicholson, he says, I can't identify the shooter,
and so the police start scouring the area looking for witnesses.
Speaker 3 (07:47):
So how did it end up with them settling on
a guy who, it should have been painfully obvious from
the very beginning not only didn't do it, but couldn't
have done it.
Speaker 7 (07:59):
They started listening to rumors in the in the street
and one of the women who later recanted said, you know,
the shooter looked a little bit like this guy I
know from the neighborhood dre. So the next thing they
do with that is go to the hospital and get
Sean Nicholson, who had repeatedly said I didn't see the
guy he had a mask to pick Andre allegedly out
(08:20):
of a photo array. So what Nicholson actually said, or
what the police got him to say, was, as he
was falling to the ground, he looked over his shoulder
and saw the shooter pulled the mask off his face
and he could recognize Andre from the neighborhood.
Speaker 8 (08:33):
Sounds totally legit exactly happens all the time.
Speaker 7 (08:36):
Two days later, a witness comes forward who claims she
was in her car when the shooting occurred. And this
is about five point thirty six o'clock at night on
a winter night, so it was just starting to get
dark in January. And then she says she saw the
shooter run past her and pull up his mask just
as he passed her car window. She also said that
(08:57):
the shots were fired by her car, but the shots
that shot mister Nicholson as a described around the corner,
so she would not have been able to see what
she said she saw. And she said that she was
so upset that night she reported to the police because
she almost had a heart attack and she was treated
for angina. That night, so she didn't come forward until
two days later. After there was already the rumors in
(09:19):
the neighborhood and they were already looking for Andre.
Speaker 4 (09:22):
So, Andre, when you found out they were looking for you,
you turned yourself in with a lawyer.
Speaker 6 (09:26):
Yes.
Speaker 5 (09:27):
They came to my girlfriend's house early in the morning.
They missed me. I had just went out to get
breakfast really quick and came back. She was trembling and
she said, listen, the police were here. They left the
card that they searched the home. I immediately reached out
to my mom and she said, Andre, they were just
here also, I was just about to call you. And
I went to the Bar Association to meet Martin Fisher.
(09:49):
Martin Fisher was a family attorney, and I said, Marty,
they're looking for me. I don't know what they're looking
for me for. They were contacted by Martin and they said,
we want to ask him a few questions. He said, no,
he's represented by me. You cannot ask him any questions.
I said, okay, Well, if we need him, we'll contact you.
Two days later, on the Wednesday morning, they contacted him.
Speaker 6 (10:10):
Which was the twentieth of January.
Speaker 5 (10:12):
And I went down there with my mom and my
girlfriend at the time, and walked right into the prison.
I didn't have a worry in the world because I
knew that I didn't have anything to do with this case.
So at that time I was not a prisoner yet.
I was actually seated outside of the push door. And
it's ironic because one of the detectives there, he said, Andre,
(10:32):
don't you remember me?
Speaker 6 (10:33):
And I'm like, no, I don't. Who are you?
Speaker 5 (10:35):
He said, when you were shot? I came to the hospital,
so they knew that I was shot already before even
any questions were occurring. And then my attorney went inside
spoke to them, and he came back out, and at
that point they arrested me. And I became enraged. You know,
I was yelling at my attorney. I was yelling at them.
(10:57):
I said, listen, I could have never committed this crime.
I showed them my injury. They noted it. It was
on the police reports. And then I went to a lineup,
and when I went to the lineup, I was picked
out of the lineup as the suspect.
Speaker 3 (11:23):
It's a perfect time to highlight the fact that I
witness identification has been proven in experiments to be less
accurate than guessing when you're in a hyper tense situation,
like your own life is on the line, when there's
gunshots being fired, when it's a running gun situation. Literally
in this case, your adrenalinees going. And most people think
their minds work like a camera, but in fact we're
(11:45):
so easily influenced that in this case, it seems like
the police may have influenced these witnesses, and I'm being
very kind.
Speaker 2 (11:51):
They may have, and.
Speaker 7 (11:52):
We believe that she did witness it, that she was there,
that we do believe, but we believe that she was
guided into picking the wrong person.
Speaker 1 (12:00):
In addition to any guidance the victim and the witness
may have received from law enforcement, Andre's case features a
very unfortunate coincidence. It became clear many years later when
the true assailant was discovered that he and Andre could
easily be mistaken for one another, especially given the alleged
quick glances that the witness and victim were relying on
(12:21):
to make their identifications.
Speaker 2 (12:24):
What were the.
Speaker 6 (12:24):
Charges to attempted murders?
Speaker 5 (12:27):
Two assaults, breakless endangerment, and the list just goes on and.
Speaker 7 (12:31):
On and everything under a gun possession, gun possession. The
family hired a well known criminal defense attorney named Ira Brown,
and the first appearance, Ira says to the judge, but
the family retained me, but they don't have enough money
to pay for an expert. Can the court pay for
an expert? You see, Judge, my client just recently started
being able to walk without a cane. He's still undergoing
(12:52):
physical therapy, and at the time of this shooting, he
couldn't possibly have ran the two city blocks that the
shooter did. So I want to get the medical records,
and I want to hire an expert orthopedist. And the
judge said, well, that sounds like a pretty strong defense.
So let me start with five hundred dollars get the
medical records, and then when you hired the expert, let
me know, you know what else you need, because yes,
(13:13):
we'll pay for that. What happened was Ira was on
trial two or three times in a row when Andrea's
case was on and the family decided we have to
get somebody else. At that time, there were a lot
of mafia trials going on, you know, the Gotti cases,
and mafia lawyers were kind of considered the cream of
the crop, and they hired a guy named Thomas Lee
(13:34):
to take over the case, and that's where everything fell apart.
So even though the judge had approved this money, Thomas
never pursued the medical evidence after that. And there were
two witnesses that he told the court he was trying
to locate who would name another shooter, a witness named
Graham and a witness named Cleveland. And he gave subpoenas
(13:54):
to the judge and he didn't have the addresses on
the subpoenas, so the judge said, I can't sign a
blank subpoena. Get me the addresses and I'll sign them.
And he never did anything else after that. The last straw,
and what Jason was referring to, was that the one
eyewitness was going to testify. The woman in the car
ran into Andre's mother and a family friend at a
laundromat and they pleaded with her, you know, you made
(14:16):
a mistake.
Speaker 8 (14:17):
My son didn't do this.
Speaker 7 (14:18):
She reports that to the DA, who reports it to
the judge, and the judge said, well, that's perfectly normal.
They didn't threaten her. They just told her they think
her son is innocent. But what the DA was saying
was that she didn't want to come forward and testify.
We believe she didn't want to come forward and testify
because she knew that she probably did not identify the
right person. But what happened after that is the day
before she's supposed to testify, a bullet in an envelope
(14:40):
ends up under her windshield wiper and it says, this
is what happens to rats, you fat bitch.
Speaker 5 (14:47):
And it was written in reading and ready with two
bullets in a left on her windshield.
Speaker 7 (14:53):
Right, so of course Andre's incarcerated, so so he didn't
do it.
Speaker 2 (14:57):
Right.
Speaker 7 (14:58):
The point about Lee being involved, what the judge said
was it had to have been someone connected to the defendant.
What she didn't consider it was the lawyer was a
fully made member of the Banano crime family and one
of the crimes he got arrested for and turned informant
was that he would go to the jail and speak
to the dawn who was arrested because he could go
(15:18):
see him without anybody listening. He's a lawyer, and he
would go back and give instructions including who to give
a garbage contract to in Staten Island, who to give
a garbage contract to in the Bronx and who to
kill and who to promote within the family, who's more
likely to intimidate it Like that's their game, that's what
they do.
Speaker 8 (15:36):
This sounds like a mob guy.
Speaker 7 (15:38):
And it would also explain why he wouldn't do the
rest of the work because he says, there's one witness.
If she doesn't show up, the case is over, and
I can't you know, many times they would tell clients,
you know, they would say, don't worry, she's not going
to show up. And I would say them, you know,
the third floor in Attica is called a she showed
up wing. Okay, you know, don't count on someone not
(15:58):
showing up. She's going to show she hates you, okay.
But so he was probably counting on that he was
going to be able to intimidate her and I don't
need to worry about it.
Speaker 1 (16:08):
Even though it's believed that this witness refused to testify
due to her doubts over her identification, the appearance of
witness intimidation probably did not reflect well on Andre. Meanwhile,
his attorney's trial strategy hinged on both her absence and
being able to cross examine the victim, who had initially
said that he could not identify the shooter. Well, both
(16:29):
of those things came to pass. The witness's absence at
trial had an unforeseen and unfortunate result.
Speaker 7 (16:36):
They let the DA read her testimony from the grand jury.
It was a total of six questions. Where were you
on that night in my car?
Speaker 8 (16:45):
What happened?
Speaker 7 (16:46):
Somebody ran behind me? What happened after that? I saw
a second person would have gone ran after him? What
happened after that? I heard shots? What happened after that?
He pulled his mask off. Were he able to see
his face?
Speaker 8 (16:56):
Yes? Did you recognize him? Yes?
Speaker 2 (16:58):
Who?
Speaker 8 (16:59):
Andre Bran?
Speaker 7 (17:00):
Now she didn't know the name Andre Brown. She only
knew was Dre. But by the time the grand jury
she had learned the name, and he said, how do
you know him from around the neighborhood?
Speaker 8 (17:09):
That's it?
Speaker 7 (17:09):
Okay, those eight questions, whatever I just went through. That
was her testimony. That's what convicted Andre essentially was those
eight questions. But she wasn't cross examined about being in
the car at night, being scared. The jury never heard
she almost had a heart attack. The jury never saw
how similar Andrea looked to the real shooter. Obviously, Now,
Nicholson testified, you know also that he saw him as
(17:30):
he fell, and he was pretty well cross examined by Lee.
I will say that that's what he was good at
to say how incredible it could be that you could
be falling down looking over your shoulder and catch a
glimpse of a guy, you know. So that was the
whole evidence.
Speaker 4 (17:43):
Right there, right So to just summarize the entire evidence
against you, Andre, was not cross testimony from this witness.
That's it.
Speaker 8 (17:51):
That's it. No motive, no physical evidence.
Speaker 4 (17:54):
Those eight questions convicted Andre.
Speaker 3 (17:57):
So Andre, that moment when the jury came back in,
can you take us inside your heart, your soul, your
experience of being in that courtroom jury comes back and
says guilty.
Speaker 5 (18:10):
At that very moment, I was shaking the pinnacle of
either I'm going home or I received this forty years.
And I sat there and the judge came in and
we all rose, and there was one guy I'll never
forget in the jury and he kept looking at me
and he was shaking his head like, yo, Yo, it's
not good, man, it's not good. And I looked at him.
I said what happened? He said, Yo, they found you guilty.
(18:33):
And I told Lee I hit him. I said, Yo,
they're gonna find me guilty. He said, what are you
talking about. I put on a great defense and he
put on no defense. Didn't bring my medical records anything
like that to the jury's attention. And I was trembling
knowing that I was about to be convicted. I just
felt like an entire cold go over my body. It's
(18:55):
almost as if your soul leaves you, because you know
this is the trend information of life itself. After I
was convicted, I was taken back upstairs. I was crying continuously,
taking back to records island. So the judge waited. I
think it was like three months before sentencing, and I
thought that the judge would have saw the lies and
(19:18):
would have changed her mind and sent me home. I
can remember it clearly. I said, she's going to see it.
She'll see the lies, she'll see that Thomas Lee didn't
put on the defense. She'll be able to see medical
records something. But when I come back, I'm going to
be freed. And when I was sentenced, I snapped again
(19:41):
and I said, do you see what you're doing to
an innocent man? Do you see what you're taking me
away from? Do you see that you're taking me from
my college, from my family, from my potential girlfriend, everything
that I've worked so hard for. Do you see what
you're taking away from me? And she said, mister Brown,
I'll understand, but you have an appeal. And she sentenced me.
She said, for the first count, I'm going to sentence
(20:03):
you to twenty years, and then she said for the
second count, I'm going to sentence you to twenty years.
And both of these sentences will run consecutive to one another.
And I didn't understand what that meant at the time.
And then when I got back and they gave me
my sentence and commitment papers, it said forty years. I
(20:36):
want our audience to really understand going through a bullpen
therapy in the three stages of prison because it changes
the cognition of your mind.
Speaker 4 (20:45):
Well, so you were a child, so your brain is
still developing when you went into prison.
Speaker 5 (20:49):
Absolutely, so you know I'm arrested, kicking, screaming, being dragged
into prison saying you did something that you didn't do.
I go through the central booking is the first stage
of prison. Straight madness and chaos. People sleeping on the floor,
You're trying to get to the phone system. You're trying
to lay on a bench where individuals is fighting and
(21:10):
pulling and tugging and saying if you're not built like that,
you're not sleeping on the bench. You're going to sleep
under the bench. You're going to sleep on the floor.
You may sleep near the toilet whereas all urine filled.
So this is the first stage of being thrown inside
the madness. And then the second stage is going through
reyk As Island. And now you're fighting to get on
(21:31):
the phones again, you're fighting in the yard. You're making
sure now you're exercising so that you can stay you know,
built for anything that's going to come at you. So
it's a war zone from Central Book and two reyk
As Island. And now you're getting thrown inside the Department
of Corrections where they're supposed to rehabilitate you. But now
(21:52):
it's more gangs, it's more violence, it's more police assault,
it's more just the pitfalls of the criminal justice system.
So immediately my mind started to trigger Andre. Now you're
going to be like them. You have to now engage
into the brutality to make it to take phone, to
(22:17):
carry raisers, to carry sharp objects, to protect yourself. You
have to battle in order to have your core beliefs
and your freedom's met in the minds of these men
who understand that we're criminals.
Speaker 4 (22:33):
When you put an innocent child in prison with people
that are actually dangerous, there are dangerous people in prison.
You have to survive, absolutely, and that could also be
a huge hindrance to him getting out if he got
in a fight or someone attacked him and something happened.
I mean, we don't even think about that when we
put someone like you in prison that's innocent, you could
(22:55):
come out an actual criminal.
Speaker 6 (22:57):
At that point, it came up.
Speaker 7 (22:58):
But as strong as you got into a fight, and
the DA brought it to the attention that he got
into a violent altercation at prison because they made a
bail application. So even though you didn't know that, that's
exactly what happened.
Speaker 4 (23:09):
I didn't know that, but yeah, that could have hurt
your chances of getting out absolutely. So, Oscar, how did
you get this man out of prison?
Speaker 6 (23:16):
Yeah, let's get to the good stuff here.
Speaker 7 (23:19):
Well, So, one of the reasons I got involved in
Andrea's case is this is my neighborhood. We went to
the same high school, Christopher Columbus and the bronx for Columbus.
Speaker 2 (23:26):
He wrongly identified a whole country.
Speaker 7 (23:28):
Exactly wasn't even on the same continent. But in any event,
the case right, I said, it spoke to me, but
also showed how weak it was. We just found out
a lot during freedom information laws, which is everybody's good friend.
We first found a report at DD five that was
not given to either mister Ira Brown or to Lee
(23:50):
that showed that the police had actually tested the bullets
and found that the bullets on the fifteenth matched the
gun that was used on the eleventh, So we already
knew that Virgo had one of the guns, so this
had to be the gun that was shooting at Virgo
on the eleventh. So frankly, I felt that was almost
enough because now we had a motive for the jury
(24:12):
that the same person who shot at these two young
men also shot them on the fifteenth. And O'Neil Virgo
had told the police he got a look at the
person who shot him on the eleventh and he didn't
think it was Andre. So if Andre didn't shoot him
on the eleventh, and how could Andre have had the
gun on the fifteenth, And the judge at his hearing
had a lot of questions about that. That was the
first thing. We then found another DD five of a witness,
(24:33):
Courtney Weezy, who said that the shooter was wearing a TAM.
A tam is what Jamaica men were to hold the dreads.
It's a big woolf cat. Courtney Weezy said the shooter
had a TAM and he was showing a photo array
with Andrea's picture in it and said he couldn't recognize
anybody in the photo ray or we only got the
first page and I noticed there was a check mark
(24:54):
on the front page as witness can I d yes?
And then no one ever got the second page, said
makes I.
Speaker 4 (25:00):
Know, so that's a Brady violation.
Speaker 7 (25:02):
That would be a Brady violation. But they argued that
the shooter had a mask on, so you know, it
wasn't a big deal and he couldn't see it. But
the point is he had a right to know that,
and so I said, well, there'd be no reason for
Andre to be wearing a tan. So this shooter was
likely Jamaican, and I knew that back then there was
a lot of battle between Jamaicans and American blacks over
(25:23):
turf as the Jamaicans are moving into the Bronx. So
didn't make sense to me that both of the victims
were Jamaican. Why would a Jamaican shoot these victims. But
we found out when we located the witnesses was that
the real shooter was a Jamaican guy who happened to
have gotten into the neighborhood little bit earlier and was
working with American blacks to sell weed at that location,
and even though they were Jamaican, he didn't like that
(25:44):
they were working his corner, and that's what the shooting
was all about. The guy who we discovered was the
real shooter, we did some research and tried to get
his yearbook picture, and we got his middle school yearbook picture.
By sheer coincidence. The principal of the middle school that
he went to ended up being my teacher from back
in seventh grade. So there's a lot of connections for
me in the case. If you put these pictures side
(26:05):
by side, Andre and the real shooter look extremely similar.
And that's a key factor is that the person who
might have seen the real shooter when his mass was
off could have easily picked him as Andre. They were
the exact same height and the exact same weight, okay,
and a very similar face. When we found the motion,
(26:25):
we showed, hey, look what TAM means. The real shooter
we found out was Jamaican. He would wear that the
victims were selling weed. Andre never sold weed. This guy
only sold weed. Seven months after this shooting, guess what happened.
Real shooter gets gunned down.
Speaker 5 (26:38):
Just finding the funeral picture where he actually had dreads, right,
we were able to actually put together the two pieces
of the TAM and now the dreads with the funeral pictures.
Speaker 7 (26:47):
Right, we found his funeral program, which is great because
it said his real name, but in the middle of
it said Bonkers. Okay, his nickname was Bonkers. And the
witness said, this guy was crazy. This guy would shoot
you up for no reason. So it's like, let's put
this together here, okay. And then we actually found a
surgeon who did the surgery on Andre's leg. He had
(27:10):
a very serious condition called compartment syndrome. And what happens
there is you get shot and your leg swells up
so much that they have to expose all four quadrants
of your calf. They cut it open, and they leave
you lying in bed with open wounds until the pressure
goes down. He had skin grasps. We're talking about a
scar from his thigh down to his ankle, proven atrophy.
(27:32):
And the doctor actually remembered the case, which is unbelievable.
He's the head of trauma at Jacobi in the Bronx,
which is a trauma one center, so this is not
some quack. And now he was head of medicine and
surgery at Mymodny's in Brooklyn.
Speaker 5 (27:48):
And listen, I just want to say that when you're
wrongfully convicted, you better know God. All right, We're not
going to allow that not to be set on this
forum right now.
Speaker 8 (28:00):
It really must.
Speaker 5 (28:01):
Be stated because a lot of this is sheer luck
and God's umbrella had to be on me because my
surgeon was alive.
Speaker 7 (28:11):
And he said, there's no way someone with this injury
could have ran. He said, maybe he could pull his
leg along, he said, but he would have a noticeable
limp at best. And the judge at Andrea's hearings said,
could he jog? He said no, he could not jog.
He could not jog. He could not run this quickly.
The problem was because the case was so old, there
(28:32):
were no physical therapy records, to show how far along.
Speaker 6 (28:37):
To when it got those medical.
Speaker 9 (28:39):
Records, to make us his amazing wife, and not to
mention my brother Devon who's not here, also where we
were on the phone like illegally at that point making
three week calls to Jacobe Hospital to locate these records.
Speaker 7 (28:53):
This surgeon he actually called over there to try to
get him himself. I mean, he really knew that something
wrong was going on. Ronald Simon, he said, there's got
to be pt records there, maybe Ifi Coal, you know,
we'll find them. And no one could find those therapy
recordscause they don't preserve them. It's talking about the nineteen
ninety we'll looking for them in twenty twenty, you know.
But we did have Ira Brown telling the judge at
(29:14):
his first court appearance, my client is still undergoing physical
therapy and only recently was able to walk without a cane,
and so that formed the basis.
Speaker 3 (29:25):
You know, there are a series of sort of miracles
right that led to.
Speaker 2 (29:28):
You being here.
Speaker 3 (29:28):
But it points out, you know, my estimate is that
there's probably around two hundred thousand innocent people in prison
while we're sitting here right now in this country and
that's probably conservative. And those people, many of them, don't
have a way out. They don't have an Oscar Michelin, right,
they don't have a Maggie Feeling to do a podcast
about the case.
Speaker 2 (29:49):
In fact, this goes back to very early when we first.
Speaker 3 (29:51):
Started the Wrongful Conviction podcast and our producer back then
was a woman named Sabine Jas and she alerted me
to your case. I brought it to our fantastic PR
person named Don Cameron.
Speaker 2 (30:01):
Amazed to generate some interest.
Speaker 6 (30:05):
We brought Jeffrey Deskovic in.
Speaker 3 (30:06):
I was about to go there and let me brag
on Jeffrey for a second. So Jeffrey Deskovic right there,
sitting in the front row, standing in the front row,
standing now wrongfully convicted, served sixteen years in New York
State and is now a member of the bar.
Speaker 2 (30:22):
And he turned out to be Listen.
Speaker 5 (30:25):
As a joke, and as a joke, you know, we
say that Jeffrey is the media whore.
Speaker 6 (30:32):
Okay, Now they.
Speaker 4 (30:34):
Love your case because the jeff you brought the case.
Speaker 5 (30:37):
Listen, they love jeff the media so immediately, and it's
not a.
Speaker 6 (30:42):
Joke, guys.
Speaker 5 (30:43):
Its a lot of attention to this, Yes, because Jeff
is my brother. Jeff is the guy who went hard,
extremely hard in the media for my case him and
then Sabine will never forget Sabine because she contacted Jason
and Jason said, who's Andre Brown, and so being explained
it and he said, listen, we got to put Dawn
(31:05):
on this because the only thing that Governor Cuomo does
in the morning is he reads and not bad. So
at that point he put Dawn right in the fray
of everything, and the campaign began.
Speaker 7 (31:21):
First, we went to the Conviction Review Unit. They rejected
the case and so we filed a four to forty.
Speaker 5 (31:27):
At that time, it was COVID and they were not
trying to bring me down on a hearing.
Speaker 7 (31:32):
We had asked for a virtual hearing because the courts
were closed to in person hearings, and the DA opposed that,
and then Jeff organized a rally in front of her
office to try to get her to agree to a
virtual hearing, and we had a hearing and the judge
agreed that at the very least Lee was ineffective for
(31:52):
not presenting the medical evidence, and just to put the
icing on it. I've known Jeff for a long time.
We kind of mentored him through with his law school experience,
and he became an admitted attorney right before we had
got a hearing granted, so I asked him to second seat. Mean,
Andre was just first client. So and he's back in
a hundred.
Speaker 4 (32:13):
So actually, Oscar, I do want to point out not
exactly a hundred Andre.
Speaker 8 (32:18):
No, I shouldn't say that's right.
Speaker 4 (32:19):
Andrea is not exonerated yet, which is why we're here
telling his story because the bronx DA is actually still
fighting his conviction, wanting to put Andre back in prison.
So not only do we need to exonerate him, we
need to make sure that he doesn't go back to prison.
Speaker 7 (32:36):
Yeah, they're they're filed an appeal of the vacature of
the conviction, and I got to tell you, you know,
the odds of its success are are not high, the low.
But this room speaks to what happens when you caught
up in the criminal justice system. Right if you if
you're counting on the criminal justicism to work out for you,
you know you're going to get very sorely disappointed. So
(32:59):
it really, you know, is a case that should not
be appealed. Never mind the fact that he served well
over twenty years for a crime that we established, you know,
he didn't commit, but to just drag it on, have
this over his head. They fought bail. Now after the
judge vacated his conviction, they asked for five hundred thousand
dollars bail. Okay, the judge released him, but to supervise release,
(33:22):
just like it wouldn't give us the measure that he
was actually innocent. Took the safe path and said he
was ineffective. You know, as I said to Jason before
we came out here, I've been involved in a lot
of cases. I've never had a case with this much
evidence of innocence. And the judge just couldn't get there.
And then he couldn't just do roar. He had to
send him to supervised release. So it's just constant. The
(33:43):
justice system loves finality. They want to, you know, keep
that hold on you. To the point where when he
first started going to the supervised release place, which is
now run by the Fortune Society, they called us and said,
why are we supervising this person. He went to another
program to be interviewed and they ended up hiring them
instead of supervising.
Speaker 6 (34:03):
He works there.
Speaker 7 (34:04):
Now, Yes, I mean, it's really daunting and it's very
discomforting to believe that.
Speaker 8 (34:10):
You know, we now have to wait.
Speaker 7 (34:11):
It'll take about two years to decide this appeal.
Speaker 3 (34:14):
And I want to get to what people here can do,
if they can write letters, or if there's anything else
they could do to make their voices heard for Andre.
Speaker 4 (34:20):
Well, I do know there's a go fundme for Andre.
It's GoFundMe such support Andre Brown, So that exists, so
please donate.
Speaker 2 (34:29):
To that if you can, and we'll link to it
in the episode. Yeah description as well.
Speaker 4 (34:32):
And you guys have the power to vote for the DA.
I mean, we can vote in progressive district attorneys. So
just so you guys know that you have the power
to make sure that there are conviction review units, that
there are progressive das that don't fight these convictions that
are so obvious, so obvious.
Speaker 3 (34:50):
And before we go to we have a tradition on
the show, we call it closing arguments. But before we
do that, there's one other very special person in this
room I want to acknowledge, and this is a young
man named right, your.
Speaker 2 (35:01):
Son's daf Aj.
Speaker 3 (35:03):
I heard somewhere that he scored thirty points in a
basketball game this week, So if there's any agents in
the room, might want to get in now because he's
only twelve.
Speaker 4 (35:12):
Actually, I did want to talk about Aja Tamika and Andre.
You knew each other from high school, yes, and now
you're married. You did over twenty years in prison, and
actually we talked about how you're lucky that you're alive,
because if you're a leg you're lucky now that you're
out a lot of people get out and don't have family,
and you have a wonderful wife and a son, yes,
(35:32):
that you're coming home to right.
Speaker 2 (35:34):
There, right there, right look for.
Speaker 5 (35:39):
Not only do people not have family, they don't have hope,
they don't have faith. They lose their souls inside of
prison because they don't have friends. I've seen individuals walk
in the yard until they turn mad because they're innocent
and now everybody has shunned them. So what does that
really mean when society itself make you the treads and
(36:03):
then inside of the prison you're a nobody.
Speaker 7 (36:09):
Well, it's just a dangerous place. Where we were waiting
for Andrea's hearing because of COVID. One of the reasons
we filed for the virtual hearing was Andre was actually
on the phone with Tamika on Thanksgiving Day and some
other guy in the prison thought he was on the
phone too long and nearly took Andre's eyes, stabbed him
in the face with a pen. Yeah, while he was
on the phone with Tamika, right, Yes, And you know
(36:32):
I wrote to the judge and said, look, we got
to get this guy hearing like he's in the Honors prison.
By way, this is the place in the Eastern those
are here know they call it Happy Nap because it's
like the place where you're supposed to be the safest.
And he got attacked just on the phone. So you know,
sending someone to prison is you know, it could potentially
be a death sentence.
Speaker 3 (36:50):
It is for too many people. And we know that
right here in Manhattan and right here in New York
Rikers Island. Since may Or Adams took office, twenty nine
people at last count, have been murdered and Riker's Island,
and most of them, overwhelming the jar of them had
even been convicted of anything.
Speaker 8 (37:03):
Yet most of them were presumed innocent.
Speaker 2 (37:04):
Yeah, just waiting for trials.
Speaker 6 (37:06):
Detainees.
Speaker 2 (37:07):
Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 3 (37:07):
That could have been you, or could have been so
many other people in this room. So anyone who's just
listened to the Wrongful Conviction podcast knows this is my
favorite part of the show. We call it closing Arguments.
It's where we thank each of you, Maggie and I
for being here with us today, everybody in the audience,
everybody listening at home, and then turn it over to
Oscar first to say anything else is left to be said,
(37:29):
and then you take us off into the sunset anything
you want to say.
Speaker 7 (37:32):
First of all, thank you for being involved in the
issue and spread the word. Tell people that there are
folks in there who don't belong there. There are many
people who serve their time in a route that will
never get the justice that they deserve and that time
has been lost. Will let people know that this is
an issue that should be addressed at every time that
there's a DA running for office.
Speaker 5 (37:51):
And for me, I got to mention some of my
great colleagues, Michael Cobb, who we all know is shot,
do Raphael Martine, as Pedro Rodriguez, Noachia Rose, Ronaldo Morgan.
These men are still fighting for their freedom today and
I mentioned them because I want everybody here in the
(38:15):
live audience at home to take a second look. I
give you the analogy that I give to some of
the students when I did my last speech with Jeff,
and it is like when you guys are driving home
and you just see something as simple as a pedestrian
(38:36):
pulled over on the side of the road, and you're
just like, oh, it must be a lawful stop, so
you just keep moving. Take a second look, take a
second look when you see somebody in trouble, because you
never will know when it's your time to give that
help in hand.
Speaker 2 (38:56):
Thank you, Thank you for listening to Wrongful Conviction.
Speaker 3 (39:07):
You can listen to this and all the Lava for
Good podcasts 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 Clyburn.
The music in this production was supplied by three time
OSCAR nominated composer Jay Ralph. Be sure to follow us
(39:28):
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 a production of
Lava for Good podcasts and association with Signal Company Number
one
Hosts And Creators
Lauren Bright Pacheco
Maggie Freleng
Jason Flom
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